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Emergent forest and private land

regimes in JavaNancy Lee Peluso

Published online: 14 Sep 2011.

To cite this article:Nancy Lee Peluso (2011) Emergent forest and private land regimes in Java, The

Journal of Peasant Studies, 38:4, 811-836, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2011.608285

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Emergent forest and private land regimes in Java

Nancy Lee Peluso

Forests are important components of agrarian environments and householdlivelihoods, but as broad political economies and agrarian environments change,how important is land control? Forest villagers in Java during Indonesias NewOrder (19661998) were highly dependent on access to state forests for theirlivelihoods. In the teak forests, long reserved and enclosed lands were guardedclosely by foresters in the State Forestry Corporation. Most villagers income was

locally earned and both land and forest dependent. By 2010, this highly localizedand forest and agricultural land-dependent situation had changed dramatically. InSingget, a hamlet I studied in the mid-1980s, I found that nearly all local familiesderived some income from urban and distant industrial or rural work sites by 2010.Most hamlet residents, however, do not move away permanently to work, butmigrate for periods of several months to several years. As in other parts of ruralJava, these other sources of income are transforming household livelihoodportfolios. Unlike many other parts of Java, the new practices affect villagersrelations to state forest and to their private agricultural lands. This essay examinesthese transformations in land control and labor dynamics, focusing on the changingimportance of teak forest land to villagers livelihoods over the last thirty-plus years.

Keywords:Land Control; forests; Indonesia; migration; teak

Like most women from Singget hamlet, Dik Wati had never worked outside the village

in 1985, when she was helping me record her familys daily activities during my

research. This small task ended in August of that year when a van drove into the

forest-based hamlet, and stopped in front of the hamlet heads house. A man and a

woman told the hamlet head they were looking for young women to work in Jakarta as

pembantu, household help. Dik Wati was one of two who left that evening, passing on

her research assistant tasks for me to her younger brother. I met her again in February

2010, when I visited the village after a hiatus of some 25 years. She said that she andher friend had stayed in Jakarta for two years, then moved back to Singget, married,

and had children. They had been only the first of many young women from this forest

village hamlet to leave for a few years before marriage to work in urban homes. Now,

she lived in Singget not far from her parents and near the homes of all three of her

married brothers and sisters. Her father had been a logger, a day laborer, for the State

Forestry Corporation (SFC) when I lived there years before; her brothers and

brothers-in-law had been involved in more clandestine logging operations.

Many thanks to Edi Suprapto and Agus Purnomo who carried out restudy fieldwork in Singgetwith me. I also appreciate the comments of Derek Hall, Christian Lund, the anonymousreviewers and the editors of JPS. It goes without saying that without the willingness of the peopleof Singget to let us learn about their lives, this research would not have been possible.

The Journal of Peasant Studies

Vol. 38, No. 4, October 2011, 811836

ISSN 0306-6150 print/ISSN 1743-9361 online

2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2011.608285

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In another section of the hamlet, Mbah Lam was now the only midwife/healer

(dukun bayi) working in Singget since the other two passed away. It was also

relatively new for her to be living in a house inside the village bounds. A simple

wooden house, it was nevertheless more comfortable and safe than where she had

raised all four of her children, in a hut constructed of teak leaves and bark on the

state forest lands managed by the SFC. She had been born and was raised in similar

circumstances, her father working for the SFC, dependent on the forest for work and

access to reforestation land to farm for many long years. When I knew her in 1985,

she still lived on the edge of the hamlet, inside the forest proper. Various forest

guards (mantri) had taken pity on her and allowed her to stay there for several

decades, until her children were married. One of them built a small house on her

in-laws land and invited her to stay. Forest land was still important to their

livelihoods; they were involved in some reforestation activities as they had been for a

very long time. That day in 2010 when we talked however, her son-in-law was

working elsewhere and her daughter was taking care of a new baby.

Was access to forest land for employment and temporary farming duringreforestation still crucial to the survival of most residents of this hamlet? Or, had the

clearing of the maturing teak forests surrounding Singget in 1985 opened new

employment horizons to hamlet residents, concurrently with the opening of the

physical horizon? The imposing teak trees of the 1980s had seemed at the time to

almost literally enclose the hamlet residents: travel was difficult on the dirt roads,

cash for transport was in short supply, and the risks of venturing far from the

forest which provided livelihood opportunities of one kind or another for virtually

everyone in the hamlet seemed too difficult to bear.

Yet, as Dik Wati, Mbah Lam, and other old friends explained to my assistants

and me during visits in 2010, things in Singget were different now. In 2010, as inyears before and after some five years of economic crisis and transition to

decentralized democracy in Indonesia, young men left the forest village in groups or

alone for several months at a time to work elsewhere: as manual laborers in oil

exploration firms, as contract labor in urban construction or forest conversion and

plantation establishment, or seeking their fortunes in wildcat gold-mining in

Kalimantan. Unmarried women often sought their fortunes afar for months or years

before returning to marry. Similar patterns have been recorded since the 1980s, at

least, in other parts of Java and Southeast Asia. My question was how the forest, and

specifically access to forest land and resources, had affected villagers decisions to

work locally or away? How had incomes earned locally and away affected the

importance of private and forest land control and how had local practices and the

rhythms of life in this formerly forest-dependent agrarian environment changed in

the past 25 years? These questions loomed large as I continued to talk to old friends

and their children living in the heart of Javas teak forest.

Forests pose unique theoretical and practical questions about land control

and the differences land control makes to the livelihoods of the people living in and

around them. What though, do we mean by forests? According to biological and

ecological definitions, forests are tracts of land characterized by certain densities

and extents of woody cover; they influence the actual and potential uses of that land

in accordance with their composition, biogeochemical properties, and ecologies.

That said, most forests in the world today have been made into political forests, i.e.zones of demarcated territory that are permanently and formally delimited as

forests, whether or not the vegetative cover consists primarily of trees at any given

812 Nancy Lee Peluso


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moment (Peluso and Vandergeest 2001). As components and producers of agrarian

environments or agrarian production systems, political forests have been managed

historically on the assumption that land control was fundamentally necessary to

both scientific forestry and conservation (Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 2000,

Vandergeest and Peluso 2006a). While the forms of land control may be officially

determined by state institutions and laws in such zones, other social and socio-

natural forces also influence access to and control of the land, trees, and other forest

resources (Ribot and Peluso 2003). Moreover, the establishment of political forests

over the past several hundred years has displaced many previous land claimants and

users, and generated uncountable numbers of agrarian conflicts (see, e.g., Thompson

1975, Scott 1976, Guha 1990, Peluso 1992, Neumann 1999, Sivaramakrishnan 1999,

Agrawal 2005).

Forests are important components of agrarian environments and household

livelihoods, but as broad political economies and agrarian environments change,

how important is land control? Research in Southeast Asia since the 1990s has

documented the increasing move away from rural households primary dependenceon agrarian livelihoods (McGee, 1991, Rigg 1998, 2003, Bremen and Wiradi 2002,

Silvey 2003, Kelly 2011). Most of these studies document the declining importance of

agricultural land control either as a source of livelihoods or household wealth and

class status, with incomes augmented by rural-urban and rural-rural migrations.

Mobilities and the ability to maintain connections while away from village homes are

transforming the spatialities of households (Gibson-Graham 2005, Kelly 2011).

Individuals and households are now producing and reproducing themselves and

their environments in multiple localities in the course of a year, with potentially

profound implications for the relative importance of household land control, as Rigg

(1998, 2003) has argued for rural villages of Southeast Asia in general. While theseshifts in the relative importance of land control have also affected household

livelihood practices in forested areas, the specific differences that forest land control

makes to household livelihoods have been less extensively explored (cf. Sunderlin

1993, Sunderlin et al. 2000, Sunderlin et al. 2008, Colchester 2006). Does proximity

to the forest make a difference to household livelihoods when some household

members migrate for work? Conversely, what are the effects of circular migration on

forest and private land use, on the relative control by foresters of villagers labor on

forest lands, and on the (re)gendering of work on and off forest lands?

