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One of the challenges during the democratic transition from the New Order regime to the Reformasi era was advancing the idea of an agrarian transition to reconcile structural inequalities regarding land ownership. However, this transition was unfortunately not accompanied by a rearrangement of land ownership to allow the practice of land-grabbing inherited from the New Order regime to persist in contemporary Indonesia. This article examines the reasons behind the failure of the agrarian transition in Indonesia, by focusing on case studies in Tegalrejo Village, Malang Regency and the Pamona indigenous peoples, Poso Regency. We argue that the modus operandi of land-grabbing practices is highly dependent on state power and weak protection of communal land rights. By explaining these two factors, this article provides recommendations to strengthen the community's position in dealing with land-grabbing practices by limiting the power of the state and encouraging land reform aimed at securing community land rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indonesia, an archipelagic nation with a tropical climate, fertile soil, and abundant natural resources, primarily supports its population through agriculture. Most people make their living as farmers, heavily reliant on the land. Because of its importance, there is a constant effort to own and control land. Land represents the earth's surface and is often defined by property boundaries. Its significance necessitates state regulations for land rights control. This study uses a normative and empirical juridical approach, collecting data through library research, observations, and interviews, followed by qualitative analysis. The findings reveal that land grabbing occurs mainly due to the absence of a Certificate of Ownership (SHM), with transactions based solely on a sale and purchase certificate lacking a receipt. Factors contributing to land grabbing include landowners' lack of awareness about their assets, victims' unawareness of land ownership, family members selling or giving away land without the victims' knowledge, and rising land prices driving people to seek land for farming. In case number 1/Pdt.G/2023/PN Mgl, the judge accepted the Plaintiff's lawsuit against the Defendant for unlawful acts. The trial demonstrated that the Defendant could not prove his claim of purchasing land from Helmi Majid. The Defendant failed to provide documentary evidence, and witness statements did not support his argument. After careful examination of the actions, events, evidence, and legal facts, the Panel of Judges found the Defendant had clearly violated Article 1365 of the Civil Code regarding Unlawful Acts. Consequently, the Panel of Judges rejected all of the Defendant's objections and granted part of the Plaintiff's claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bajo Tribe is a traditional society living in coastal areas of Indonesia in East Kalimantan, South Kalimantan, South Sulawesi, Southeast Sulawesi, West Nusa Tenggara, East Nusa Tenggara. For centuries, they existed as marine nomads, but more recently have established permanent settlements in coastal areas which often protrude into the sea. The Indonesian constitution guarantees the rights of each citizen to have a place of residence. As the form of legal certainty, the national government issues deeds, which guarantees rights over land to the people of the Bajo Tribe in the form of the Building Use Rights. This research is a legal research under normative juridical methods regarding the approach of laws and regulations (statute approach). Research results demonstrate that any rights over land granted in coastal areas do not conform to Law Number 5 of 1960 regarding the Basic Agrarian Law (hereinafter called UUPA) as the legal grounds of national land. Regulations on land ownership and usage after Law Number 11 of 2020 regarding the Omnibus Law cause legal uncertainty, as they do not conform to previous concepts and principles contained in UUPA. Overlapping land regulations in Indonesia require the state to harmonize and synchronize conflicts. Consequently, land rights cannot be granted for coastal areas for people such as the Bajo Tribe who may have occupied them for generations. A more appropriate settlement is to use utilization permits with certain criteria. Settlements constructed by the Bajo people in the coastal areas must take into account zoning and marine spatial plans. These plans should prioritize ecosystem balance and address the management of waste generated by these settlements Coastal areas are shared resources and can be used by anyone through the principles of common property and open access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the effectiveness of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil's (RSPO) Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) policy in respecting customary land rights in Indonesia using a policy implementation framework. The questions addressed are what is the practice of FPIC by oil palm companies? What is the performance of the companies in implementing the FPIC? Data from companies' documents and a survey of oil palm companies in West and Central Kalimantan show that while RSPO members are practicing the FPIC policy, their FPIC performance is inadequate, because of the absence of external monitoring of land acquisition and company reliance on inadequate Indonesian environmental law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soil is inseparable from all activities of living things. Land is also a source of activity for life and human habitation, especially for Indonesian citizens, where the majority of citizens