To respond to the rapid increase in urbanisation across the country, Indonesia needs to develop an effective land policy that facilitates formal housing development and gives all sectors of the population access to good-quality, affordable housing. The share of the urban population reached 30 per cent in 1990, 42 per cent in 2000 and 49.8 per cent when the latest census was conducted in 2010. By 2035, it is expected to reach 66.6 per cent, and to exceed 80 per cent in four provinces in Java: Jakarta, West Java, Yogyakarta and Banten (Bappenas 2013a).

Indonesia's rapid urban growth has increased the numbers of low- and middle-income people residing in the cities and suburbs, but the availability of housing for those people has not kept up with demand. According to data released by the National Development Planning Agency, the housing backlog reached 12 million units in 2013 and is continuing to increase (Bappenas 2013b). Most houses built over the past decade have been built by owner-occupiers (rather than the government or private developers), but many of them are substandard. In 2012, 4 million Indonesians lived in very poor quality dwellings, some of which were not permanent structures, and another 13 million were homeless. While the number of houses constructed each year has increased, many of those dwellings remain unsold due to the high asking prices.

For the most part, owner-occupiers in Indonesia acquire their houses through informal, incremental processes, after squatting on the land, or using an inheritance or loan from a family member to purchase land. These arrangements have become a quick and ready solution to address the housing backlog. However, informal processes are considered inefficient in providing low- and middle-income people with adequate access to urban amenities and infrastructure such as water, sewage, electricity or even the postal system (Monkonnen 2013: 257).

Meanwhile, economic growth has been pushing up land prices, squeezing low- and middle-income Indonesians out of the market. Unable to access well-located land, the poor are forced to squat on land that may be hazardous, without proper services and amenities, or located far from the city centre, without any assistance in terms of planning or provision of basic services, or even official recognition of their existence. Illegal occupation of land, in its various forms, often triggers land-use conflicts and makes it difficult for government to build infrastructure and facilities.

Judging by President Joko Widodo's (Jokowi's) first year in office, the former furniture salesman is committed to realising his campaign pledge of making swift strides in the improvement of Indonesia's crumbling physical infrastructure. In early 2015 he took the politically bold decision to slash billions from the government's fuel subsidies bill and spend the near entirety of these savings on infrastructure investment. In the 2015 state budget alone, Jokowi allotted a state capital expenditure fund of about Rp 290 billion, up approximately 86 per cent from the Rp 156 trillion the government of his predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, had budgeted (Sambijantoro 2015). This is one way in which Jokowi is striving to distinguish his administration from the sluggish performance of his predecessor's. Yudhoyono had also promised better infrastructure provision, and held an extravagant infrastructure summit less than a hundred days into his first presidency in early 2005. The summit flopped: few private firms, domestic or foreign, bid on the projects on offer and even fewer of the projects were built to completion.

In addition to increased public spending, Jokowi has been prepared to rely more heavily on the state sector and its state-owned enterprises than Yudhoyono had done. The former general had sought greater recourse to the public–private partnership (PPP) concept, a popular policy tool of the World Bank and other international financial institutions. While neoliberals prefer to pin the failure of PPP projects under Yudhoyono on government ineptitude, blame must also be apportioned to the domestic private sector for its intransigence. Firms more often than not dragged their feet in directly investing in projects for which they held the licences; some preferred rents through the flipping of these permits. In partial response, Jokowi is turning the clock back to the time before the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, and its championing of less state and more private sector participation in economic affairs. In the post-World War II era, a range of policy-makers—development specialists of the western powers, neoclassical economists, Marxist-oriented dependency advocates and state elites of the post-colonial world—had believed that the state was the proper entity to overcome the collective action problems of a weak capitalist class and build the roads, ports and other utilities that would induce further private investment in the generation of national industry.

The right of indigenous peoples to give or withhold their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) to developments that will affect them is articulated in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was passed with a resounding majority by the UN General Assembly in September 2007. Voluntary industry standards for timber (set up by the Forest Stewardship Council) and oil palm (through the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) recognise the necessity for both indigenous peoples and local communities to enjoy the right to give or withhold their free, prior and informed consent. Following pressure from customers and investors, many of the biggest companies in these sectors in Indonesia have committed to follow these standards, even as Indonesia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs continues to insist that the nation does not have any indigenous peoples, and that the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples therefore does not apply to Indonesia. The voluntary industry commitments to respect community rights, combined with advocacy by civil society, have put pressure on the Indonesian government to provide greater recognition of the rights of local communities and indigenous peoples.

