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nalysts have cast doubt over the efficacy of the recently-issued policy on settling tenure problems in forest areas. The policy has also been criticized for potentially threatening indigenous people.

Issued by President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, who is banking on his land reform policy to address socio-economic inequality in Indonesia, Presidential Regulation No. 88/2017 on Settlement Of Tenure Inside Forest Areas mainly aims to provide legal protection for citizens’ tenure of forest areas, which cover around 70 percent of Indonesian land.

Many forest areas in Indonesia, however, are inhibited by local indigenous people claiming customary rights and people who were relocated to areas outside Java during the massive transmigration program under the Suharto administration, or have been designated for business activities like palm oil plantations.

Activists argue that such conditions make the tenure of these areas unclear and uncertain, triggering conflicts between locals and other parties such as companies and authorities. In the past four years, land conflicts have mostly happened inside forests and plantations, according to the Consortium for Agrarian
Reform (KPA).

Through the new regulation, the government seeks to solve tenure problems with four mechanisms: Releasing the land from the forest area by changing the forest area boundary, land-swapping, giving locals access to manage lands through the social forestry program and relocating locals to other areas.

But such mechanisms would not be effective because, according to the regulation, they would only be implemented in appointed forest areas, which constitute only 14 percent or 17.1 million hectares of 122 million hectares of forest areas in Indonesia, a researcher argued.

“This means the government would not solve tenure problems inside forest areas [other than the 14 percent],” Siti Chaakimah, a researcher with socio-agrarian think tank the Epistema Institute, said on Wednesday, adding that conflicts instead often occurred outside the
14 percent.

Muhammad Arman, legal and advocacy head at the Indigenous People’s Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), meanwhile, pointed out the resettlement mechanism was to be applied to protection forests and conservation forests.

Protection forest has a role to protect life support systems to regulate water, prevent flooding, control erosion, prevent seawater intrusion and maintain soil fertility. Conservation forest, meanwhile, has the primary function of conserving plant and wildlife biodiversity and their ecosystems.

“The resettlement scheme could potentially threaten the lives of indigenous people inhabiting conservation forests. Relocating them would automatically change the structure of their lives,” Arman said.

There are around one million indigenous people inhabiting approximately 1.6 million hectares of customary land located inside conservation forests, according to an AMAN estimate.