Indonesia

FPP has been supporting forest peoples and working with local partners in Indonesia since 1990. Our field programme started in 1996. We now work with national and local partners in 10 provinces across the archipelago to prevent and seek redress for land rights violations, including by extractive industries and conservation areas.

Country Overview

There are many positive aspects to the way Indonesia treats its indigenous peoples on paper. Indonesia has signed the main international human rights treaties and labour conventions, the Constitution upholds indigenous peoples’ rights to some extent, and there has been a cross-party recognition of the need for legal reforms to better recognise their rights. 

However, in practice, the land and forestry laws, top-down policies on land use planning and collusion between politicians and developers in the allocation of concessions combine to deny rights. 

As a result, there are thousands of land rights violations across the country. When communities facing land conflicts try to assert their rights, they are often subjected to heavy-handed repression and the criminalisation of community members, their leaders and activists.

• For a a comprehensive history of Indonesia and Indigenous Peoples rights, see 'Assault on the Commons: Deforestation and denial of rights in Indonesia'.

Our work in Indonesia

We have a particular focus on supporting communities impacted by:

• oil palm estates,
• pulpwood plantations,
• transmigration,
• mining for ‘transition minerals’
• infrastructure development and logging,
• national parks and conservation areas.

We promote an approach to development and conservation based on:

• recognising and respecting forest peoples’ rights to self-determination and to their lands, territories and resources,
• community management of production and protected areas and
• the promotion of economic initiatives chosen or directed by the peoples themselves. 

Our current work includes:

• Participatory mapping to counter top-down land use plans in Aceh, West Sumatra, Riau, West Kalimantan, East Kalimantan and Central Kalimantan.
• Promoting company recognition of and remedy for customary lands taken over by pulpwood plantations in North Sumatra, Riau, Jambi and throughout Kalimantan.
• Documenting links between land rights violations and downstream companies that purchase commodities from these areas.
• Researching the disguised ownership of companies that are abusing human rights registered through shell companies and in secrecy jurisdictions.
• Advising on community-led complaints against oil palm, pulpwood and logging companies taking over indigenous peoples’ and local communities’ lands in numerous provinces across the archipelago.
• Assisting impacted communities challenging the way Eucalyptus plantations are replacing the Toba Batak’s millennial resin forests and wider livelihoods in North Sumatra.
• Supporting the Dayak Bekati’ facing Transmigration projects in West Kalimantan,
• Supporting indigenous communities secure legal recognition of their customary forests, in production and conservation areas.
• Pioneering a combined land and marine communal tenure in Bengkulu.
• Supporting communities facing criminalization for standing up to companies taking over their lands.
• Promoting conflict resolution, rights recognition and sustainable livelihoods in the framework of Jurisdictional Approaches in Aceh, West Sumatra, West Kalimantan and Central Kalimantan.
• Critiquing road-building plans across Borneo which threaten to open up Dayak peoples’ territories, the island’s last remaining large blocks of unprotected forests, to industrial oil palm plantations.