Companies that sign up to the voluntary industry standards are obliged to respect customary (adat) land rights and the right to FPIC, and to attempt to resolve any outstanding conflicts that impinge on those rights. Both companies and non-government organisations have lobbied the Indonesian government to make uniform environmental and social commitments mandatory for all concession holders. There are indications that national regulations on important issues such as the identification and protection of environmentally significant areas, the right to FPIC and access to conflict resolution mechanisms are being strengthened due to these advocacy efforts (Dewan Kehutanan Nasional and UN-REDD Programme Indonesia 2011). In 2015, for example, both the Ministry of Agrarian Affairs and Spatial Planning and the Ministry of Environment and Forestry issued regulations that provide much greater scope for communities affected by plantations to have their rights to land recognised.

For both companies and governments seeking to acquire land, the process of obtaining consent from community landholders is a central issue (Colchester et al. 2006; Afrizal 2007, 2010, 2013; Colchester and Chao 2013). The question of consent concerns recognition of and respect for a community's rights to land, and is particularly important given the rapid expansion of pulp and paper and oil palm plantations across Indonesia.

Unresolved land governance questions are at the heart of President Joko Widodo's political agenda. On 14 October 2014, a week before his inauguration, Widodo made a speech touching on several key issues facing Indonesia: reducing greenhouse gas emissions from annual forest fires; resolving a plethora of often violent disputes in the mining and agricultural sectors; and addressing the poverty of farmers eking out an existence on tiny plots of land (Saturi 2014). During his first months in office the president sought to develop infrastructure to promote development and ease land acquisition for investors. Many of these initiatives and policy statements responded to a deeply held desire among Indonesians for an administration that could steward development, pursue social justice and reduce conflict. Such policies depend on addressing land questions, which are central to economic development, social justice and environmental management.

The state needs to recognise and protect the insecure tenurial rights of many Indonesians while finding ways to support forms of development that assist the majority, to deal with proliferating land conflicts, to resolve the property rights question at the heart of Indonesia's unsustainable environmental transition and to provide affordable housing for the poor. In this introductory chapter we discuss these dilemmas in relation to wider international debates about natural resource management, land governance and social justice. For instance, what role might land reform play in poverty alleviation? Can the formalisation of property rights provide a significant means of ensuring development? How might initiatives to recognise customary (adat) tenure protect indigenous landowners? How can more effective land-tenure governance build on existing localised, vernacular forms of tenure? Can securing tenure in forest areas ensure effective carbon sequestration in forests and address deforestation? Do international governance initiatives, such as those that involve greater corporate social responsibility or that seek to ensure free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) in land transactions, provide an effective means of dealing with land grabs?

We find that land issues are becoming ever more urgent as demand for land, pressure for individual title over land and the increasing commercialisation of land, including the large-scale acquisition of land by corporate entities, continue to generate conflict. While the shift to a more democratic and decentralised political system has led to gradual progress, the reform of Indonesia's land tenure regime remains a perpetual work in progress.

Indonesia marked its seventieth anniversary as a nation in August 2015, although those 70 years are but a moment in the history of the archipelago. During the short period in which it has been a unified nation, Indonesia has undergone dramatic transformation—from charismatic leadership in a politically chaotic landscape in the 1950s and early 1960s, to 32 years of authoritarian rule in the period to 1998, to one of the world's largest and most vibrant democracies. Yet, while the Indonesian state has matured politically, fundamental challenges of equity and social justice remain. Estimates place the proportion of Indonesians living below or just over the poverty line at around 40 per cent (World Bank 2015), while conflicts over land ownership and access to natural resources continue to rise (Komnas HAM 2015).

The year 2015 also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the anti-communist massacres of the mid-1960s, which still haunt Indonesia today. Despite growing calls from many Indonesians for accountability and reconciliation, it is clear that, 50 years on, those in a position to lead this process remain reluctant to take steps to come to terms with the enormity of what happened during that period. The multi-decade struggle of indigenous communities in Indonesia to gain recognition of their col-lective rights, and the reluctance of the state to act on their demands, may well be a central legacy of this time.

