From Trees to Titles: Legal Pluralism, Land Commodification, and Local Resistance in Aceh, Indonesia

Abstract:

Globally, there is a rising trend to integrate land registration with tree-growing programs, as part of broader efforts to secure tenure and promote sustainable land use. In Indonesia, the Agrarian Reform (TORA) program has advanced land registration, increasing certified land parcels from 46 million in 2017 to 112 million by mid-2024, which occurs alongside ambitious tree-growing programs. When land formalisation and tree-growing programs intersect, the outcomes are often complex and contradictory. This study explores how these intersecting initiatives function within Indonesia’s context of overlapping tenure, legal pluralism, and elite-favoured resource control. Focusing on Aceh, the thesis investigates how land formalisation and tree-growing approaches shape land management, and socioeconomic and environmental outcomes. Methodologically, this study adopts a qualitative case study approach, utilising ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews to explore predominant commodification and resistance scenarios. This thesis argues that the relational dynamics of economic interests, political connections, and power structures shape land governance. Ostensibly beneficial initiatives driven by ambitious policies supporting tree-growing programs, coupled with land formalisation policies and governance reforms, can function as mechanisms that facilitate different outcomes. On the one hand, collusionbetween external investors, local elites, and government agencies drives the commodification of land and undermines traditional customary governance systems, leading to the erosion of communal land rights. Yet, the same reforms work out differently in contexts where strong customary institutions, historical traditions of collective action, robust village cohesion, and effective leadership converge to enforce accountability, working as protective responses to safeguard social life and prevent excesses of land commodification. This ongoing tension between commodification and resistance (or, in Karl Polanyi's framework, disembedding liberalising forces and countermovements to the "disembedding" of land tenure from customary systems) demonstrates that land governance outcomes are determined by socio-political processes between market-driven interests and community-based governance capacities, rather than by policy intentions alone.

Bio:

Asrul Sidiq is a PhD scholar at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. His research focuses on agrarian change and land tenure, regional and rural development, environmental policy, and economic geography. He is a faculty member in the Department of Architecture and Planning at Syiah Kuala University in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Asrul holds a Master of Science in Regional and Rural Development Planning from the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand, and a bachelor's degree in Regional and City Planning from the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB). He is also an affiliate researcher at the International Centre for Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies (ICAIOS). With professional experience in government institutions such as the Aceh Public Works Department and the Aceh Development Planning Agency, Asrul brings a practical perspective to his academic work. He is also active in civil society and is a cofounder of Kota Tanyoe, a community-based initiative focused on urban and regional issues in Aceh.