still rely on land for survival, such as for agricultural land and plantations. The purpose of this study is to analyze the application of legal rules regarding land registration procedures based on Government Regulation Number 18 of 2021 concerning Management Rights, Land Rights, Flats Units, and Land Registration. This research uses the Normative Juridical type of research, which is conceptualized as norms or rules that exist and are obeyed in society, so that they become a reference in behavior. In related arrangements land registration must be based on the principle of legality. In Black's Law Dictionary, legislation/legality has many meanings, one of which is Legislative Action, Drafting and Making Laws and/or Drafting rules for the future. Based on the results of the analysis in this study, it was found that a legal effect was arising related to the implementation of the installation of stakes and related to the principle of delimitation contradictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both human activities and climate change have changed landscapes significantly, especially in coastal areas. Sea level rise and land subsidence foster tidal floods and permanent inundations, thus changing and limiting land use. Though many countries, including Indonesia, are aware of these phenomena, the legal status of this permanently inundated land remains unclear. Indonesia refers to this land legally as obliterated land. This qualification makes former landowners uncertain, as it does not recognize their previous land rights, and creates disputes during land acquisition. In view of policy pressures to develop large-scale projects, the government often fails to include obliterated land legally during land acquisition processes for these projects. This causes unfair and disputed compensation for those former landowners. Current scientific discourses do not yet address this legal quandary. This study therefore has the following three aims: (1) to describe the legal, institutional and procedural contradictions related to obliterated land; (2) to assess the validity of right of the owners whose land parcels are permanently inundated; and (3) to formulate a responsible and tenure responsive policy to deal with obliterated land. We investigate these questions for the construction of a toll road and sea embankment in Kecamatan Sayung, Kabupaten Demak involving obliterated land. We reviewed policies, regulations and documentations related to coastal land and disaster management, and the implementation of land acquisition. We used geospatial data to visualize the ways in which and locations where landscapes, land parcels and land right changed. We determined that legal uncertainty leads to policy inconsistencies in handling obliterated land, specifically during land acquisition. Additionally, former landowners suffer from the legal gaps to establish clarity of land tenure, which prevents them from receiving any compensation. We suggest a law revision that considers the social–historical aspects of land tenure when defining obliterated land. The law should also provide for a fairer and more just compensation for former landowners during land acquisition processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land-use systems are characterized by complex interactions between human decision-makers and their rights environment. Mismatches between the scale of human drivers and the impacts of human decisions potentially threaten the public rights as a whole. The research is a normative legal research using a statute, case, and conceptual approaches. The results show that land for management rights can be used for the purposes of conducting their duties or business, and its use can be transferred to third parties with the approval of the holder of management right. In fact, transfer of rights and imposition of mortgage rights can occur even without the permit of the holder of management right. However, when there is default, the creditor experiences obstacles because the National Land Agency rejects to issue a Land Registration Certificate without the holder's permit of management rights, so that collateral cannot be executed. This condition results in the failure to fulfill the principles of justice and legal certainty for creditors and debtors. This provision should be abolished because it contradicts the principle of justice and legal certainty for the parties having an interest in utilizing the management rights land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the discourse of indigeneity, rural communities around the world are joining a global network of rural justice seekers. By articulating grievances collectively, they demand state recognition while seeking support from NGOs and international development organisations. In Indonesia, the manifestation of indigenous 'adat' politics is no longer confined to the national struggle for the recognition of land rights, but instead, has proliferated into many localised short term 'adat projects'. This introduction to the TAPJA special issue on adat demonstrates that both the rural poor and local elites can be the initiators or recipients of these adat projects but, at the current juncture, the latter are better positioned to benefit from such projects. The special issue shows that in Indonesia, where adat is often firmly entrenched in the state, the promotion of indigeneity claims can work in contradictory ways. Findings from across the special issue show that adat projects tend to reinforce the power of the state, rather than challenging it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While legal and policy frameworks are based on a clear distinction between public and private security