Paper short abstract:

In Indonesia, devolution of tenure rights is precipitated through local-global coalitions via social forestry schemes, often around discourses of indigeneity. This paper analyses how deliberative politics within coalition networks shape exclusion or access for diverse and marginalised stakeholders.

Paper long abstract:

70% of landcover in Indonesia is registered as state forests, effectively rendering forest-dwelling communities, such as the indigeneous Dayak of Kalimantan, illegal squatters. Tenure reform initiatives encompassed in social forestry schemes seek to devolve tenure rights and formalise communal territorial claims. Formalisation aims to improve livelihoods, protect against land grabs, and improve sustainable land management. However, not all local actors are impacted equally by such projects. And the deliberative politics of devolved forest governance may engender unanticipated forms of inequity and new subalternities.

Indonesian social forestry is contingent upon coalitions between local actors and civil society organisations. In this context, discourses of indigeneity have emerged as powerful platforms for articulating and mobalizing collective political will within coalitions. However, these networks may privelege some actors and interests to the exclusion of others. In Indonesia, where indigeneity is a complex and contested concept, the ways that indigeneity and its entitlements are discurisvely imagined, performed, asserted, and/or contested within coalition networks may shape perceptions of stakeholder legitimacy within policy deliberations.

This paper thus examines the discursive production of legitimacy within tenure deliberations in the Berau Forest Carbon Project (BFCP), a jurisdictional social forestry project in East Kalimantan. Combining a critical reading of Indonesian tenure policies and ethnographic interviews from two villages involved in tenure deliberations in the BFCP, I analyse how the discursive politics of legitimation affects new boundaries of access and exclusion in environmental governance and how changing ideas of indigeneity are implicated within these processes.