Of course, the case has been made that Javanese villagers have long been highly

mobile subjects, even those from forest or upland villages.1 But the regularity of this

movement for work has intensified, according to local accounts, and, for Singget at

least, circular migration patterns seem to be associated with the amount of mature

forest and forest work (formal or informal) available locally. Forest villagers from

Java are working in other parts of Indonesia where forests are being converted to

industrial agriculture, mining, or pulp plantations. As men leave for months to earn

wages in these kinds of jobs or in construction, women travel to work as domestic

labor in cities as well as in newly industrialized or frontier developments, or as

factory labor (Peluso et al. forthcoming).

1For Javanese villagers in general, see Vickers (2004), Hugo (2002), Kumar (1979, 1980), Dove(1985), Pigeaud (1962). Their work extends and supports earlier evidence provided by thecolonial welfare survey (1930s) and the colonial land tenure survey (1880s).

The Journal of Peasant Studies 813


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This study examines the changing importance of control over forest land and

agricultural land to village livelihoods in a Javanese teak forest village the hamlet

of Singget in which I lived in 1985 as a range of socio-natural conditions have

changed, both locally and afar, during the 1990s and 2000s. Singget is a forest-

enclosed hamlet in Blora District (Kabupaten Blora) in which mens and womens

circular migration for work has changed the nature and relativevalue of forest and

agricultural land to local livelihoods (Peluso et al.2011). Most Singget villagers were

not particularly mobile in the mid-1980s, when I first lived and conducted research

there (Peluso 1992).2 Nor were mobile labor and circular migration topics of much

concern among students of forestry at the time. Recent revisits to Singget have

indicated that forest and private land access and control and labor opportunities

on agricultural and forest lands remain important in the teak forest, but in changing

ways.

I track the historical trajectories of land control and labor regimes during these

last few decades, inside and outside of a hamlet located within Javas most valuable

political forest type. I note the ways these regimes have been affected by newmobilities of labor, mutabilities of planting practices, and changes in the value of the

forest lands to the SFC and to forest villagers. Political forests and their constitutive

land control regimes are being transformed not only by forest village laborers

circular migrations away from the teak forests for work, but also by villagers

increased planting of teak for savings and petty commodity production on their

privately held smallholdings. However, many forest village households continue to

seek access to forest land, and to maintain control over their small plots of private

agricultural land, in order to engage in traditional land-based livelihood activities

such as growing food crops and pursuing new extractive opportunities on forest and

private lands, as described below.For most of the households and individuals we interviewed, villagers increased

mobility and wage work outside the village has reduced their relative dependence on

the forest. The overwhelming majority of them, however, continue to keep their

residence in the village and to work at least part of the year locally on agricultural

and forest land. Control of the land and territory that constitutes the political forest

remains important to the SFC, both symbolically and materially, even though

declining stocks of teak have been causing the SFC to subsidize its operations by

overharvesting current stocks and seeking short-term support from the Ministry of

Forestry (MoF) (Ardana 2008, Soedomo 2010).

In forests and forested regions, land control is part of a broader set of practices

and ideas related to best management of forest production or protection; these

practices and ideas have constituted the hegemony of a particular set of political-

economic institutions of forest land management and security in twentieth century

Indonesia. These are visible in the social relations continually playing out in the

social practices and tensions in and around political forests, in this case, the teak

forests of Java. In Blora District, the heart of the teak forest, a long trajectory of

state land control through state, corporate, and parastatal forest institutions has

been produced, contested, maintained, and transformed through three centuries

since the United East India Company (VOC) first made arrangements with Javanese

sultans and princes to buy timber and the labor(ers) needed to cut it (Peluso 1992).

2At the time of the research and of writing the 1992 book, it would not have been prudent toidentify the hamlet by name, nor to discuss its location or actual characteristics in print.



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The recent mobility of forest villagers and their reduced, though not eliminated,

dependence on forest lands for income and livelihood have major implications for

the ways the SFC attempts to maintain control of the political forest i.e. through its

own continued land control.

In the next section, I discuss forests and land control as material and symbolic

representations of hegemony. I then outline the trajectories of struggles over land

control in three recent periods, building on my earlier work (Peluso 1992). The three

periods are the late Suharto regime (approximately 19901998), the violent transition

to reform (19982003), and the maturation of neoliberal-democratic forces (2004

2011). In the conclusion I return to the broader question posed in this special

collection ofJPS, What difference does land control make?, to specifically address

the question of forests.

Land control, political forests, and their contexts

To analyze how land control, land use, and labor regimes are changing in practiceand importance to forest villagers in Singget and to the policies and practices of the

SFC,3 I use a broadly Gramscian approach (Gramsci 1971, Mann 2008). A

Gramsican analysis examines multiple strands of interlinked historical trajectories

and how they come together; it requires unpacking complex, mutually constitutive

relations of conflict and cooperation over history (Gramsci 1971, Hart 2006, Mann

2008). Javas political forest lands, and the broader extractive, urbanizing, capitalist,

and national contexts within which they are set, offer a useful analytic terrain

through which to analyze the importance of agrarian land control under forest and

agricultural land uses to competitors operating in a rapidly changing political

economy. The social relations constituting the land control regimes divided officiallybetween forest lands (political forest) and agricultural lands have trajectories that

begin with the formal constitution of state lands and of forest lands as specific

categories of colonial state territory in the nineteenth century. From the first, these

political entities have been challenged by resident villagers. Far from being static

political zones of untouchable forest or wilderness, these forests and forest

plantations became sites of political violence, contested settlement, claims and

counter-claims (Peluso 1992).

Political forests as land-use zones and tracts of state-controlled territory,

whatever the composition or nature of those states, have existed in Southeast Asia

since the nineteenth and twentieth century colonial era (Vandergeest and Peluso

2006a, 2006b). National, state, and Crown forests,4 since the colonial period in

Southeast Asia, have been recognized as tracts of land that have been mapped,

demarcated, legislated, and or decreed as permanent forest zones. They are meant to

enable state agencies to regulate the socio-spatiality (where and by whom) of floral

and faunal forest production, reproduction, extraction, and protection. In addition,

certain species of plants have been designated forest species. Some forest species,

the most valuable ones, were immediately monopolized by state agencies for

3Neither the SFC or forest villagers comprise a homogenous group; rather I recognize them as

environmental subjects with multiple and diverse interests, positioned differently in relation tothe teak forests of Java.4Even though some forests were later defined as parks or conservation areas, or naturalreserves.



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commercial production. Forest Departments were defined by their authority to

manage forest lands and species by either direct management, as in Java, or

indirectly by concession, as in Sumatra, Borneo and other Indonesian forests outside

of Java.5 In some cases, the presence of a particular species could determine a

territorys designation as a political forest as was the case with teak in Java

historically (Peluso 1992).6 Territorial designations were fundamental to deciding

which state and private interests would formally control the land (Agrawal and

Sivaramakrishnan 2000, Brookfield et al. 1995, Dove 2004, Peluso 1995, Peluso and

Vandergeest 2001, Potter 1988, Potter 2003, Scott 1998, Sivaramakrishnan 1997,

1999). When I asked what differentiated a tract of land covered in mixed fruit, resin,

and latex-rich trees in Borneo from a tract of adjacent forest, a prominent

American forest ecologist7 answered, species composition, without hesitation.

Permanently zoned, mapped, demarcated, and legislated political forests in Java

have accounted for 2023% of the islands land since the nineteenth century, and are

surrounded by more than 6,300 forest villages (Susilawati and Esariti 2007). Indeed,

one fourth of all the villages on Java are designated forest villages (Ardana 2008b).This means not only that they are surrounded by or adjacent to the forest, but,

in an administrative anomaly, that political forest occupies some percentage of the

villages official territory.

