Ulrich Löffler, (1996):
Land Tenure Developments in Indonesia

2. Problem Elaboration

The land question in Indonesia has developed in significance over recent years. For various reasons, land tenure problems have increased dynamically and explosively. In West Java alone, more than 300 conflicts have been documented in the last years.

Growing population and rapid economic development lead to various competing land uses, in particular in booming areas. Land is not only used for increasing agricultural production, but rather for non-agricultural purposes in ever-increasing amounts.

In the following section, some of the most important problems of land tenure in Indonesia have been summarized:

• Two parallel legal systems exist de facto in Indonesia: adat law and statutory law. In many regions of Indonesia, adat law persists, and the local population is oriented towards adat law, which is more transparent and more easily to understood than statutory law which people frequently do not know or do not fully understand.
• Legal uncertainty is partially caused by numerous unclear and indistinct legal regulations, which are passed in addition to the legal frameworks, such as the Basic Agrarian Law and the Basic Forestry Law. The same is true for land registration procedures or provisions for the determination of adat rights and, also for the procedures for the determination of compensation payments. Moreover, numerous regulations which are set down in the legal regulations, are either not carried out or are circumvented.
• State institutions are frequently difficult to access in isolated rural areas, and are not in the position to adequately implement land policies due to insufficient finances and personnel.
• The distribution of authority within the government is unclear and the "horizontal" cooperation between the different vertically organized sectoral agencies which are involved in land matters at various levels is often insufficient. The National Land Agency (BPN), for example is in charge of the non-forest areas, while the Ministry of Forestry is in charge of forest areas which officially encompass 74 % of the total Indonesian land mass.
• The diverse interests of forest concessions, industrial forest plantations, commercial agricultural plantations, mining concessions, settlement programmes and the interests of the local population overlap in some regions. Thus, boundaries drawn up by the local population are frequently interpreted differently from boundaries drawn up by official institutions. For example, transmigration projects have often led to conflicts with the local population because of insufficient planning and implementation.
• Most traditional rights are still valid in forest areas which are administrated by the Ministry of Forestry. This division of land policy and land management between forest areas and non-forest areas leads to numerous problems, in particular with regard to land use planning and the recognition of adat rights. Although many people live in forest areas, they have no chance of having their adat rights registered, since the forest areas are State land.
• The problems of "illegal" occupation of land (squatters) exist in both remote rural regions and, increasingly, in urban growth areas, e.g. Jakarta.
• Competing uses of land also play an important part in the urban and peri-urban areas. Thus, the various agricultural and non-agricultural uses of land which compete with each other must be brought into accord on, for example, Java where the difference between rural and urban areas is scarcely obvious in many regions. Areas of land for housing development, industrial estates and infrastructural measures which must be withdrawn from agricultural production, are required for the rapidly growing industrialization and urbanization.
• As land has become more and more a commercial commodity, the level of land speculation is also increasing. As a result, there is "corruption and collusion between local government and private entrepreneurs who often misuse an existing lack of supervision (sadly enough, local community leaders are sometimes involved)...", and "abuse of power by local government against uninformed public is often done in the name of "development" and intimidation can reach disgraceful proportions." [FN 1]