Redistribution and equity
The nature of ‘adverse formalisation' becomes stark when contrasted with land tenure reforms that primarily address equity and livelihoods. Agrarian reform in the classic sense of ‘land to the tiller' involves systematically changing the distribution of land rights.
It also involves not only promoting access to land but also often to inputs (knowledge, credit, markets) required to increase productivity and enhance livelihoods (White, Borras, and Hall 2014).This kind of radical land redistribution works in situations where political shifts, such as in Korea or Japan, open up space for freeing up large amounts of land for redistribution. Indonesia attempted land redistribution in the 1960s through ‘tiller reform.' It was catastrophic. Pronounced social tensions culminated between 1965-1966 and half a million people were killed. In contemporary Indonesia, the memory of the 1960s means that people associate state-led agrarian reform of private land with communism and thus, it mostly remains a taboo topic. Hence land reform is understood in an attenuated form. In 2018, President Joko Widodo is pursuing a policy to distribute unused land and former plantation areas—state land that is not cultivated—and forest estate areas with community rights claims. Existing regulations also require plantation license holders to allocate 20 percent of the concession area to the surrounding community. This allocation is delayed because apparently, there are no effective legal instruments to compel companies to do it (Menterian Koordinator 2017). In the period up to December 2017, state agencies issued certificates to smallholders for over 199,000 hectares of ex-HGU land, 49 percent of the targeted 400,000 hectares. The state also managed to rezone 750,123 hectares of state forest zone (Land Subject to Agrarian Reform [Tanah Objek Reforma Agraria or TORA]), just 18.2 percent of the 4.1 million hectare target.
As an alternative to land redistribution on these lines, the Jokowi administration is pursuing a certification program.
Van der Eng (2016) has shown that historically, certification has made slow progress in Indonesia. It has taken the state 50 years to register 48 percent of parcels, all within the 30 percent of the national land area that remains outside of the putative ‘forestry estate.' Between 2010-2014, only 2 percent ofparcels were certified. As van der Eng notes, at this rate, it would take another 25 years to complete the certification process. However, President Joko Widodo has set out to ‘legalize' 4.5 million hectares of land over five years. During the initial three years of his presidency, the pace of certification has increased. As of December 2017, state agencies had certified an additional 1.9 million hectares, a significant increase against the target of 3.9 million hectares over five years. Even so, progress has been gradual, reportedly because “the process of checking and confirming the rightful owner of a plot of land has been slow and tedious” (La Batu and Dipa 2017).We now turn to broader questions of distributional justice, principally how to stop (if not reverse) processes of adverse formalisation. In other words, alongside seeking to improve access for the poor after land expropriation, the challenge is how to retain or defend existing access patterns. We consider current attempts to shift governance up from the local smallholder-company interface and insert it into non-state, transnational, and non-state or private forms of regulation. These attempts can be seen, for example, in the provision of FPIC, the use of RSPO, FSC, and IFC dispute resolution mechanisms, and the use of partnership schemes to achieve justice and settle disputes.