Social Forestry as Solution to Agrarian Conflicts? A Case Study between Oil Palm Smallholders and Industrial Plantations in Jambi, Indonesia

Abstract

Extraction activities across Indonesia have caused drastic changes to forest ecologies. The Indonesian government responded to this through a policy of Industrial Plantation Forest concessions, which were given to the private sector in the hopes of overcoming damages from forest extraction activities while at the same time utilizing unproductive forest land. However, this policy does not pay attention to the existence of people who de facto control and use the land and has triggered new conflicts around agrarian claims based on different interpretations of land rights. In an effort to resolve conflicts, the government has implemented a community-based forest area management policy, which involves a partnership between local communities and companies known as the social forestry partnership scheme. This scheme is partial tenure in the form of management rights and legality to communities to manage land in forest areas. In this study, we report how the community interprets this program as a solution to agrarian conflicts. Using qualitative methods, this study finds that social forestry has not been entirely accepted by local communities for several reasons. These include the low level of public trust due to the actions taken by the company during the land claim process, demands for property rights from social movements that were not fulfilled through this scheme, and the community's continued cultivation of oil palm, which is a non-forest crop, on their land. The last reason requires the community to replace their plantations with non-oil palm plantations if they wish to participate in the social forestry program. This research further examines how the community's readiness to adopt non-oil palm plantations is influenced by factors of income, convenience, socio-cultural and ecological adaptation, and the potential for new conflicts to arise.