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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]

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]

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]

Participation is commonly accepted to be a process that brings stakeholders together to define issues and create mutually beneficial outcomes. In the fields of development and natural resource management, participation is such a widely accepted part of policy that it is rare to find a project or programme that does not exhort the practice of participation and stakeholder engagement. However, despite the considerable weight of orthodoxy advocating greater participation and stakeholder engagement in development, the participative processes and power relations underpinning such engagement are rarely analysed in careful detail. This is particularly the case with oil palm plantations in frontier Indonesia and the interactions between the principal stakeholders at the plantation-community level. There has been minimal analysis to date appraising how such stakeholders interact in relation to a plantation, and there is limited description outlining the divergent viewpoints from such stakeholders. The paper argues that one local stakeholder group, oil palm smallholders, usually possess some agency in their decision-making and interactions with a plantation organisation but that existing structural and informal modes of interaction often limit the transformative potential of participation for all stakeholders. [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]

Transmigration from Java to rural areas of the 'outer islands' appeared finished in Indonesia after the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998 and decentralisation in 2001. However, the rapid growth of oil palm plantations in the past decade has led to a renewed call for transmigrants by district heads seeking an expanded labour force. A new system has evolved on a district-to-district basis with applicants in 'sending districts' (in Java, Bali and the poorer provinces of East and West Nusa Tenggara) being matched to requests from 'receiving districts' (in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi and Papua), which largely depend on levels of plantation investment near proposed new transmigration sites. Coordination is in the hands of a rebranded central Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration. Integral to the 'spatial' organisation of the new transmigration will be the creation of towns or cities, known as Kota Terpadu Mandiri ('Integrated self-sufficient city'). A new transmigration region (with its oil palm plantations) will form the 'embryo' for the city's growth. Although these arrangements will aim to reduce poverty, their social and environmental costs have not been evaluated. Examples of these new schemes in parts of Central Kalimantan are discussed, with brief comparisons of earlier transmigration projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]