The recent conjuncture in Indonesia is characterized by both political

decentralization and an intensified neoliberalization of economic policies, including

a decentralization of the management of some resources and the privatization of

many state industries. In contrast to this trend, the Ministry of Forestry has retained

legal control over political forest lands, which comprise more than two thirds of

Indonesias total territory.8 Challenged violently by forest villagers since 1998,

foresters hegemony over legal land control has required coercion and numerousconcessions to forest villagers and others. In Java, foresters responded violently to

property damage (see below), while their concessions include increased access to

forest lands, fewer responsibilities for contracted reforestation farmers, and more

revenue sharing from wood and resin harvests between foresters and villagers.9

Teak forests illustrate how enclosures of land and certain species (for capitalist

production) and state territorialization have worked together historically. State

control over teak forests of Java is legitimated through the politics of internal

territorialization (Vandergeest and Peluso 1995). In addition, the Basic Forestry Act

and the Forest Laws enclosed both land and a hyper-valuable tree species for the

state. This double enclosure has enabled the State Forestry Corporation at once

5During the colonial period, some teak forests were allocated to private companies byconcession for exploitation (Boomgaard 1994).6Teak was also enclosed by monopoly by colonial and contemporary states in Burma andThailand (Vandergeest 1996, Bryant 1997).7A conversation with Dr. Charles Peters of the New York Botanical Garden in the mid-1990s.8In other work, I and others have written about the conflicts on these forest lands undercolonialism, through the initial years of Indonesian independence, and throughout the NewOrder. In the next section I deal briefly with these historical conflicts and the terms underwhich villagers, foresters, and others have clashed or cooperated (see e.g. Peluso 1992,Sunderlin 1993, Santoso 2004, Simon 1999, Simon 2004, Awang 2004, Hoelman 2005).9

I do not go into the problems or specific changes brought by the increased spread of socialforestry, forest farmer users groups, or shared revenues, nor do I discuss the landoccupations and agrarian reform efforts/demands on West Javas forest lands discussed byNoer Fauzi Rachman, also in this collection.



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a forestry management institution and a parastatal enterprise to accumulate

significant profits, capital, and power. Indeed the breadth of their power is expressed

in their control of so much land. The SFCs monopoly on the production of (and

flow of benefits from) teak is weakening, however, which might be seen as a result of

concessions to forest villagers in the present moment.

How have these two enclosures of land and species worked together over time,

and how have they intersected with the regulatory dimensions of territorialization?

State or ruling elites (the aforementioned sultans and princes) claimed monopolies

on teak trees, but the 1865 colonial forest laws enabled the enclosure of teak forest

land by the state. After the extant forests of the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries were cut, teak plantations with lifecycles of 80 years were established. Ending

the monopoly on such a long-lived species changes the spatialized relations of

production, and the power relations built on those territorial controls, with further,

complex implications for the ecologies and economies of forested regions. The

findings reported in this study thus challenge linear transition narratives (of agrarian,

forest, and property transitions), while demonstrating that forests and forest landscontinue to subsidize household income but in varied and constantly changing ways.

Among scholars of forest transition and of the social lives of forests, migration

and the remittances sent by migrants to family in forested areas are also critical

components of analysis, though this has been taken up less by scholars of Southeast

Asia than by those working in Latin America (Hecht et al. 2005, Padoch et al. 2008,

Morrison et al. in press; c.f. Hoch et al. 2009). Yet, migrations increasing role in

household and individual production and reproduction is a key theme in both the

Southeast Asian and other regions agrarian transition literatures (Gibson-Graham

2005, Hall et al. 2011, Kelly 2011, Rigg 2003, Silvey 2003, White and Wiradi 1989,

White 2005). These laboring patterns have gained traction in Indonesia with thetransformation of the Indonesian political economy since 1998 (Breman and Wiradi

2002, Rigg 2003). Despite the lack of systematic data on migration in and out of

forest villages, some recent reconnaissance and research in forest villages have found

changing patterns of employment, similar to those affecting other parts of Java and

rural Southeast Asia, particularly periodic temporary (circular) migrations by

various household and family members (Padoch et al.2008, Crambet al.2009, Kelly

2011, Rigg 2003). Forest village households are changing composition in Singget,

for example, they are clearly getting smaller but many adult men and women are

maintaining residence and landholdings in forest villages while migrating to work for

wages elsewhere for several months at a time. For forest areas, the patterns have

intensified further since approximately 2004, arguably because of significant losses of

mature and medium-aged teak and other woody forest products from Javas state

forest lands (see below).

In each of the recent historical periods discussed below, I address how the

mobilities of labor, trees, rights, and capital are transforming hegemonic relations in

the political forests of Java.

Post-colonial trajectories of land control in the teak forest10

Suharto came to power in Indonesia in 1966 and established what he called the New

Order regime, under which he ruled until 1998. During his 32 years of authoritarian

10Unless otherwise noted, the material in this section is taken from Peluso (1992).



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rule, the nature of governance, of international and national political economy, and

the politics of forestry worldwide and within Indonesia changed in multiple ways

(Robison 1986, Dauvergne 1997, Barr 1998, Brown 1999, Robison and Hadiz 2004,

Barret al.2010). His brand of authoritarian state-led capitalist development enabled

new forms of capital investment and established the formal institutions of land

control. Not divorced from violence, Indonesian forest enclosures that enabled state

institutions, cronies, and other corporate interests to accumulate massive profits

were expanded and strengthened during the New Order. State and private

enterprises, many with strong ties to military institutions and individuals, invested

in resource production and extraction (Barr 1998, Brown 1999, Gellert 2008,

Robison 1986, Robison and Hadiz 2004).

Forestry was a powerful player in Suhartos bureaucracy from the start. The

authority of the State Forestry Corporation of Java, first formed as two provincial

state enterprises (of Central and East Java) under first-president Sukarno in 1961,

was extended to West Java in 1978. The SFC had legal jurisdiction over and

directly managed11 all production and most protection forest on the whole islandof Java. Its jurisdiction meant that foresters had legal authority over most of the

tracts legislated as Kawasan Hutan (Forest Territory), and all the activities carried

out on those forest lands. A remnant institution of the previous regime, the Dinas

Kehutanan (Forest Service) has retained control over a very small estate in Java,

and reports directly to the Ministry of Forestry (MoF). The SFC thus has legal

control over nearly 2.5 million hectares of Javas land, 61% of which is classified

for production of teak (Soedomo 2010). In 1984, the Department of Forestry was

removed from the Ministry of Agriculture and upgraded to a Ministry [of

Forestry], in part because of the importance of its control over the 70% of

Indonesias land designated as Kawasan Hutan. These territories constitute what Icall in this study political forest.

The great value and potential of the teak forests in Blora led colonial and

contemporary forestry agencies to cordon off some 44% of Blora District

(kabupaten) as forest; by the end of the nineteenth century, all the state forest lands

in this district had been rendered into forest districts with management plans.

After the Indonesian revolution ended in 1949, colonial forest laws for Java and

Madura were translated into Indonesian and re-legislated in virtually the same

prewar terms. The Basic Agrarian Law of 1960, which governed private lands and

land for development gave no jurisdictional authority to agrarian land authorities

over political forest lands (Kawasan Hutan). The Basic Forestry Act of 1967

established a national Indonesian forest estate for the first time and the Forest Laws

governed control of, access to, and management of the forest lands. This territorial

division of authority within the Indonesian state over these two important categories

of land control and use during the colonial period has underlain many of the land

disputes in Java since.

Teak districts in Java provided the revenues to support management of

protection forests and less-valuable production forests such as montane forests

11The SFCs direct management thus differed from the Ministry of Forestrys indirect

management of Indonesias other production forest lands. These latter are allocated forlogging to private concerns as territorial concessions. The SFC, in contrast, employs averitable army of professionally trained foresters and manual laborers to carry out planningand implementation of all forestry activities on the lands under its authority.



