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This paper examines the political intricacies inherent in the management of Southeast Asia's transboundary haze pollution. It argues for a scalar perspective in understanding the complexities of the haze problem. The so‐called 'inconvenient truth' is unravelled by teasing out some issues in the national and regional political ecologies, and the challenges of synchronising co‐operation at the national, regional and global scales. Discussion shows that the 'environment' takes on different meanings at each scale, and both Indonesia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) need to recognise this in order to engage more effectively with the transboundary environmental issue. Specifically, inadequate management of forest resources in Indonesia, ASEAN's principle of 'non‐interference' and a lack of a holistic ecosystem perspective are amongst some of the interconnected issues addressed. The paper calls for a greater awareness of structural weaknesses in the management of forest resources and a change in ASEAN's environmental paradigm to a more holistic ecosystem perspective that prioritises not just environmental and human health, but also a healthy and sustainable ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With large tracts of forested land planned for, or already converted to, industrial palm oil concessions, there is a need to better understand the gendered implications for, and responses by, communities affected by such landscape change. This paper examines the differentiated gendered responses and livelihood strategies of Dayak Modang women and men in a hamlet in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, surrounded by industrial palm oil plantations. Informed by feminist political ecology, we investigate how the compounding impact of industrial oil palm – the basis and outcome of enclavement – curtails livelihood options and reinforces gender differentiation in terms of access to and use of customary resources. Gendered inequalities and food insecurity dynamics emerge as a result. We show how, however, that despite gendered exclusions, Dayak Modang women use their own knowledge and practices to diversify livelihoods to negotiate emerging constraints over resource access and use. Our paper demonstrates that ways in which Dayak women 'sustain livelihoods' reflects forms of everyday negotiations and resistance to intensifying constraints over life and livelihood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peatland fires and the impact of transboundary haze are often intertwined with socio‐environmental externalities of neoliberal forest governance and overlapping systems of resource property rights in Indonesia. New peatland governance strategies are emerging to address fires and haze by reorganising peatland management using a more ecologically relevant scale that territorialises peatland according to its hydrological characteristics. Employing the concept of the eco‐scalar fix, this paper interrogates rescaling peatland governance as a strategy to address the socio‐ecological crisis associated with the conversion of peatland into mono‐agricultural land. However, rescaling peatland governance entails the risk of merely displacing socio‐environmental crises to areas considered less ecologically important rather than addressing them. Drawing on a case study of a peatland restoration in Riau, Indonesia, this paper shows how emerging hybrid forms of peatland governance can address the environmental externalities that have unintentionally been created. This hybrid form of peatland governance has pressured actors across multiple types of property to rework the ways that environmental commons are controlled and accessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the emerging effects of the 2012 decision of the Constitutional Court of Indonesia relating to the customary management of Indonesia's traditional forests. It focuses on the challenge of moving from legal to political and societal recognition of Indigenous peoples' rights. In its advocacy of customary land rights, Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN) successfully applied to the Constitutional Court for judicial review of the Forest Law 41 1999. It argued the law breached the constitutional rights of its members in permitting the state to permit exploitation and development rights over traditional forest without their consent. The flow‐on effect of allocating such rights included widespread deforestation and land use change without agreement from customary communities that have used and occupied these forests for centuries, thus ignoring traditional customary law that regards these forests as the property of such communities. The paper reflects critically on international experience in the interface between legal recognition of Indigenous peoples' rights, and their translation into sustainable and meaningful societal transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yolŋu people living in northeast Arnhem Land regularly celebrate their connections with the Macassan trepangers from Indonesian Sulawesi in storytelling, art and music. The history of this contact is well known in academic literature, and these stories of Macassan contact are told regularly by Yolŋu people to tourists visiting northeast Arnhem Land. This paper explores the impact that hearing stories about the Macassans from one Yolŋu family's tourism business had on a group of Australian Indonesian language teachers, visiting as part of an Endeavour Language Teaching Fellowship. It draws on ideas related to telling and hearing stories and argues that these particular stories enabled the teachers to make powerful connections: with each other and with Australia's histories and geographies. The paper also explores the ways in which the teachers went on to become storytellers themselves, using stories to make connections in their students' learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a time of increasing land