Elsevier

World Development

Volume 32, Issue 7, July 2004, Pages 1199-1223
World Development

Changing to Gray: Decentralization and the Emergence of Volatile Socio-Legal Configurations in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2004.02.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Decentralization policy narratives articulated by donor agencies tend to describe decentralization as a technical process of policy design and implementation, advocating decentralization as a solution to particular problems. Drawing on research carried out in the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan following the inception of a decentralization program, this article examines how political processes at the national, district and village levels have led to highly volatile socio-legal configurations that create insecurity and heighten resource conflicts. It concludes that while the politics surrounding decentralization in different domains have ensured that the patterns of governance inherited from the past remain precariously distant from the objectives of good governance, decentralization has also opened up space for positive changes.

Introduction

Donor and development organizations have prescribed decentralization to promote accountability and transparency, public participation in policy making and democratization. The donor agency and development administration literature considers the types of decentralization, the dynamics leading governments to embark on decentralization programs, the set of programmatic objectives that these reforms seek to address, and the associated problems that emerge as state administrations attempt to implement their decentralization blueprints. By taking such a global comparative perspective and attempting to locate patterns among diverse variables, development agencies and practitioners have developed a broad set of explanatory narratives concerning decentralization policy design and implementation (cf. Roe, 1991). In contrast, a social scientist attempting to understand how decentralization is affecting a specific local context is likely to come across a muddled and rather chaotic state of affairs that hardly seems to resemble the scenario described in the decentralization policy narratives. Decentralization tends to be just one element in wider processes of socioeconomic and political transformation, and it is difficult to isolate this process from wider changes. In remote districts of Indonesia, decentralization involves a dynamic and highly uneven process of change that is generating quite specific local socio-legal configurations.

Here I will consider how decentralization policy narratives have coalesced with domestic dynamics to inspire a decentralization process that helps generate particular socio-legal configurations in the districts of Kapuas and South Barito within the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan. I am concerned with how the international decentralization policy narratives––interpenetrating with national and district legal processes––affect administrative practices and local social fields governing access to and use of forest resources. This discussion necessarily focuses on the productive role of the decentralization laws, considering how these laws and the various legal innovations that follow, reflect and have the power to structure the discourse within which issues and conflicts are framed.1 I examine how, as actors interact in a dynamic situation, emergent socio-legal configurations develop as increasingly heterogeneous national and district legal regimes interact, conforming with and/or opposing each other as well as volatile district social fields and re-assertive customary normative orders.

This article analyzes the overlapping socio-legal configurations arising from parallel developments at the national, district and village levels to advance three arguments. First, in complex polities such a Indonesia, after decades of authoritarian rule, corruption and clientelist networks predominate. Actors at every level have sought to affect the outcome, supporting their interests by advancing their own interpretations of an inconsistent legal framework. During the ensuing uncertainty, the fragmentation of state arrangements has worked to the advantage of entrenched regional elites. Second, in remote provinces, infrastructure and government services are extremely limited, and most of the population is distant from centers of power. As electoral laws have empowered political party leaders rather than rural constituencies, accountability mechanisms and community participation in decision-making remain poor. Third, despite the range of legal initiatives developed following the inception of decentralization, up to now the legal changes have yet to provide transparent and accountable mechanisms at the village and district levels for recognizing customary (adat) rights, contributing to an environment of distrust, competition and violence where there is a lack of the institutional fora required for handling conflicts and enforcing agreements between parties. Taken together, these dynamics are contributing to the emergence of highly volatile socio-legal configurations that create insecurity and heighten resource conflicts. The article concludes that decentralization has opened space for positive change, which might be significant if political actors such as indigenous groups and nongovernmental organization (NGOs) could organize themselves to take advantage of these new openings. Nonetheless, to date, the politics surrounding decentralization have occurred under the shade of the New Order's authoritarian heritage. As these politics work out at different levels, circumstances remain precariously distant from the objectives of good governance.

