“The permit for the community forests: we finally got it!” Hanging up his phone, Erwin Basrin, with lights in his eyes, proudly announced the good news. For years, his organization, the Akar Foundation, had been working with villagers in Indonesia’s Bengkulu province to secure their right to manage their community forests, where they grow coffee under the trees.
But the victory felt fragile: one village was not granted a permit, allegedly due to the presence of mining operations in the claimed area. It turned out, however, that the mining company was not even registered with the Indonesian government. This is hardly uncommon: in Indonesia, large portions of lands and forests have been allocated for industrial plantations and extractive businesses with little respect for the land rights of the Indigenous Peoples and local communities occupying or claiming these areas, despite a 2013 Constitutional Court Ruling stating that customary forests should be returned to their traditional owners.
So are communities really being discriminated against when they seek recognition of tenure rights? How unfair are the laws and regulations? Is it true that companies are being favored over local communities when it comes to accessing and using land?
In an attempt to answer these questions, Tenure Conference co-organized in Jakarta on the 25th to 27th of October by the Indonesian government and the CSO Tenure Coalition.
About the author: Anne-Sophie Gindroz is the Southeast Asia Facilitator for the Rights and Resources Initiative.
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