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producing less expensive lumbers, pine pitch, and resins (damar,copal). Enclosure of

teak forests required no small effort or expense, however, as the costs of professional

forest guards was high. Foresters determined plantation teaks ideal age to be 80

years and established an 80-year rotational harvest system comprised of 10-year-old

blocks or Age Classes of teak trees. Every forest district with a plan thus was

theoretically intended to cut and to plant 1/80th of its land in teak each year. The

plantation establishment and harvest years of these cycles required more labor inputs

than the other years. The states monopoly on teak did not mean that farmers could

not plant it on their own land, but selling it required a permit and a tax, and usually

entailed harassment by local foresters.

Teak grew well in the poor limestone soils of this region. Teaks availability

in proximate forests subsidized the provision of resident villagers most basic

needs: they used the dense, long-lasting wood to make all of their farm tools (hoes,

ploughs), fencing, and housing. Teak was also the preferred wood to burn in

blacksmithing. The occasional teak tree would be found in a home garden or in a

village square, even outside the primary teak zones. Massive teak trees shared spacewith the graves in cemeteries, rendering them sacred groves, mystical sites, and,

importantly, supernaturally protected from trespassing foresters (Peluso 1992).

During the Suharto years, the hamlet dwellers of Singget, surrounded on all sides

by teak forest, were highly dependent on the forests (lands and species) and on

foresters for access to forest-based work. Forest land served to supplement food

production on private land when a household was allocated a reforestation plot

(taungya) for the first two years of teak plantation establishment. Limitations on

land available for private holdings due to the forest enclosures of one hundred

years or more led people in teak areas, in particular, to buy or keep cows as savings

(as well as draft animals). The animals held their value over time, and could graze onforest lands as well as fallowed private lands, another way in which the forest

subsidized household incomes. And, over time (before or after the establishment of

the colonial forest service), the forest supplied the only kind of wood that locals

would use for their housing: teak.

Singget villagers rarely migrated to work, in part because much of the wage labor

on other islands was managed through the formal channels of transmigration or

transmigration-contract labor. To transmigrate at the time was considered a

permanent decision, requiring moving residence and leaving friends and family.

While a few Singget villagers agreed to transmigrate to Sumatra, Kalimantan, or

West Papua (then Irian Jaya), others feared the worst, assuming that they would be

taken outside their villages and shot or thrown in the ocean.12

Most Singget residents owned some agricultural land, though generally not

enough to provide for a familys annual subsistence. Singget was also distinguished

by the absence of large landlords monopolizing big tracts of village land, which

12Sponsored transmigration, a government program enabling poor Javanese villagers toseek livelihoods on other Indonesian islands, was experienced in the teak forest as apunishment. The SFC had a special interest in the program, hoping to solve their problems ofwhat they saw as excess human populations and tree theft by moving people out of theirforests in Java. Villagers, however, understood transmigration as banishment, a sentence

imposed on recalcitrant and unrepentant teak thieves who were caught and/or foundthemselves on the wrong side of the village leader. Even when a few transmigrants returned toJava and talked about their successes in West Kalimantan or Sumatra, few people were willingto sign up.



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many attributed to the low fertility of their land. In these social relations of land

control, Singget differed from other hamlets in Bleboh and other forest villages,

many of which were more stratified by land ownership and income. Even the Singget

hamlet heads salary lands13 amounted to only 0.6 hectare contrasting with the

situation of all the other hamlets nearby. Beji, the village that borders directly on

Bleboh (the village in which Singget is a hamlet) provided nine hectares of salary

land for its head a huge amount of land in Java. The village head of Bleboh

controlled some 4 hectares of top quality irrigated rice land (sawah) as salary land. In

Singget, by contrast, the only big landlord was the SFC, with its domination of

nearly 60 % of the hamlets land.

Many tensions and contradictions characterized the relations between SFC

foresters and forest villagers, as documented elsewhere (Awang 2004, Barber 1989,

Peluso 1990, 1992, Santoso 2004, Sunderlin 1993). Contestation and negotiation

took place through teak cutting and black markets in timber and firewood,

augmented by a grey market (part legal, part illicit) in teak houses.14 Foresters

wanted to control all access to forest land, but the labor requirements for producingteak made foresters dependent on the villagers who planted, guarded, girdled, and

harvested the trees.

Reforestation was clearly a site of struggle over land control. The taungya

system, started in the late nineteenth century, was specifically put into place to take

advantage of the demographic conditions in these teak forests: densely settled

populations constrained from clearing political forest for food production, class

stratification indicated by land ownership and control patterns, and a minimum of

non-farm employment available locally except in the forest. This made it possible for

the state to reforest by offering access to taungya lands for cultivating food crops

between the teak seedlings, decreasing the costs of plantation establishment to theforesters. Forest villagers wanted and needed access to taungya land even though

they could farm for only two years before the canopies shaded out their field crops,

because it supplemented their subsistence capacities.

In 1985, almost the entire hamlet was involved in some aspect of state forest

production. There were many large families, some with eight to ten people living in a

single sprawling, wooden house with a dirt floor; some 74 houses comprised the

hamlet. Few men left the village to work, except in logging or other forestry activities

that might take them to nearby forest districts. Villagers from other forest hamlets

joined the SFC and became forest labor foremen (mandor), forest guards or

managers (mantri), or forest police (Polhut); but men from Singget usually worked as

forest laborers thinning, logging, and dragging logs with their livestock. And at

that time, whether or not they were involved in the SFCs formal forest production

activities, many were involved in the unauthorized cutting of trees, or in sawing cut

timber into boards and two-by-fours, in transporting timber from the forest, in its

burial under farmers fields, or in hiding the wood in the cemeteries. Some were

involved in networks of wood marketing and in the construction and sale of teak

13Another remnant of colonial policy in the present was the payment of village leaders salarieswith land rather than cash.14

It was not illegal to sell the wood in your house. However, if you were selling your house,you needed more wood to build another. The acquisition of this wood was technically illegal,but proof was difficult unless thieves were caught in the act. See Peluso (1992) for a moreextensive discussion of Suharto era politics of house selling.



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houses or teak furniture. In short, nearly every household in Singget was forest

dependent, and most were dependent in multiple ways.

As late as 1985, Singget villagers seemed to have an extremely powerful

connection to place. The hamlets cohesion was strong. Most agricultural production

was carried out with reciprocal labor, and the atmosphere was distinctly one of a

forest-enclosed settlement in a wild frontier replete with gambling, furtive night

excursions, gossip about informants, forest police raids, and so on a frontier town

smack in the middle of long-settled, highly differentiated,15 rural Java, the most

densely populated agrarian environment in the world.16 Yet, because some 60% of

Singget hamlets lands were occupied by political forests,17 the New Order period

was experienced as a time of repression. Yet if by day they could not cut their own

hamlets teak trees, by night they would go into the next valley and cut trees in their

neighbors.

The material manifestations of these politico-cultural struggles over land and

forest control were visible in the age-class structures of the teak forest. In 1985, some

40% of the land controlled by the SFC was degraded or in Age Classes 1 and 2(Peluso 1992). By the end of the New Order, in 1997, even before the forest crisis

described in the next section, the age-class structure was already so skewed that

nearly 90 % of teak forest land was planted in teak of Age Classes 14, rather than

the 4050% of the total that should have been in those classes18 (Perhutani 1999).

This, forestry scholars have recently shown, is the result not only of a constant

whittling away of the teak stocks in the vicinity of forest villages but, more

significantly, of overharvest by the SFC. Among other documented acts of

mismanagement, the actual standing stocks are not the basis of the annual cut as

they are designed to be though they record theft and missing trees, many SFC

districts do not recalculate the cut according to how many teak trees still stand(Ardana 2008).

In recognizing and beginning to try to deal with these material losses, SFC

created a program of social forestry, allowing, in theory, villagers greater access to

and control over forest lands (see, e.g., Sunderlin 1993, Simon 2003, Awang 2004).

