Village Law – forest governance, domination and possibilities of liberation in decentralised Indonesia
Keywords: Grounded Theory
Critical Realism
Hegemony studies
Power Theory
Queer Political Ecology
Forest Decentralisation
Indonesia

Many states across the Global South have implemented decentralisation policies aimed at making forest governance more equitable and locally responsive, but often reforms have failed to deliver assumed benefits and been associated with increased inequity and environmental degradation. At the same time, substantial research questions the extent to which decentralisations have been realised in practice and highlights multiple ways in which elites and other powerful actors reshape such reforms in practice so as to entrench and forward their interests. In light of these trends, this thesis examines a significant recent village-level decentralisation – Indonesia’s 2014 Village Law – with the aim of exploring the extent to which authentically decentralised, locally accountable governance can be fostered through the dynamics of a centrally administered reform, as well as their effects on forests and practices of forest governance.
The thesis’s approach to analysis bridges a gap identified by Lund, Rutt & Ribot (2018) between analyses of decentralisation’s socio-environmental effects and critical explorations of the broader contexts within which they are situated. Drawing from post-structural theorists including Foucault, Laclau & Mouffe, and Butler, the thesis conceives of law as something embedded in practice, using the term legal hegemony to identify the complex assemblage of dynamics that (re)produces both the presently dominant meanings and agendas as well as grounded manifestations, operations and effects of decentralisation reform in practice. Adopting an exploratory approach involving a year of fieldwork in West Kalimantan and Jakarta, research aimed to explore the operations of this hegemony, and the extent to which transformative dynamics had been generated on the ground as a result of its operations. After delineating the dominant logics underlying its implementation, the study then applied these findings as a lens through which to examine the law’s effects on village forest governance.
Findings revealed an expansion of central governmental power over villages, with village government agendas being driven by centrally determined economic development goals, limited democratic empowerment and a substantial increase in top-down supervision and scrutiny. The study linked these grounded realities with a bureaucratic re-envisioning of the law which sidelined programs of village autonomy for an agenda of centrally planned rural developmentalism. Such dynamics are replicated in village forests. Whilst villages have initiated a wide array of forest programs since the law’s adoption, these have overwhelmingly been determined by village officials based on higher bureaucratic expectations. There appears little scope for the operations of genuine community-based forest governance under present implementational logics, which may leave villages vulnerable to land-grabbing agrobusinesses. These findings emphasise that decentralisations cannot be taken as an end in itself without carefully attending to the effects of such reforms on dynamics of social and political inclusion and exclusion on the ground over time. Findings highlight the limitations of research aimed at quantitatively assessing the linkages between decentralisation and socio-environmental effects since many decentralisation reforms do not function as such in practice. By exploring the politics embedded within the implementation process, this analysis enabled a detailed tracing of the politics of elite subversion of legislative reform. The study concludes by exploring how, through delineation of such logics, alternative pathways of political activism and legal reform are illuminated and made thinkable.