Land tenure rights, village institutions, and rainforest conversion in Central Sulawesi (Indonesia)

Abstract

Small-scale agriculture continues to account for a significant share of global forest conversion, especially, in remote forest frontier areas such as the mountainous forests of Central Sulawesi. Although much information on the proximate driving forces of deforestation can be obtained from analyses of the household level, the analysis of supra-household level institutional phenomena is indispensable for an adequate understanding of forest conversion. This is particularly true for the interaction of local institutions governing land access and tenure rights. In this contribution, we synthesize results from several related studies conducted around Lore Lindu National Park (LLNP) that investigate this relation. Contrary to the theoretical argument that tenure security fosters resource conservation, we find that the high tenure security of formal land titles increasingly available in the region attracts migrants who are aggressive buyers of land for petty capitalist cocoa production. At the end of the process, a substantial share of the autochthonous population finds itself either landless or is forced to cut marginal forest land, often inside LLNP. Restricting land ownership to traditional forms of community land rights avoids the formation of a class of newly landless locals but it comes at costs in terms of social discrimination and lost agricultural income.