Most social forestry lands, however, were the most degraded forest lands from which

the SFC was no longer able to make any kind of profit. The mid-to-late1990s also

witnessed the formation of underground opposition groups advocating for agrarian

reform (Lucas and Warren 2003). Forestry reform, however, was conflicted, as some

forestry and environmental NGOs could not accept the idea of transferring forest

lands to farmers without guarantees that the land would remain or be remade into

some kind of forest cover (Peluso et al. 2008). While these oppositions indicate

an incompleteness of the SFCs hegemonic control over forest land, they did not

materialize in strong or cohesive enough forms to effect significant change. The

incremental changes they did induce, however, were intensified by violent change in

the next period, after the fall of Suharto and the institutional transformation of

many aspects of Indonesian natural resource governance.

15Singget was unusually less differentiated in terms of land distribution than other Javanesevillages and even other hamlets of Bleboh. This was perhaps because of a more recent

settlement history or its isolation.16An honor it shares with Bangladesh.17Thus even more than the districts 44% average.1875% was in Age Classes 12 (Ardana 2008b).



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In sum, in 1985 Singget residents livelihoods and labor were primarily agrarian

and most off-farm labor was local and in the forest. Access to the forests and forest

lands, whether legally sanctioned or not, was critical to most households livelihoods

to supplement subsistence cultivation and labor on private agricultural lands. Forest

lands as terrain for grazing the cows used in agriculture and as savings and teak

grown on the forest lands subsidized household livelihoods. Some men went away

occasionally to work, but cash income was available through legal and illegal

activities in the mature and maturing forests surrounding the settlement. Women

were only starting to migrate for work before they were married. During the 1990s,

migration increased in frequency, with more and more men working in urban and

rural industrial sites far from the teak forest, and unmarried women from Singget

traveling to Jakarta, Bandung, Surabaya, Semarang, and Blora or abroad, to work

as domestic servants.

19982003 Crises causing and contextualizing TransitionSuharto fell in the midst of the Asian Economic Crisis, after 32 years of dictatorship.

While he stepped down peacefully, the decline signaled the end of a soon to be passe

New Order. The New Order regime had been despised by people in most rural areas

for the unprecedented expropriations of land and other resources and the regimes

often violent dispossessions of them. Thus the year 1998 saw much looting of goods

from shops and warehouses, as well as looting and destruction of export crops and

other commodities growing on state and corporate private lands all over Indonesia.

Nascent democracy and the end of the worst repression enabled underground

agrarian movement organizations to go public, organizing poor villagers to occupy

government and private plantation lands on Java and elsewhere. Organized andspontaneous occupations occurred on forest plantations in some fertile upland and

montane areas. Surprisingly, such occupations, especially ones that tried to maintain

control for the long term, rarely occurred in Bloras extensive teak forests (Afiffet al.

2005, Bachriadi and Lucas 2002).

In Java particularly, the two and a half years between the 1998 announcement by

Suhartos successor, President Habibie, about a transition to democracy and

decentralization, and its actual implementation in 2001, were filled with havoc and

uncertainty. Unfortunately, the decentralization law failed to establish clear

decentralizing mechanisms (Resosudarmo 2005). Forest law became a major site of

struggle, as NGOs and academics put forward multiple (and conflicting) drafts for

a new law, which they hoped would reduce the legal grip of the SFC and the MoF on

political forest lands. The new Forest Law passed in 1999, updating the 1967

National Forest Act, did not fulfill activists expectations to increase local controls

on state forest lands.

During this period, agrarian reform groups and peasant organizations, illegal

under Suharto, were able to operate publicly and alongside environmental justice

organizations in the countrys democratizing atmosphere, but their previous public

solidarities deteriorated. Now that their common enemies (Suharto and the New

Order state) had been deposed, the divergent visions of various environmental and

agrarian NGOs, and of other agrarian and environmental activists and scholars for

forest lands came into more frequent conflict (Afiff 2004, Peluso et al. 2008). Thefuror over the decree known as TAP MPR IX/2001, which combined the concerns

over the revival of the Basic Agrarian Law and the management of Natural



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Resources, was in large part a function of the splitting of the movements interests

in regard to land control and forest cover, not to mention the definition of forest

cover (Afiff 2004, Peluso et al. 2008).

The divisions between the darker green, more conservative environmental and

conservation NGOs and the environmental justice NGOs, as well as between them

(and within) the nascent agrarian reform movement, grew increasingly strident in

part because of what was happening in Javas forests. In some montane forests, land

occupations by organized and unorganized groups and individuals were taking

place. Land occupiers cut the forest species and planted food crops and agricultural

trees such as fruit trees and coffee. In other montane forests, farmers occupied the

forest land and harvested trees that were the same as wood species they grew on their

lands (primarily fast-growing varieties of Albizzia falcataria and others) and sold

them as lumber or made them into furniture. They replanted the same wood species

on the forest lands and declared it a peoples forest (Diantoro 2006). In Wonosobo,

the new District Head passed a local regulation legalizing their claims, taking

advantage of the legal uncertainties surrounding decentralized natural resourcemanagement and the new powers accorded to District Heads and District

legislatures (Diantoro 2006).19

In most teak forest areas, conflicts were largely over the trees, not the land

(Wulanet al.2004). As the early promise of decentralization (and before the passing

of the new Forest Law) held out the possibilities that even Javas forest lands might

be decentralized, villagers in teak forests rushed onto the forest lands and cut teak to

sell or to make teak furniture and new housing. Some urban migrants returned home

to forest villages specifically because so much local work was available. Gangs of

antagonized cutters, often attacking forests not far from their own backyards, cut

trees and kept the sawn wood or sold wood to black market buyers. Forestersresponded with violent repression, and the number of villagers shot and killed by

foresters skyrocketed. Between 1998 and 2008, some 99 people in Central Java were

shot, clubbed, or beaten by SFC foresters and forest police; 31 died (Ardana et al.

2010, Lidah Tani 2008). Unlike during the Suharto period, every shooting was now

written up in the newspapers and generated both retaliation and increasing unease

with what the SFC was doing. Villagers burned down forestry offices, foresters

homes, and cut more teak en masse. Some forest ranger stations in the teak forests

were burned. It was a tense, violent period.

It was also a period in which profits were difficult for the SFC to make, despite

their continued legal control over the forest land. In 1998 and 1999, the SFC used

magic numbers to claim they were still making good profits while their major sources

of profits teak and other trees were under attack (Perhutani 1999 cited by

Soedomo 2010, 7). In a paper circulated in 2009, however, the following details

about changes in accounting for trees and profits were reported (Ardana et al.2009):

satellite image analysis showed that nearly one-third of the forest land under SFC

jurisdiction had no forest cover. Figures for standing stock declined dramatically

between 1998 and 2004. The 37.3 million m3 of standing teak stock in 1998 was

reduced to 21.2 million m3 by 2004, an average loss of 2.7 million m3 per year.

Further, the SFC was under pressure to maintain its levels of income and profit; they

decided therefore to reduce teaks age of harvest (daur jati) from 80 years to 60 years.

19Similar moves were made by Bupatis in Kalimantan and Sumatra. See Casson (2001),McCarthy (2001).



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This led to an increase in the annual cut rather than a decrease. In addition, the SFC

created a new measure for determining which trees could be cut: minimum harvest

age, lowering the cutting age to 50 years in these productive districts, and thereby

reducing the overall age of the forest. Overcutting, as Ardana et al.(2009) point out,

was effectively legalized. A major anomaly was that the MoF had no legal or

bureaucratic mechanism for supervising SFC forest practices. As if this were not

enough, the accounting system used did not calculate standing stock as an active

asset, even though trees are the major fixed capital of any forestry production

operation (Ardanaet al.2009, 2, citing Audit by BPK, 2004). Though these numbers

seem fantastic, the compilers of these data (who used SFC-generated statistics from

provincial and forest district offices) claim that in 2004, when the SFC recorded 142

billion Rupiah (about US$ 14.2 million) in profits, they had actually lost standing

stock worth 3.2 trillion Rupiah (Ardana et al. 2009). In 2004, at an international

meeting sponsored by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) on

resource tenure and the future of Indonesian social forestry, the SFCs head of

production in Central Java ruefully admitted that the SFC was bankrupt to anaudience full of shocked activists, forestry professionals, and academics, including

myself.

