Abstract
This article explains the emergence of civil society movements around deforestation issue in Indonesia as contestation over knowledge claims that defines ‘deforestation’ as a political term. The term ‘deforestation’, which is translated into ‘perusakan hutan’ in Indonesian forestry laws and regulation, is a product of political epistemology that serve the needs to sustain state-reinforced developmentalism. It is imposed by valorization of modern scientific and technocratic values as well as bureaucratization of the forestry sector. Engaging with critical political ecology literatures, this study unpacks the constitutive interactions among various ways of seeing that redefine state forestry and its implications to the reproduction of political order. ‘Perusakan hutan’ is continuously re-negotiated in the relations between the state and its formative societal elements. Knowledge on addressing deforestation is organized around three contesting epistemologies: conservation, redistribution, and indigeneity. Each epistemology seeks to claim political space in the institutionalization of knowledge that fortifies state’s policies in the forestry sector. Politics of knowledge co-production operates at two levels: between hegemonic knowledge construct and its counter knowledge formation, and within the formation of counter-knowledge through alternative epistemologies.
Highlights
The surge of civil society movements and its implications environmentalism in Indonesia has been subject to scholarly debates
This article explains the emergence of civil society movements around deforestation issue in Indonesia as contestation over knowledge claims that defines ‘deforestation’ as a political term
This study examines the formation of civil society movements around deforestation as politicization of collective knowledge marked by epistemological differences
Summary
The surge of civil society movements and its implications environmentalism in Indonesia has been subject to scholarly debates. The politics of defining ‘deforestation’ is described as one that involves the production of an object of political governance It aims to explain the emergence of anti-deforestation movements as contestation among different epistemologies in the relations between human society and forest. The third section explains the emergence of civil society movements with their formative political knowledge: conservation, redistribution and indigeneity, and how they position themseves in relation to state-enforced ‘deforestation’. The term ‘perusakan hutan’ seems to dominate state’s lexicon when interpreting ‘deforestation’, it does not mean other ways of seeing are absolutely excluded In playing their antagonism with state’s definition of ’deforestation’, civil society actors engage in constitutive processes and translate different epistemologies in the movements into different forms of political activism. ‘Deforestation’ is redefined in many aspects of civil society struggles through political mobilization around three contesting political epistemology: conservation, redistribution, and indigeneity.
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