actors and functions, the reality on the ground in Indonesia reveals that there is a high level of corporate capture of public security services, including the military and police, who often operate alongside private security companies (mainly local, though there is some evidence of an emerging international presence), and the security personnel of companies engaged in the natural resources industry. This has led to serious human rights violations of indigenous peoples and other local inhabitants, who often find themselves entangled in protracted conflicts with multinational companies over access to their land. Two case studies involving fieldwork in the logging and palm oil sectors in Sumatra reveal a pernicious and deliberate erosion and violation of rights of local inhabitants across the spectrum of security actors, showing that public security actors are protecting corporate interests rather than performing public functions. The implications of these findings are considered in terms of legal responsibilities as well as access to justice. The article reasons towards what are argued to be necessary legal and policy changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a widening legal scope for indigenous rights, the invocation of indigeneity to claim land rights rarely empowers marginalized communities. This article develops an explanation for why this formal recognition of community rights actually has little substantive impact on local struggles over land in Indonesia. Employing almost two years of fieldwork on how rural communities employ indigeneity-based land claims in South Sulawesi, it argues that claims for land rights on the basis of indigeneity are settled not simply on the basis of law, but also on that of the relative bargaining positions and the character of informal linkages between communities, their mediators and local authorities. Indigenous status therefore must be understood as a privilege most likely to be obtained by those groups with relatively strong connections to influential state actors. In contrast, communities that are in conflict with local state actors tend be excluded from obtaining the status of indigeneity and hence the state is likely to deny them their land rights claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article has two basic aims. First, I discuss several notions regarding long-term changes in land-tenure arrangements, mainly in what is now Indonesia. I argue that the character of these changes is often badly understood, partly because the older literature has been misrepresented, partly because the older literature was wrong, and partly because many scholars implicitly or explicitly appear to believe in 'stages theories' (best known among scholars under the German term Stufentheorie), which posit fairly uniform and unidirectional stages of land-tenure development across the board. Second, this article deals with environmental causes and effects of long-term land-tenure developments in the Indonesian Archipelago. Land tenure and conservation are hotly debated at present, but the historical substance in such debates is meagre, usually going back no further than the 1950s or 60s. Nor does there seem to be much interest in the environmental roots of land-tenure arrangements, perhaps because the participants in the land-tenure-and-the-environment debate are mainly anthropologists and environmentalists, who might find such topics of antiquarian importance only. As an historian I cannot share this view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What gives somebody a right over land? Drawing on recent re-theorizations of "space", this paper ethnographically dissects a dispute over the illegal settling of an abandoned orchard in the Indonesian province of Kepulauan Riau. It demonstrates how parallel "rights", "duties", and claims of "belonging" can emerge from the multiple webs of social relationships in which land is enmeshed. Local incarnations of the state are similarly embroiled in these parallel social and spatial networks, fracturing the authority of the state as arbiter. The case thus offers fresh perspectives on land rights, spatiality, and the state in both Indonesia and social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the importance of land rights in providing ways and means for the improvement and preservation of urban heritage cultural values in Yogyakarta. The use of comprehensive institutional approach considers actors' behavior within their informal institutions in the reconstruction of cultural heritage post earthquake. Discussion focuses on the way landowners may constrains or enabling the reconstruction process. Interviews conducted with selected landowners indicated the way in which land rights impede the urban cultural heritage reconstruction. In the end, it shows how institutional economics analysis explains the role of land rights in the improvement of cultural heritage in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Indonesia, since the time of colonial government, the main source for the determination of land rights has been local, indigenous law. Nonetheless, the state has always attempted to influence the way land is managed. This article traces the changes in justification for this influence, with the example of a conflict over land in a Sumatran village. Every actor in the dispute makes his own choice of argument, and creates his own interpretation of facts, rules, and norms. Not only do legal arguments play a role, but political, cultural, and historical arguments are used. This phenomenon may be called discourse shopping. (Land rights, legal pluralism, Indonesia, dispute settlement, social change). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]