Many forest villagers who had never been involved in illegal logging took part

now, as did long-standing professional black market networks, many of whom had

close inside contacts. Furniture making businesses of Jepara, Blora, Cepu, and

elsewhere had both private and government wood suppliers. Among Singget

villagers, newly cut wood was not usually sold; woodcutters sawed boards and posts

and saved them inside their own and other villagers houses. Houses that had had

dirt floors acquired layers of thick teak flooring overnight. Walls and ceilings were

doubled up to conceal wood stored for later sale. Meanwhile, the urban (andinternational) demand for antique teak housing grew, demonstrating how middle

and upper class or urban consumption demands could influence both illicit

economies and forest ecologies. Over a few years, all 74 of the rambling old-style

Javanese houses were sold outside Singget. Smaller, better constructed houses made

of recently cut teak instantly replaced them. Two houses could easily be constructed

and often were where one large house had once stood. The forests role as subsidy

for cash and housing authorized or not, and without the benefit of formal land

control literally reached new heights.

By the time the nation was pulling itself out of crisis, violence in forests had

somewhat subsided and in late 2003 foresters in Java approached forest villagers to

accept reforestation plots in a few tracts. In the meantime, other major political-

economic changes had been set in motion, affecting the teak forest labor force in new

ways, as we see in the following section. In particular, the re-engagement and

expansion of capital investors in resource industries outside of Java in particular (oil,

natural gas, gold and nickel mining, forestry, and forest conversion to oil palm and

rubber plantations) affected what was possible in the teak forests, just as the

transformations in teak forests affected the availability of labor for those industries

outside.

During this conflictual period, the SFCs hegemonic control over forest lands,

trees, and labor diminished enough that formal access to them and the labor

relations entangled with various formal access mechanisms would be re-negotiated.At least three new challenges to the SFCs hegemony and control emerged, providing

evidence of a shift. First, the foresters were not able to stop unauthorized teak



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cutting, in part because so many foresters were involved in illegal operations, but

also because of its extent.20 Their violent responses also had aggravated the illegal

cutting, motivating people not previously involved to cut wood for revenge now

(Peluso et al. in press; Ardana 2008b). Second, such large areas of medium to

mature-aged forest had been cut off-plan that the SFC accelerated the timing of

planned rotational cuts, formally reducing the ideal age for cutting teak from 80 to

60 years.21 In 2004, all the forest visible from Singget hamlet tracts that had been

4080 years old in 1985 had been razed to the ground. Some tracts had been cut on

scheduled rotations by the SFC in the late 1990s, the rest had been cut informally.

The third domain of renegotiation was in reforestation by taungya in this area.

Despite the extensive amount of degraded and clearcut forest around this village, the

SFC had engaged no reforestation activities around Singget between 1998 and 2003.

Proximity to the forest but mainly for its teak not its land had made a

significant difference in local economies, household livelihoods, and the political

forests nature during this period. Not everyone was sent back to their villages as

industrial and urban jobs were hit by crisis, nor did many return unwillingly; manycame backspecifically to take advantage of local economic opportunities. In Singget

and other parts of Blora, the forest directly subsidized housing and household

incomes during the transition years of 1998 through 2003.

This section has shown how linear predictions of agrarian, forest, and

demographic transitions are bedeviled by the circumstances in Singget and other

parts of the teak forest during the crisis period of 19972003. Hegemony was a

more tightly wound spring at that time, twanging open as socio-natural conditions

of forest land and labor changed. This conjunctural terrain was violent and

transformative for the forest. As the economy recovered, construction jobs picked up

in Indonesian and Malaysian cities, demand for contract labor in forest and othertypes of resource production outside Blora increased, and demand for domestic help

and industrial labor increased.

20042010 migrations and multi-localities: capital, labor, trees, and livelihoods

Neoliberal policies and regulatory practices, though first ushered into Indonesia in

the late 1980s through the doorways of an authoritarian state-led development

regime, have rendered capital more mobile and freer of state control since

decentralization. Outside Java, more private capital than ever before is being

invested in forest plantation production, forest conversion to industrial agriculture,

and mining. Capitalist enterprises today are less subject to the regulations and the

manipulations of the New Order era and are often courted by provincial and district

20SFC Division Head Ir. Rijanto Tri Wahyono was quoted in the newspaper Pikiran Rakyatthat some 10% of SFC employees, at all levels from labor foremen and guards to heads ofForest Districts and those in higher administrative positions have been involved in forest theft(Pikiran Rakyat, 13 Juli 2000; quoted in Faud and Astraatmaja 2000).21The policy was passed through Provincial Planning and Development Bureau Decree No.1483/042.1/SPPU/Can/I on 25 November 2002. The decree stated that the reduction in thelifecycle (daur) of the teak trees was necessitated by the poor condition of the resources in thewake of the mass cutting. However, the possibility of reducing the trees lifespan had been

discussed in seminars in Yogyakarta in 1968 and 1985 (Aristyawati 2009), and had actuallybegun in some subdistricts practice in late 1980s and 1990s. Since Undang-UndangKehutanan 143/1974 they could legally harvest before 80 years; the more recent decreesolidified the implementation.



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governments newly responsible for producing the revenues on which they will run

(Resosudarmo 2005, Robison and Hadiz 2004). In Java, however, the SFC, as a

restructured parastatal enterprise, still has formal-legal authority over the islands

forest land and makes most of the decisions about managing the forests growing

there.

The location of labor opportunities in urban and industrial areas outside of Blora

and Central Java, in Indonesia and beyond, combine with the variation, flexibility,

and insecurity of the labor demands in some industries to profoundly affect the

rhythms and patterns of livelihood-seeking and the importance of land control for

residents in Javas political forest regions and other rural areas. In the destination

sites, it is common knowledge that management prefers non-local to local labor.

Migrant laborers are freer than locals in that they have few, if any, local ties, they

do not own land in nearby villages, and they are more vulnerable and easy

controlled. At the same time, because these sorts of manual labor rarely promise job

security, it is easy for migrant laborers to return to home villages when work

demands in the agricultural cycle are high. Government transmigration programsand the fears that went with them have been replaced by spontaneous migration and

short-term contract labor by laborers predominantly from Java.

The SFC was rebuilt in the aftermath of its bankruptcy, its reconstruction

bolstered by the MoF (Hoelman 2005). Despite the massive losses of teak standing

stock, and unprecedented numbers of killings by foresters between 1998 and 2003,

not to mention the countrys decentralizing and neoliberalizing tendencies of the

moment, the Ministry of Forestry and the SFC in Java have retained their

jurisdiction over the political forest, refusing to reallocate rights to forest land to

district or village authorities or forest villagers. They maintain the authority to

determine land use within the Kawasan Hutan for the primary commercial andprotected species. On the surface, therefore, things seem the same. However, in

practice, control of the political forests land no longer means a state monopoly on

the production of certainforestproducts and species. With declining teak stocks, the

real income and hegemonic power of the SFC are also declining. Land control

remains critically important, because it still represents the source of the SFCs power

within the government, as does land control to the MoF. Teak was also a source of

power and wealth as the most profitable product the SFC could produce on its

lands but the increasing challenges of growing teak on forest lands have opened the

SFC to alternative production possibilities.

Other aspects of the socio-natural trajectories in the teak forests are transforming

the nature of hegemonic relations between Forestry and forest villagers in profound

ways (see, e.g. Pelusoet al.in press). Underlining the imbrications of land and labor

in the reproduction of forest-based households and of the political forest are the

macro political economic changes affecting the Indonesian economy, and the ways

forest villagers have increased their own mobility for work.

I return to my initial question of What difference does the forest make to

villagers and foresters livelihoods, and the livelihood of the SFC as a forest-

dependent management institution? In particular, how do the forests ecological

composition and forms of access to it at this historical moment affect where and

under what conditions forest villagers work?

Lets start with the value of the forest to the SFC (Ardana 2008a, Soedomo2010). The ecological upshot of all the forest cutting, violence, and general crises

experienced during the transition period from 1998 to 2003 was that the forests of



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Java lost considerable woody cover. Statistics for all of Javas teak forests show that

before the melee in 1998, the total teak standing stock amounted to 37,530,454 trees.

