REDD+ Governmentality: Governing Forest, Land, and Forest Peoples in Indonesia

<p>Aimed at lowering forest carbon emissions through financing improved forest governance and socially inclusive land and natural resources use, the REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus) program is attracting widespread interest and investment in Indonesia. REDD+ introduces new governmental rationalities, in which forest carbon is used as a standard to measure a country’s performance in keeping its tropical forests intact and defines the financial rewards the country will receive. REDD+ is one factor in an emergent new political conjuncture in Indonesia that is opening up to the possibilities for reworking forest governance. This thesis employs Foucault’s concept of governmentality to examine how governmental technologies are formed, contested and implemented through REDD+ and some of the early impacts the program is having (Foucault, 1991a). Drawing on grounded empirical data and inspired by a ‘not-quite neoliberal nature’ framework (de Freitas, Marston and Bakker, 2015) I show how place-based discourses, politics, actors, and interests are shaping the way REDD+ unfolds in Indonesia. This is achieved through three case studies focused on the REDD+ Taskforce; the One Map Initiative; and an Indigenous land claim in a community in Central Kalimantan. Findings from the three case studies show how current deficiencies in forestland governance have been problematized where there is no clarity over who has rights to forestland, who owns the concessions and where they are. Thus, addressing current complexities is becoming the Taskforce’s priority through series of governmental technologies including the One Map Initiative. Meanwhile, activists are making use of this opportunity to render visible Indigenous land rights in an attempt to subvert focused technical fixes to more open social justice ends. By discussing the messy actualities of developing, implementing and responding to governmental technologies the thesis problematizes pro- and anti-REDD+ debates. Rather than view REDD+ governmental technologies through “a programmer’s view” (Death, 2013) as a finished or rigid project implemented on others, I see it as an ongoing attempt to govern human – forest relationships that are shaped by contestations and resistances. Thus, the thesis makes an important contribution to neoliberal nature literature by showing that neoliberal governmental programs, such as REDD+, should be seen as sites of struggle, with different actors experiencing and engaging the program in different ways. As such, this thesis highlights how neoliberal mechanisms can be co-opted by particular actors in order to achieve diverse economic, social and environmental goals. Through engagement with governmental technologies the landscapes of forest politics change in both enabling and constraining ways.</p>

REDD+ Governmentality: Governing Forest, Land, and Forest Peoples in Indonesia

<p>Aimed at lowering forest carbon emissions through financing improved forest governance and socially inclusive land and natural resources use, the REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus) program is attracting widespread interest and investment in Indonesia. REDD+ introduces new governmental rationalities, in which forest carbon is used as a standard to measure a country’s performance in keeping its tropical forests intact and defines the financial rewards the country will receive. REDD+ is one factor in an emergent new political conjuncture in Indonesia that is opening up to the possibilities for reworking forest governance. This thesis employs Foucault’s concept of governmentality to examine how governmental technologies are formed, contested and implemented through REDD+ and some of the early impacts the program is having (Foucault, 1991a). Drawing on grounded empirical data and inspired by a ‘not-quite neoliberal nature’ framework (de Freitas, Marston and Bakker, 2015) I show how place-based discourses, politics, actors, and interests are shaping the way REDD+ unfolds in Indonesia. This is achieved through three case studies focused on the REDD+ Taskforce; the One Map Initiative; and an Indigenous land claim in a community in Central Kalimantan. Findings from the three case studies show how current deficiencies in forestland governance have been problematized where there is no clarity over who has rights to forestland, who owns the concessions and where they are. Thus, addressing current complexities is becoming the Taskforce’s priority through series of governmental technologies including the One Map Initiative. Meanwhile, activists are making use of this opportunity to render visible Indigenous land rights in an attempt to subvert focused technical fixes to more open social justice ends. By discussing the messy actualities of developing, implementing and responding to governmental technologies the thesis problematizes pro- and anti-REDD+ debates. Rather than view REDD+ governmental technologies through “a programmer’s view” (Death, 2013) as a finished or rigid project implemented on others, I see it as an ongoing attempt to govern human – forest relationships that are shaped by contestations and resistances. Thus, the thesis makes an important contribution to neoliberal nature literature by showing that neoliberal governmental programs, such as REDD+, should be seen as sites of struggle, with different actors experiencing and engaging the program in different ways. As such, this thesis highlights how neoliberal mechanisms can be co-opted by particular actors in order to achieve diverse economic, social and environmental goals. Through engagement with governmental technologies the landscapes of forest politics change in both enabling and constraining ways.</p>

