Ziwei Zhang

In the backdrop of climate change crisis, a new form of land regime is created from “carbon market”. My research is about the implementation of social forestry particularly in Indonesia. It is crucial to understand how neoliberal environment program “colonizes” the local community, and how the alternative path can be explored and fought out.

 

With more voices calling for human rights and environmental protections, governments are under more pressure to manage the victims of extractive industries. In West Kalimantan, many villagers have been dispossessed of land and economically marginalized by palm oil companies which have not provided adequate job opportunities as promised. Social forestry is a program that is widely advocated by the government and NGOs in Indonesia. By granting land back, it claims to improve the livelihood of local communities sustainably and environmental protections.

 

This paper argues that instead, social forestry is a form of strategic spatial politics to pacify the surplus labor that caused by palm oil industries with the subsistence economy and simultaneously silence environmental critics. In this program, villagers are rewarded for their stewardship of the forest by being granted access to a small piece of the forest. However, villagers are restricted to collecting only non-timber raw materials that are also heavily taxed. The so-called sustainable livelihood is, in practice, making villagers as cheap outsourced labor. Social forestry depoliticizes issues of poverty, customary land rights, and environmental sustainability, especially with the enrollment of transnational NGOs. While the Indonesian government plans to further expand palm oil plantation zones, social forestry optimizes conditions for capital accumulation in palm oil industries without considering the welfare of local populations.

 

Work Product: Presentation