This number was 15,029,095 for Central Java Province alone. By 2004, the total for

Java had been reduced to 21,207,210 trees and to 8, 008,486 teak trees in Central

Java thus half that provinces teak trees were lost. By 2007, Java as a whole

suffered a further reduction to 18,900,000 trees (now less than 50% of the 1998

amount). Some 76% of these trees in 2007 were young, growing in Age Classes 1 and

2, i.e. all under 20 years old. Since management plans for timber harvest are

supposed to be adjusted to take account of illegal cutting in the forest, with so much

timber cut, there should have been less logging. Technically speaking, only 1.67 m3

were officially supposed to be cut that year, i.e. those in Age Classes 6 and above

(Soedomo 2010). However, the logging actually increased beyond what was planned

(Ardana 2008a).22 Technically, the SFC still controlled its political forest land, but

the quality and value of that forest was hardly worth the costs of management.

Besides the excessive logging by the SFC and the crisis logging of the previous

period, several relatively new or intensified extractive activities have further degradedthe forest land, even though they provide work and contribute to local peoples

livelihoods. Rocks, mostly limestone boulders, have become an important

commodity. Taken off the forest lands, they require no production investment, just

an access fee usually paid to the local forest guard(s) by the day or the truckload.

Other forest mining opportunities include digging up massive stumps and roots

from old or recent old-growth logging sites. Entrepreneur-middlemen pay a forest

guard for access to one of these sites, rent a truck to pick them up and sell them to

buyers along the main road or in cities, who in turn sell them to furniture makers: for

stump tables and stools.23 Underground resources are also mined from teak forest

lands. Villagers have opened up sealed oil wells and have developed a complexinformal set of property and access practices, forms of cooperation, and laboring

arrangements for extracting the oil. Abandoned by the Dutch at the end of the

colonial period, these wells were eschewed as unprofitable and underproductive by

Pertamina, Indonesias state oil company. Using elaborate, labor-intensive

techniques, villagers extract oil from the wells, separate the excess water, and distill

it to a state in which it can be used as diesel fuel. Again, because the oil is found

officially on state forest lands, it is subject to taxation in the form of formal and

informal fees that oil well owners pay to foresters for access. In all three of these

extractive enterprises, control of the forest land is important to the local foresters

(illicit) incomes, but does not directly benefit the SFC or the local rock collectors or

stump diggers. Oil extractors and well owners control their wells and environs

through informal property rights that have spontaneously emerged since the wells

were re-discovered.

Our research in Singget indicated that the extractive, off-farm activities described

above were largely done by married men older than 4045, though some younger

men worked as laborers for the oil extractors. Younger men, married or single, and

22As mentioned above, this is because standing stock lost to theft, which in the case of teakmeans losses of company assets, has never been accounted for as a loss since the formation ofthe SFC in Sukarnos time, even though it was clearly counted as an asset by the colonial

Dutch (Yuwono 2008).23While locals are lucky to make the equivalent of five to ten US dollars for digging out one ofthese stumps, they can be found in bargain furniture stores in Northern California for overUS $1000!



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women (who never worked as rock collectors, oil extractors, or stump diggers)

tended to make other choices if they needed off-farm income.24

From 2005 until 2010, many Singget residents we think more than ever before

migrated to work. Whereas few men and no women effectively migrated to work

outside Singget in 1985, in 2010 we found that some 67% of teenage or adult men

had worked outside at some time, and 39% of teenage or adult women had done

so.25 This broke down again by generation, though we did not specifically measure

the generational differences because of difficulties in ascertaining peoples actual

ages. In general, however, older people with less education (if any) tended to work in

and around the village, while those with some education sought some part of their

livelihoods away from the village. In some cases, men or women migrated to work in

urban areas as construction or household labor. Additionally, men went in groups to

industrial areas, contracted for oil exploration labor (called seismik locally), and

women went sometimes to those areas as household or service workers (e.g. as

cooks). Some went to mine gold in Kalimantan, though this was more frequently

reported by men. Men and women went to new industrial agriculture (oil palm,rubber plantations) and industrial forest sites in Kalimantan, West Papua, and

Sarawak, clearing land for planting, planting trees, or selling medicines and goods to

workers or in villages. Men and women who migrated worked for three, six, or nine

months at a time, sometimes for two or more years. While away, many (not all) sent

remittances to their families remaining in the village. Many returned to work on the

agricultural land or on reforestation plots that their wives or parents controlled

at heavy labor-input periods. Thus, between 1985 and 2010, Singget households

complete dependence on local agriculture and local forest lands (from formal or

informal activities) had ended. As mentioned above, a younger generation, most of

whom had had some schooling, led the way.Many households, or certain members of them, became multi-local (Padoch

et al. 2008), with one or more adult or teenaged members frequently traveling to

work elsewhere. While away, workers in industrial or construction sites lived in

dormitories or barracks or other housing provided by the boss or the company.

Domestic workers lived in the homes of their employers. At home in Singget, many

young families started another relatively new trend, living in their own single-family

houses. Those 74 sprawling, old-fashioned Javanese teak homes filled with large,

extended families that had characterized the 1985 village landscape had been

refurbished and replaced in 2010 by some 145 smaller houses built in more

contemporary styles. Whether built in the crisis years or their aftermath, these

houses each contained fewer adults, and fewer children on average.26 Thus decisions

to travel to work often depended on who remained home and could take care of

people, land, cows, and other local responsibilities in the workers absence.

In Singget, we also interviewed people who had participated in government-

sponsored transmigration to Kalimantan and Irian/West Papua in the 1980s and

1990s, but returned to live in Singget when violence in those sites threatened their

24These findings are not completely conclusive as we were not able in the short research periodto interview all or even most of the village adults.25We calculated this as follows: we counted a total 292 males in the village, and 261 females.

We assumed that half the school-age or younger children a total of 80 were male, and halffemale. Some 84 of the men never worked outside only 33% while 136 women had neverworked outside, which was 61%.26Calculated from the records of the 2004 agricultural census kept by the Hamlet Head.



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lives or livelihoods. Despite the dangers many had faced in those regions, some of

these people or their children have since returned to the same sites, some multiple

times, as part-time contract laborers. Again, those we talked to had worked in

restaurants as servers, sold medicines, cleared forests for projects and plantations,

constructed roads or houses, or mined for gold.

Multi-locality was thus an emergent livelihood strategy for Singget households

that was hardly operative at all in 1985, in part because so many lucrative income-

producing opportunities (not all legal) existed on the diversely aged, mostly mature,

forest lands. As part of multi-locality, however, most Singget households have and

need control over some agricultural and forest land. So what, in the context of the

new political ecologies, had changed in these domains of livelihood seeking?

Both the quantity and quality of available forest land play a part in household

and individual decisions to work nearby or away. In the vicinity of Singget, more

reforestation land has become available since the forest destruction of the crisis years

and the overharvesting of planned rotations before and after the crisis. In 2010, all

the households we interviewed that were willing or able to farm forest land had twoor three plots. We also found changes in the ways these plots were acquired and

managed. Farmers have become more selective about which reforestation plots they

accept from the SFC; those perceived to be infertile were left uncleared or cultivated.

As in the past, farmers planted dry rice, corn, and some herbs or other crops around

the edges of their plots. However, the reforestation farmer (petani pesanggem) is no

longer responsible for planting the teak seedlings. A separate teak planting contract

is made with a laborer (sometimes the pesanggem) to plant teak seedlings, or a forest

foreman (mandor) or guard himself plants the teak. Such arrangements were unheard

of in the 1980s, and they still are not in operation in all forest villages (Edi Suprapto,

pers. comm, 2010). Therefore, for those households cultivating crops between teakseedlings on reforestation land, forest land remains important as a source of food or

income, but is not as relatively important as in the past.

