Implementation of agrarian reform in North Sumatra, Indonesia: The productiveness of institutional fragmentation

Over the past few years, the Government of Indonesia has set out to implement an ambitious goal of formally changing land tenure arrangements on over 20 million hectares of land across the country. In this paper, I analyze the politics surrounding the policy framework’s implementation at the provincial level in North Sumatra. Given variegated meanings of agrarian reform held by different civil society actors as well as the abstract national-level policy framework allowing for multiple types of tenure to be claimed, I show how “ineffective” policy implementation cannot be merely explained by characterizing state institutions as dysfunctional, in part due to how “accurate” claims cannot be ascertained in a self-evident manner. Rather, the invocation and resignification of longstanding commonly accepted communitarian vocabularies provide opportunities for different civil society actors to assert and gain recognition for specific visions of (re)territorializing land and (re)subjectivizing rural populations to challenge longstanding political-economic structures that continue to privilege plantation, mining, and logging interests. As such, contemporary fragmentation of the Indonesian land bureaucracy should not be seen in a negative light. Instead, bureaucratic interactions at the provincial level are decisive modes of articulating and formalizing legitimate visions of land use and rural development as well as defining appropriate economic, environmental, and cultural subjectivities in a non-deterministic manner.