enclosures sparked by large-scale environmental initiatives and agricultural expansion, this paper examines local and global contestations over the value of forest on an Indonesian forest frontier. Engaging with recent debates on carbon forestry, the paper problematises the emerging initiatives of ' Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation' known as REDD+ in the province of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. The paper argues that the general rush to implement REDD+ without intimate knowledge of the political landscape of resource struggle is in danger of generating new enclosures of land that may be easily appropriated by local elites, thus excluding less fortunate sections of local society. The paper shows how divergent interpretations of REDD+ are triggering land disputes, and how powerful actors readily appropriate REDD+ discourses as a tool to support divergent claims of land ownership. Government and villagers, through overlapping and contradictory engagements, negotiate REDD+ initiatives with global environmental actors and private plantation companies. The paper highlights the implications of these local realities for the successes of REDD+. The Kalimantan case highlights some of the dilemmas of carbon mitigation initiatives experienced in frontier regions throughout Southeast Asia, places that have become prime battlefronts of large-scale climate change initiatives and agrarian expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intra-regional medical travel by patients from Indonesia to Penang in Malaysia is embedded in and facilitated by regional circuits. Although such movement is fuelled by dissatisfaction with the health-care services offered in Indonesia, we argue that these contemporary movements for health care are also a continuation of existing exchanges for trade, education and cultural ties that have long existed. In the first part of the paper, we consider the historical interconnections between the locations of Medan and Aceh in Indonesia and Penang in Malaysia. Based upon fieldwork and interviews with 70 intra-regional patients travelling to Penang for treatment, we describe how these interconnections are now manifested in travel for medical care. We argue that the temporary exit from the Indonesian health system to pursue care in hospitals in Penang by some Chinese Indonesians and Acehnese follows patterns and logics based on social histories of discrimination and conflict as well as geographical convenience. This highlights the need to contextualise such travel not just as geographic movements across space but also through the depth of time and local histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forest protection policies to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation ( REDD+) are currently being implemented by international donors, governments and conservation agencies across the developing world aiming for reduction of greenhouse gases while ensuring fair distribution of benefits. This paper draws on a case study in northern Cambodia to analyse how conservation practitioners and the local forest management committees engaged in implementing REDD+ actively translate and influence the policy and its implementation in accordance with their respective interests through particular communication strategies. When assessing project progress and outcomes, the conservation practitioners involved in implementing projects show an interest in emphasising positive project assessments by downplaying potential project complications, and by primarily communicating with pro- REDD+ members of the local communities. Powerful actors in the local forest management committees adopt the conservation rhetoric of these practitioners; at the same time, they can interpret and control local access to resources to their own advantage. By doing so, they can ensure continued support, while not necessarily representing all community members or sharing benefits equally. The processes and consequences of this policy translation in a REDD+ arena are discussed and compared with existing dominant trends in environment and development policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the process for establishing a 'village agreement' using the Kalimantan Forests and Climate Partnership ( KFCP) as a case study. REDD+ is designed as a 'performance-based' mechanism and requires a contractual agreement between the parties involved. Since its implementation will affect the life of forest-dependent communities, it is vital that villagers have sufficient ability to negotiate their interests during the agreement process. This paper investigates the degree of 'social learning' essential for developing actors' capacity to negotiate rules and interests with outsiders involved in the agreement process (between KFCP and the seven villages involved) and how this meshes with notions of 'participation'. It found that while 'social learning' occurred as a result of the well-designed participatory process conducted by KFCP, villagers' ability to secure their interests was influenced by a learning experience accumulated from their previous engagement with several development/conservation projects. This finding contributes to literature by emphasising how historical context plays a significant role in the success of present learning and the efficacy or otherwise of a contractual agreement. Therefore historical aspects should be taken into account in site selection and the design of future REDD+ projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of changing rationales and tactics among actors engaged in mobilising private finance for Indonesia's emergent Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation ( REDD+) programme. Despite limited flows of private finance so far, private sector actors have been responsible for a great deal of development and innovation in the forest carbon sector in Indonesia, and have thus played - and continue to play - an important part in shaping the country's REDD+ programme. Drawing