Another change on the forest lands, a concession by the SFC to forest villagers to

encourage their participation in reforestation and seedling protection during

plantation establishment, are expanded social forestry programs called Forest

Village Management Programs (PMDH). Singget does not have its own PMDH,

but the hamlet is part of one for Bleboh Village (with five or six hamlets) and is

supposed to receive a portion of the revenues generated by logging on Bleboh

villages forest lands. These monies, however, are not distributed broadly to

pesanggem or among all hamlet dwellers, but rather to the Forest Village Council

(Lembaga Masyarakat Desa Hutan or LMDH), formed in approximately 2004. The

LMDH regards the monies as monetary support for monitoring equipment

(a motorbike for example) and rewards for their council work guarding the forest

and allegedly handling disputes.27 These attempts to allegedly share some authority

27While I was staying in the village in 2010, a dispute erupted over who had prior rights to aparticularly desireable reforestation plot. The hamlet head, who was called by the forest laborforeman, declined to assist, saying he was afraid to interfere in the foresters realm ofauthority. The winner of the dispute in fact was a member of the LMDH from a differenthamlet, who had evidently moved in on a plot cleared and claimed by a woman and her

husband from Singget. The husband was away, and the wife was not able to prevail, nor didthe hamlet head support her prior clearing rights, probably because he would have beenuncomfortable with his fellow LMDH member. No one else from the LMDH was asked orvolunteered to intervene.



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technically create new contradictions for foresters but in Singget or Bleboh have not

been a real challenge to foresters authority on forest land. At the same time, the

newly negotiated relations in reforestation can be seen as an indicator of the

foresters declining monopoly on what really happens on forest land.28

In the past, the SFCs accumulation of profits was virtually guaranteed by two

forms of enclosure: the cordoning off of the political forest and the monopolization

of teak. Wages paid by foresters on a daily basis tended to match or exceed daily

wages for agricultural work on local private lands. Wages are now lower on forest

lands than for agricultural or other non-forest day labor, causing some foresters to

cry labor shortage! in the most densely populated agricultural region of the world.

In 2010, foresters paid laborers men or women Rp. 15,000 a day to work in

nurseries, thin young trees, or weed around the new seedlings on forest land planted

by contract labor. In contrast, a mans agricultural labor on private land earned him

Rp. 25,000 per day, while women made Rp. 15,00020,000 per day. The decrease in

forest wages relative to agricultural wages is increasingly feminizing certain types of

forest labor, with women doing a considerable share of the least remunerated forestlabor tasks: weeding, thinning, and cultivating nursery seedlings.29

Equally if not more important to assessing the relative importance of land

control to both institutional (forestry) revenues and authority and household

livelihoods is the shifting interplay between land and species control since the end of

the SFCs monopoly on commercial teak production. As a long-standing measure of

what species constitute a political forest in Java, this recent change cannot be too

strongly emphasized. Sultans, princes, the VOC (United East India Company),

Napoleons man Daendels, and the Dutch territorial colonial state, as well as all the

forest codes written under colonialism and post colonialism, sought to monopolize

the right to commercial production of this species. Raffles and, much later, some ofthe Dutch foresters rented these rights to private, often corporate, producers, but

since the early twentieth century, teak production has remained the purview of the

state forest enterprise of the moment.

Since 2005, more and more villagers are growing teak on their privately held

land. They grow it both inside and outside the main teak zones. Half-hectare plots

of teak, surrounded by paddy, are becoming common sights along the roadsides, as

are the rows of thin teak trees growing on bunds between fields. Nevertheless,

farmers growing teak are rarely economically secure enough to wait 6080 years for

full maturity. Initial inquiries about these hutan rakyat (peoples forests) revealed

that farmers have sold their teak at 10, 20, or 30 years, as poles or lumber, for big

ritual, health, or school expenses (Suprapto, pers. comm. 2011). It is becoming a cash

crop of choice for many farmers in teak forest areas. As teak spreads to private

lands, whether in mono-crop plots or planted opportunistically on the bunds

between fields, the new mobility of this species will have new, though still

ambiguous, ecological, economic, and political effects. The common sense notion

28Another change that requires further inquiry has to do with the long and short termcomposition of species on forest land. With so much land under reforestation, forest lands areproducing more food crops such as dry rice, maize, cassava, sweet potato and other tubers,and even fruit trees and medicinal herbs. What this means for the future of forest production

and the benefits of land control to the SFC is still not entirely clear.29Systematic study of gender differentiation for these forest labor tasks has not yet been done.Anecdotal evidence from both male and female activists supports this suggestion (amongothers, Diah Rahardjo, pers. comm, 2010).



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that underwrote the SFCs hegemony during the New Order, i.e. that forest lands are

for growing forest species like teak and agricultural lands for agricultural species,

is finally changing, and with it the spatiality of forest species production. Will this

extend SFC authority to private lands? Is it a first step in the replacement of state

forestry production by private agroforesters?

Whatever the answer to that question, the loss of forest cover, the increased

mobility of labor, the gender composition of the forest labor force, and the

movement of forest species to private lands, are all affecting the composition of the

forest, and the relative importance of forest land control to local livelihoods. Yet,

while land, forest or agricultural, contributes a smaller percentage of income to most

household livelihoods, it is not unimportant. It is simply one of several diverse

livelihood strategies that many forest village households still need. It may be a short-

term effect; if contract labor opportunities in industrial agriculture, construction,

mining, and forest conversions elsewhere in the region decline, forest land

dependence might increase again. However, other factors not considered in detail

here, such as an apparently steep and rapid decline in fertility, with most women ofchild bearing age in Singget having only one or two children, will also affect labor

availability in the future. It remains to be seen which way these entangled trajectories

might turn.

Conclusion: rethinking relations between forest land, species, and labor

Control over land inside and outside the political forest remains important to forest

villagers in general, as well as to the SFC. However, the relative dependence of

households and individuals on forest and private land for their livelihoods has

declined, as shown by the stories of Dik Wati, Mbah Lam, and the other men andwomen whose sources of livelihood have diversified in a variety of ways. In part

because many of Singgets younger, more able-bodied men depend now on circular

migration for a portion of their employment and income, the relationships between

the SFC and the hamlets available labor force are also changing. In the wake of

forest degradation, both the cumulative incremental sorts of the New Order and the

concentrated, intensive sorts that erupted after its (N.O.) fall, more labor, especially

for restocking and ameliorating the forest, is needed. The SFCs increased demand

for labor has led already to increased mechanization of harvests (by chainsaw) and

other changes in forest labor processes, such as the detachment of teak planting

duties from taungya reforestation contracts in some sub-districts. Yet foresters still

depend on forest villagers to help produce, plant, and protect seedlings, girdle trees,

and to perform plantation maintenance tasks.

The teak forests of Java have long constituted a political forest that is both a

state territory and a state corporations enclosure of the land and teak, its primary,

long-living, hyper-valuable forest product. The broader political-economic and

environmental changes impel us to think in some new ways about changing

hegemonic relations on forest lands and the local and distant drivers of change. At

least three political ecological processes in these forests recent historical trajectories

have affected the quality and composition of the political forest and the relative value

of land control for teak production. During the New Orders authoritarian rule,

the SFC over-harvested the best teak. Challenges to its mostly coercive control tookthe form of tree theft, arson, and encroachments. The SFC generally treated these as

criminal acts rather than any kind of legitimate means of challenging their authority



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on forest lands. Downplaying the degree to which such incremental (though

numerous) attacks affected the standing stock, SFC forest managers only

minimally reduced planned annual cuts. During the reform and transition period,

the forest violence by disgruntled and repressed villagers, and professional black

market syndicates, and resulted in severe, degradation of teak stocks that openly

threatened the SFCs legitimacy and hegemony, to such an extent that some

activists, scholars, and other observers could envision changes in the status quo of

the SFCs legal forest control. Dealing with these threats incrementally, the SFC in

the most recent period made several concessions to forest villagers, not all

discussed at length in this article, such as expanding the breadth and depth of

social forestry programs. I suggest that the recent

Emergent forest and Private Land

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