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Land certification: Watch out for local dynamics
Land certification programs may have led to some unintended problems such as the increase of land markets, land tenure conflicts and deforestation in Indonesia.
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Great harvest – Farmers carry paddy grains they will mill at a milling factory in Ngawi, East Java, on Oct.13. (Antara/Ari Bowo Sucipto)
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ndonesia’s land certification (LC) programs are great for improving the country’s equitable and sustainable economic development, National Development Planning Board (Bappenas) head Bambang Brojodonegoro proudly said at a recent public lecture at the University of Melbourne.
The government has thus long crafted national programs like the National Agrarian Operations Project (Prona) and the People’s Service for Land Certification (Larasita), in 1981 and 2006, respectively, to facilitate LC programs in urban, rural and remote areas.
Following the advice of economist Hernando de Soto, the post-Soeharto administrations believed LC programs could provide legal security over land ownership, potentially increase land investments, reduce land tenure conflicts and improve the use of agricultural land. Thus, while Indonesia is known as one of the most difficult and expensive countries in terms of land registration, “ranking 107 out of 177 countries”, according to a 2015 study by Martin E. Gold and Russell Zuckerman, administrations, especially under President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, have worked hard to improve the ineffective and expensive bureaucracy to streamline the LC programs.
Since the 1980s, the government has managed to issue 45 percent of its total target for 2022. By 2013, out of the 100 million plots of land in 430 regencies, LC programs covered some 45 million plots, leaving a backlog of about 60 million certificates, as this newspaper reported in 2016. Jokowi pledged “to give certificates to people every day”, and that he “will monitor it closely”. The administration is also committed to issuing 21 million new land certificates between 2017 and 2019. But this commitment seems very ambitious — between 2007 and 2011, the government could only certify 560,000 of 5.2 million plots per year.