on extended field research and interviews with key actors engaged with REDD+ in Indonesia, we identify a variety of private investor motivations, strategies and tactics, many of which depart considerably from the common understanding of REDD+ as avoided deforestation funded through carbon offsets. As non-state actors increasingly shape emerging REDD+ projects, they assume important roles as agents of environmental governance - working through a variety of private market and hybrid modes of forest/climate governance. We describe four general modes of engagement, centred around: investment in REDD+ verified emissions reductions; corporate social responsibility; sustainable commodities; and impact investment. The research thus contributes to an improved understanding of the nature of private REDD+ finance in Indonesia, and the implications, potential and limits of private, market-based climate governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus ( REDD+) programme seeks to reshape the way we value, govern and interact with forests. Rather than managing forests according to interests in timber, conservation, land or livelihoods, REDD+ encourages forms of forest management that prioritise carbon. While international negotiations are shaping the rules of the programme, how it takes place on the ground will depend on its interpretation and implementation in different places. In this paper, we are interested in how the REDD+ Task Force ( Satgas REDD+), an ad hoc body formed by presidential decree to design and implement REDD+ readiness activities in Indonesia, has attempted to mainstream the programme from 2010 to 2013. We develop a governmentality approach to focus on how the Task Force sought to introduce REDD+ carbon rationalities to forest politics. Based on extended ethnographic research, we identify three strategies: adopting and promoting the carbon discourses circulating among global REDD+ communities; making carbon visible and governable through mapping technologies; and implementing participatory technologies to encourage pro- REDD+ subjectivities. In some ways, the Task Force has been successful in building awareness about forest carbon among forest stakeholders in Indonesia. National civil society organisations, in particular, appear to be supportive of REDD+; however, they emphasise 'co-benefits' framed as ' Beyond Carbon', informed by social and environmental justice. For others, however, forests remain sources of timber and land, and new strategies are required if REDD+ is to have substantial impacts on forest governance in Indonesia. The Task Force's efforts reveal the difficult and contested processes through which global climate change programmes come to be embedded in national arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation ( REDD+) is an ambitious global programme oriented towards improving forest carbon management. It aims to attract new sources of 'green' capital to fund emissions reductions from avoided deforestation and sustainable forest management. REDD+ is transforming forest conservation, as a diverse array of new stakeholders become involved. Not surprisingly, REDD+ has proved divisive, as critics concern themselves with issues of power, justice, and commodification, while practice-oriented researchers tackle similar issues from different perspectives, focusing on benefit sharing, safeguards, additionality, measuring and verification. In this paper we explore the different roles of critical and practical research, and argue that there is a need for greater sharing of knowledge across current divides. We draw on our own experiences of conducting a research project on REDD+ in Indonesia that involved critical and practice-oriented researchers. We argue that critical research disconnected from practical matters can have perverse outcomes for practitioners who are ultimately working towards similar goals; while uncritical practice-oriented research has the potential to lead to a dilution of core values of environmental justice and conservation. In contrast, forms of practical critique provide ways of researching REDD+ that have practical value while maintaining critical insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interpreted as 'unity in diversity', Indonesia's national politicians appropriated the slogan Bhinneka Tunggal Ika from a fourteenth century poem to legitimise one nation‐state for the diverse archipelago. As Indonesia becomes a rapidly urbanising country, the concepts of 'unity' and 'diversity' intertwine with changing landscapes and societies. With the growth of cities as centres of population and economic activities, the intensity of development in the city has transformed urban spaces, social interactions, economies and aspirations. Much of these urban transformations have affected urban kampung, early forms of urban settlement. Urban kampung has a historical role in the making of 'unity in diversity' as a national concept, but official discourses rarely associate kampung with the slogan, even when concerns on tolerance and diversity increase in urbanising Indonesia. Using urban kampung as a viewpoint in city‐ and nation‐building, we conduct archival and ethnographic research to interpret everyday practices of Bhinneka Tunggal Ika. To what extent does the slogan play a role in the social construction of city neighbourhoods? How do everyday realities in an urban kampung relate to the national slogan? As kampung remains relatively autonomous but also stigmatised in the city, taking kampung as a viewpoint allows insights into city‐ and nation‐building knowledge that integrate everyday practice and conceptualization of the city and the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peatlands play a crucial role in Indonesia's economic development, and in its stated goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Improved peatland management - including a national moratorium on the granting of any new conversion licenses - forms a cornerstone of Indonesia's climate change mitigation