Indigenous Planning: From Forced Assimilation to Self-determination

Interest in Indigenous planning has blossomed in recent years, particularly as it relates to the Indigenous response to settler colonialism. Driven by land and resource hunger, settler states strove to extinguish Indigenous land rights and ultimately to destroy Indigenous cultures. However, Indigenous peoples have persisted. This article draws on the literature to examine the resistance of Indigenous peoples to settler colonialism, their resilience, and the resurgence of Indigenous planning as a vehicle for Indigenous peoples to determine their own fate and to enact their own conceptions of self-determination and self-governance.

SmartSkeMa: Scalable Documentation for Community and Customary Land Tenure

According to the online database landmarkmap, up to an estimated 50% or more of the world’s habitable land is held by indigenous peoples and communities. While legal and procedural provisions are being made for bureaucratically managing the many different types of tenure relations in this domain, there continues to be a lack of tools and expertise needed to quickly and accurately document customary and indigenous land rights. Software and hardware tools that have been designed for documenting land tenure through communities continue to assume a parcel-based model of land as well as categories of land relations (RRR) largely dimensionally similar to statutory land rights categories. The SmartSkeMa approach to land tenure documentation combines sketching by hand with aerial imagery and an ontology-based model of local rules regulating land tenure relations to produce a system specifically designed to allow accurate documentation of land tenure from a local perspective. In addition, the SmartSkeMa adaptor which is an OWL-DL based set of rules for translating local land related concepts to the LADM concepts provides a more high-level view of the data collected (i.e., what does this concept relate to within the national LADM profile?) In this paper we present the core functionalities of SmartSkeMa using examples from Kenya and Ethiopia. Based on an expert survey and focus groups held in Kenya, we also analyze how the approach fairs on the Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration tools scale. The results indicate that the approach could be beneficial in scaling up mapping of community and customary lands as well as help reduce conflict through its participatory nature.

The contractualisation of public international law

This short paper intends to set out a general theory underpinning the process of contractualisation of public international law. In doing so, it explains that this has chiefly been engineered through the establishment of a third sphere of regulation – in addition to the spheres of domestic law(s) and international law – namely transnational law. Both private actors and states operate through this sphere, chiefly because of its flexibility, decreased transaction costs and access to capital (which is scarce in the other two spheres). These benefits of transacting in the transnational-law sphere and the contractualisation of pertinent relationships come at a cost. Such a cost, from the perspective of human rights and parliamentary sovereignty, is explored by reference to two case-studies. The second of these, on the outsourcing of indigenous land rights, is predicated on the research and observations offered by Bhatt (2020).

Transnational Memory and the Fukushima Disaster: Memories of Japan in Australian Anti-nuclear Activism

This paper argues for the importance of transnational memories in framing Australian anti-nuclear activism after the Fukushima disaster. Japan has loomed large in the transnational nuclear imaginary in Australia. Commemorating Hiroshima as the site of the first wartime use of nuclear weapons has been a long-standing practice in the Australian anti-nuclear movement and the day has been linked to a variety of issues including weapons and uranium mining. As Australia began exporting uranium to Japan in the 1970s, Australia-Japan relations took on a new meaning for the Indigenous traditional owners from whose land uranium was extracted. After Fukushima, these complex transnational memories formed the basis for an orientation towards Japan by Indigenous land rights activists and for the anti-nuclear movement as a whole. This paper argues that despite the tenuousness of direct organisational links between the two countries, transnational memories drove Australian anti-nuclear activists to seek connections with Japan after the Fukushima disaster. The mobilisation of these collective memories helps us to understand how transnational social movements evolve and how they construct globalisation from below in the Asia-Pacific region.