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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Resurgence of Land Reform Policy and Agrarian Movements in Indonesia Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/87s5s84g Author Rachman, Noer Fauzi Publication Date 2011 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Resurgence of Land Reform Policy and Agrarian Movements in Indonesia By Noer Fauzi Rachman A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science, Policy and Management in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Nancy Lee Peluso, Chair Professor Katherine O’Neill Professor Louise Fortmann Professor Gillian Hart Professor Michael J. Watts Fall 2011 © 2011 Noer Fauzi Rachman All Rights Reserved Abstract The Resurgence of Land Reform Policy and Agrarian Movements in Indonesia By Noer Fauzi Rachman Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science, Policy and Management Professor Nancy Lee Peluso, Chair On January 31, 2007, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono announced a new land redistribution program that was part of the implementation of a land reform policy called Reforma Agraria. The program was to be launched in conjunction with a land registration program as part of a government strategy to eradicate poverty. The launch of the program was a watershed event that had been engineered by the head of the National Land Agency (NLA) in collaboration with agrarian movement activists who had struggled for years for agrarian social justice. The resurgence of land reform policy was fostered through a unique partnership of activists, scholars, and reformist government officials. This new political space for manuever was made possible in 1998 by the end of Suharto’s “New Order” which had previously harnessed the bureaucracy, police, and military to control the rural masses through various mechanisms of coercion and consent, while constructing the apparatus for centralizing management and reaping profits from the nation’s land and forest resources. The new land redistribution program called the National Agrarian Reform Program (NARP) focused on the redistribution of state lands for the rural poor claiming 8.15 million hectares of state forest land under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Forestry and another 1.1 million hectares from other state lands under National Land Agency (NLA) authority, and 7.3 million hectares of other “idle lands” under their jurisdiction to be redistributed. When the ambitious program met with considerable political challenge, the NLA quickly reframed the reform as a government sponsored land title legalization, a program that not only better fit with the interests of the existing neoliberal economic growth model, but also allowed the NLA to tout its land title legalization programs as a major contribution to the success of President Yudhoyono’s government. This reframing ruptured the NLA’s working relationship with agrarian activists, unveiling the processes by which land reform policy in Indonesia is made and unmade. This dissertation examines how land policy processes and agrarian movements in Java, Indonesia, have been mutually constituted through continuous (and ongoing) processes of 1 movement success and movement setback. My research traces how the actors and forces are produced, and how the trajectories and conjunctures at which they meet, enable or constrain them to becoming influential. I explore state-society interactions pertaining to land reform, articulating the multiple and interconnected sites of struggle, and showing how they contribute to the empowering or disempowering of the existing politics governing land access. The purpose is to understand, as Stuart Hall formulates it, “how they work, what their limits and possibilities are, what they can and cannot accomplish.” (Hall 2007:280). Focusing on the conflict over land occupation events in West Java, this dissertation shows how the movements’ objectives over time have both conflicted, competed, and come together with the politics and practices of the National Land Agency (NLA) of the Indonesian government, and the State Forestry Corporation (SFC), at multiple sites of land policy making processes. This dissertation concludes that the tension, interaction, and convergence of these objectives have rendered unfinished the projects of both reform and anti-reform. 2 This dissertation is dedicated to my father, Abdurachman Shaleh (1935-2011), and my mother, Siti Mundjiatul Munawwarah (1940-...), who taught me how to bravely and patiently keep struggling for my goals, family, and humanity i Table of Contents Table of Contents ............................................................................................................ ii List of Figures ................................................................................................................iv List of Tables ...................................................................................................................v Abbreviations and and Pseudonyms ...............................................................................vi Acknowledgments ...........................................................................................................ix Map of Indonesia ...........................................................................................................xix Chapter 1: Introduction ...................................................................................................1 1.1. Introduction ...............................................................................................................1 1.2. Background ...............................................................................................................6 1.3. Characterizing the Java Agrarian Movement and Its Counterforces ........................8 1.4. Toward a Gramscian Approach to Understanding the Struggle for Land Reform .11 1.5. A Note on Methods .................................................................................................12 1.6. The Dissertation Chapters in Brief...........................................................................15 Chapter 2: Trajectory of Indonesian Land Policy since Independence to Sukarno’s Guided Democracy (1945-1965) ...................................................................................17 2.1. Introduction .............................................................................................................17 2.2. An Overview from Decolonization through Sukarno’s Guided Democracy ..........18 2.3. A Formal Abolishment of the State Domain Principle ...........................................22 2.4. Initial Policies to Redress Agrarian Injustices.........................................................25 2.5. How did Plantation Land become Excluded from the Land Redistribution Program? .................................................................................................................27 2.6. How did Forestry Become Separated from the Agrarian, and How did Forestland become Excluded from the Land Redistribution Program? ...................................30 2.7. The Rise and Fall of Land Reform Policy .............................................................37 2.8. Encapsulating the Trajectory of the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law...............................40 Chapter 3: Trajectory of Indonesian Land Policy: From Suharto’s New Order to Reformasi (1966-2005) ..................................................................................................43 3.1. Introduction .............................................................................................................43 3.2. The Rise of a Counter-Revolutionary Authoritarian Development State................43 3.3. The Rise of Land-for-Development Policy .............................................................45 3.4. The Rise of Market-Oriented Land Administration and Management Policy ........50 3.5. The Return of Land Reform after the Fall of Suharto .............................................53 3.6. High Hopes for Change lead to Ersatz Land Reform ..............................................64 Chapter 4: From Reforma Agraria to Land Title Legalization (2005-2009) ..................66 4.1. Introduction ..............................................................................................................66 4.2. Background for Joyo Winoto’s Appointment as the Head of National Land Agency (NLA) ......................................................................................................................68 ii 4.3. Negotiation with National Legislature ...................................................................69 4.4. Overhauling NLA Organization and Its Personnel, Governance and Function .....71 4.5. Negotiating Reforma Agraria to the President and other Ministries .....................76 4.6. Targeting Abandoned-lands to be Objects of Land Redistribution .......................87 4.7. Accelerating Land Title Legalization ....................................................................88 4.8. Concluding Remarks..............................................................................................95 Chapter 5: Shifting Relations between National Land Agency and Agrarian Activists (2005-2009) ...................................................................................................................97

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