The study is based on initial research during 2000–02, supplemented with interviews with policy makers in Jakarta during July–August 2001. It considers how the decentralization process involves legal and institutional changes that encompass a wide array of actors, institutions and levels of government. It necessarily raises issues of coordination, negotiation and conflict across multiple levels and jurisdictions. While decentralization policies initially derive from the administrative center, during the implementation of decentralization programs regional actors also take initiatives. As a result, decentralization is not an even, homogeneous process: as it plays out, decentralization and associated socio-legal transformations have highly differentiated effects at national, district and village scales. In this paper I will consider the effects of decentralization within Indonesia through discussing developments at four different scales. The first section concerns the prevailing policy narratives that set out a scenario that links the implementation of decentralization policies with a set of desired outcomes. It considers how, in a specific political context, these policy narratives have converged with a particular set of domestic political agendas to inspire a national process of administrative reform. Second, I consider the struggle over the direction of the decentralization reforms and its effect upon the relationship between emergent district socio-legal regimes and state attempts to retain some control over the decentralization process. This serves as the background for the third section, an analysis of how––within these emergent district regimes in Central Kalimantan––different actors engage in struggles over forest property. Fourth, I consider the reassertion of the customary normative field, its effect on patterns of resource use, and its relationship to the other normative fields. Finally, I will discuss the particular socio-legal configuration that has emerged at the intersection of processes occurring at parallel national, district and local scales.

Section snippets

Transnational and local inspirations

As described by Roe, 1991, Roe, 1995, policy narratives set out scenarios, explaining what will happen if a policy process is implemented as described. Seen in this way, policy narratives constitute “stories” that function “to stabilize and underwrite the assumptions needed for decision-making” in the face of highly complex and uncertain situations (Roe, 1991). These narratives serve a programmatic function, having the objective of getting their addressees to believe in supporting a particular

Implementation: decentralization and internal pluralism

If the central agencies of the state wished to retain some control in the regions, central actors needed to carefully organize the process of decentering the state. This would involve finding some delicate balance between self-government by locally accountable district and municipal administrations and central government management of the process. Yet, for a number of reasons, the central government had trouble using the monitoring and supervisory mechanisms set out in the framework law.

The

Diverging interpretations: district responses in Central Kalimantan

When, during 1999, district governments reacted rapidly to the decentralization legislation, they embarked on their own legislative programs. Clearly several dynamics shaped district responses. During the New Order, those with the capital and connections necessary to open and operate timber concessions tended to be Javanese and ethnic Chinese politico-business elites in Jakarta. Undoubtedly a Dayak elite enjoyed benefits under this system, finding privileged positions in the New Order power

Reasserting the adat order

The village domain evolved in parallel and somewhat at odds with developments at the central and district levels. As noted earlier, the reformasi period has seen the eruption of previously latent conflicts and the reassertion of the adat customary orders across Indonesia (Acciaioli, 2000; Benda-Beckmann & Benda-Beckman, 2002). In Central Kalimantan during 1999–2000 villages made claims against timber concessionaires (HPH) who had operated over enormous areas of the province, ignoring the

Emergent socio-legal configurations

Clearly the various categories of actors with interests in political control or in benefiting from resource extraction have specific capacities within different fields of control. After having considered the unfolding developments in these different national, regional and local scales, in this section I will discuss how, as different actors seek to pursue their interests or to benefit under these shifting circumstances, the four parallel processes discussed so far interpenetrate to generate

Conclusions

This article has described how, following decentralization, various actors have adjusted to regional autonomy. As they have sought to secure their various interests––whether to redress past grievances, seek rent, raise revenue, extract timber for profit, or merely subsist–– they have developed new strategies or adjusted old ones. In the course of a highly politicized implementation process, the state legal system has become increasingly heterogeneous, with competing national and district forms

Acknowledgements

I initially conducted research in Kalimantan during 2000 for the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), continuing it under a fellowship with the Indonesia Netherlands Study on Environmental Law and Administration, the Van Vollenhoven Institute, Leiden University (2001–02) and lately under an Australian Research Council fellowship at the Asia Research Center, Murdoch University. I presented an earlier version of this paper to the workshop, “Mobile people, mobile law: Expanding

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