commitment. At the same time, rapid expansion of the plantation sector is driving wide-scale drainage and conversion of peat swamp ecosystems. The province of Riau, in central Sumatra, finds itself at the crossroads of these conflicting agendas. This essay presents a case study of three islands on Riau's east coast affected by industrial timber plantation concessions. It examines the divergent experiences, perceptions and responses of communities on the islands. A mix of dramatic protests, localised everyday actions and constructive dialogue has succeeded in delaying or perhaps halting one of the concessions, while negotiations and contestation with the other two continue. With the support of regional and national non-governmental organisations and local government, communities are pursuing alternative development strategies, including the cultivation of sago, which requires no peat drainage. While a powerful political economy of state and corporate actors shapes the contours of socio-environmental change, local social movements can alter trajectories of change, promoting incremental improvements and alternative pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A multidimensional understanding of poverty includes the access of poor groups to decision‐making processes based on their needs and aspirations. However, the realisation of this 'right to make decisions' faces multiple obstacles. Over the last 20 years in Indonesia, in a context of a more democratic political environment and policy decentralisation, poverty alleviation policies have followed institutional arrangements to provide communities with opportunities for greater participation in development projects. Poverty data show a clear improvement in the living conditions of urban poor citizens in Indonesia; however, it is unclear whether poor communities have become stronger and more independent from public grants and better able to make their own decisions. This research analysed two urban poor communities in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and found that some communities working on participatory poverty alleviation strategies still face obstacles to becoming more independent and making their own decisions because they remain part of an historical legacy of top‐down approaches to poverty, highly dependent on government support and working only within 'invited spaces'. Conversely, those communities with more limited access to government funding have been more innovative in their strategies and have created 'invented spaces' for collective action that allows them to be more independent and empowered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the ways in which networking characteristics and practices influence the economic performance of creative and cultural industries. The notion of social capital is used to conceptualise the complex nature of networks, including both professional and social relationships that occur on multiple levels. This qualitative study is set in the context of Indonesia, in which two cases are examined: creative apparel entrepreneurs in Bandung and batik producers in Surakarta. The results show that regional environments provide opportunities for creative industries to find specialist suppliers, to gather market information and, importantly, to find and cross‐fertilise new ideas. Although regions provide these opportunities, the firms' internal social capital is crucial in being able to internalise and transform the knowledge from the environment into innovative values embodied in their products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the relationship between forced evictions and the 'exemplary centre' through an examination of three urban waterfront sites in Indonesia in comparative perspective. How is the notion of the 'exemplary centre' related to forced evictions and the aspirations of marginalised populations in contemporary cities of Indonesia? What are the chances of asserting alternative ideologies when a capital‐centric and modernist vision of the city as 'exemplary centre' dominates official planning paradigms? Competing visions of the 'exemplary centre' arise from distinct centres of power, from the state level to the grassroots community level; however, the dominant state vision of urban space is often internalised by those most at risk of displacement by modernist projects. Strategies to thwart forced evictions in riverbank settlements in Jakarta, Solo, and Surabaya offer alternative imaginings of the 'exemplary centre' – imaginings that enable the urban poor to visualise their hopes and to overcome the spatial uncertainties that characterise their everyday lives. While these efforts indicate resistance to marginalisation, they also provide a distinct kind of 'exemplary' vision based on residents' own understanding of ideal city living. Concurrently, some alignment to existing 'exemplary centre' narratives is traceable in the effort to assert these alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voluntary sustainability standards are used as both a means of securing coffee supply by large coffee firms and a development intervention to address rural poverty and environmental management in the Global South. Using a case‐study approach, we have examined the interface between a value‐chain sustainability programme and the livelihood trajectories of smallholder producers in upland Sumatra. Our research found the programme has had minimal impacts for coffee producers to date. The level of commitment required of producers appears incompatible with the particular way that coffee is currently embedded within local landscapes, livelihoods and poverty alleviation pathways. Various sustainability standards articulate a narrative of rural development underpinned by an assumption that agricultural modernisation is the preferred pathway out of poverty for rural households. As a result, there is some risk that sustainability programmes may be inadvertently attempting to encourage household investment in a particular kind of agriculture, which is intended to assist sustainability of supply, but is poorly aligned with prevailing processes of poverty alleviation. These observations are based on a detailed study of agrarian change among the Semendo people of South Sumatra province, where processes of rural development are far more complex than assumptions presented by mainstream sustainability standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an examination of two festivals - Qing Ming and Cap Go Meh - in the town of Singkawang in Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan), we show how Singkawang-bound Chinese Indonesian tourists and their Singkawang-based relatives produce a diasporic heritage network through 'moorings' generated by both transnational and internal migration. Instead of returning to a singular 'homeland' in distant China, these tourists return to Chinese-majority Singkawang as a result of their personal genealogical roots and of their broader cultural allegiance with a kind of Chinese-ness that Singkawang has come to represent within a post-Suharto Indonesia. Through these two festivals, we demonstrate how personal heritage practices like 'roots tourism' and visiting friends and relatives are intimately bound up with identity and developmental politics at local, national and international scales. In so doing, we identify a range of ways in which migratory and tourism flows by Chinese Indonesian internal migrants shape relations to their ancestral hometowns and cultural 'homelands' in Indonesia within the context of membership to and participation in a broader transnational diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) started as a global project aimed at reducing CO2 emissions by protecting tropical forests. At the same time, several so-called co-benefits were listed in the original documents, such as biodiversity and other environmental services, poverty reduction and sustainable livelihoods, and good governance. I argue that REDD+ quickly became a project in which these co-benefits have emerged to be of central concern and that the rights of affected forest populations today dominate much of the REDD+ discourse. One reason for the redirected focus of REDD+ can be attributed to the activities of international and national environmental and human rights organisations. While this has arguably contributed to a process of democratisation in Indonesia, it has also slowed down the implementation of readiness projects. Taking my example from the UN-REDD initiative in Central Sulawesi, I examine some reasons why it has been difficult to establish the proposed five REDD sites in the province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus ( REDD+) in Papua New Guinea ( PNG) is uncertain. Logging companies have been accessing land via a controversial legal framework called Special Agricultural Business Lease, while conservation non-government organisations are struggling to find schemes to stop the deforestation. REDD+ has been the new favoured approach. However, there are as yet only a few pilot projects, several of which are in areas without large-scale logging. Whether REDD+ has a future in PNG is difficult to know. It may come to share the fate of the portable sawmill - a technology previously assumed to promote sustainable community logging, but is now adopted by the commercial logging industry and providing new challenges to conversation efforts. This article argues that to understand the possibility for successfully implementing REDD+, it is necessary to look at the development of the forestry sector in the widest possible terms. This involves analysing the different competing actors, technologies and forms of social organisation that are employed to gain control of species deemed valuable to either conservation or commercial resource exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010, the province of Central Kalimantan in Indonesia was established as a Climate Change pilot province to reduce emissions from deforestation and through peat land forest rehabilitation. Today, international agencies, carbon traders, local and national governments, non-governmental organisations, and local populations have participated in debates and disputes over the establishment of carbon forests and forest protection areas in Central Kalimantan. One such scheme, promoted by the government of Australia ( Kalimantan Forest and Climate Partnership), intended to establish a REDD+ pilot project within an area that covers about 120 000 hectares in Kuala Kapuas in Central Kalimantan, the field location of this research. This specific dispute offers a case study based on ethnographic research that helps to illustrate how widespread climate change debates and disputes become embedded at local and national levels in Indonesia. The dispute over REDD+ will be discussed within a framework of dispute theories which focus on moments of crisis, wherein participants must present arguments and justify their actions and theories of justice. The article shows that competing and conflicting conceptions of justice that emerge in the dispute may bring to a halt a climate change pilot project in the locality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation ( REDD+) project in Sungai Lamandau was Indonesia's first forest carbon finance initiative officially proposed by a community group upon land they intended to control autonomously. However, the flagging carbon market and government licensing obstructions stalled progress towards possible monetary gains. With a focus on the agency of local farmers, we explore the 'bundles of powers' that they mobilised to access the other diverse and, at times, elusive set of benefits within the REDD+ project. In the absence of a formal tenure and 'carbon rights' regime, local actors' ability to benefit from the project was dependent on social relationships, REDD+ knowledge and access to local markets and capital. The result was a benefit-sharing framework of uneven distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]