While Indonesia's founding constitution has socialist leanings, reflected particularly in the way land is regulated, and although Law 5/1960 on Basic Agrarian Principles contains numerous provisions to promote equity and social welfare, there is perhaps no other democracy in the world that has done so little to actually recognise and provide land rights and natural resource security to its people. Currently, only a fraction of Indonesia's 180-million-hectare land base is titled, making the securing of land for local people and indigenous communities a central component of Indonesia's unfinished social equity agenda.

The national government awards formal land titles exclusively to individuals, even though Indonesian society is largely grounded in collective (though not always egalitarian) forms of enterprise and governance. The irony of resource allocation during Suharto's 32 years of military rule was that Indonesia's socialist origins were used to justify the control of the state over the allocation of access to natural resources and to restrict access to a privileged few.

Indonesia's staple food-grain agriculture is dominated by ‘smallholder’ farmers, but these smallholder communities are not homogeneous, egalitarian or static. Both macro data (such as the six decennial agricultural censuses since 1963) and various micro studies reveal considerable regional variation in patterns of land ownership and control; micro studies also show the universality of agrarian class differentiation (to varying degrees) in all Indonesian ‘smallholder’ farming communities between large landowners, middle owner–operator farmers, tenant farmers, and near-landless or landless farm workers. Both macro data and the available micro-level village studies also document the dynamics of change in patterns of land control and rural differentiation over time (White and Wiradi 1989; Bachriadi and Wiradi 2011).

Inequalities in land control are problematic for many reasons. Besides threatening the sustainability of domestic food production, they have negative effects on the distribution of employment opportunities and incomes in the agricultural sector and the rural economy generally. In the past, Asian rice-producing countries such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan successfully implemented land and tenancy reforms that put an end to landlordism, imposed rigid maximum holding limits and turned tenant farmers into owners. The experience of these countries shows that such reforms, when well implemented, result in significant improvements in productivity, smallholder farmer welfare and rural income distribution, and lead to positive interactions between the farm and rural non-farm sectors (Saith 1986; Lipton 2009).

Law 5/1960 on Basic Agrarian Principles (the Basic Agrarian Law) established the principle that land has a social function, meaning that it must be treated as a means to promote social justice, not to further individual interests that promote concentration and the exploitation of the weak by the strong. The Basic Agrarian Law and Law 2/1960 on Share Tenancy provide for maximum limits on land ownership (with the maximum varying according to local conditions), regulation of the sharing of costs and benefits between share tenants and landowners, and the prohibition of absentee landlordism. But these provisions were never implemented; the land reform courts and committees were dissolved in 1970, soon after Suharto took power. His New Order regime prioritised the implementation of Green Revolution programs to increase rice production, without significant efforts to stem the process of differentiation in land control that normally accompanies agricultural commoditisation; rice imports were eliminated in normal years, and rural poverty incidence declined, but inequality increased.

As in most developing countries, land tenure relations in Indonesia are contentious. The many transitions involving land use—from agriculture to industry, from rural villages to urban neighbourhoods, from subsistence farming to plantations—exert heavy pressure on social relations. The contributions to this volume provide vivid accounts of this; whether they concern infrastructure development, housing, oil palm regimes, agricultural change or mining, they demonstrate that changes to land use are often accompanied by conflict, violence, forced migration and other types of misery. While in the past many areas still knew a frontier that could act as a safety valve, today in many regions the limits of usable land have been reached and this route of escape has been closed off (Li 2010).

In all land disputes, law is in some way a focus of contention. This may be about legal interpretation within the parameters set by the law, or about achieving legal change in order to create more favourable conditions for particular groups of citizens. Legal interpretation is central to negotiations between parties to a conflict, in court judgments or in forums of complaint such as the National Commission for Human Rights or the Ombudsman. Achieving legal change concerns legislative processes at different levels, but also the promotion of novel judicial interpretation. For many years the Indonesian judiciary hardly played a role in legal evolution, as it lacked the institutional devices to turn legal interpretation in single cases into a judicial doctrine (Pompe 2005; Bedner 2013). However, the establishment of Indonesia's Constitutional Court in 2003 in combination with the accessibility and acceptance of legal sources of international and transnational origin has changed this.

How Indonesia's legal system is coping with the current pressures and how it influences land disputes are important matters. The key question for lawyers is whether the system provides a coherent framework for authoritative resolution of land disputes. According to most of the literature, the answer to this question is ‘no’. Little of what has been written about Indonesian land law is positive or hopeful—in that respect not much has changed from colonial times to the present (see Chapter 10 by van der Eng). Land law has been called complex, inconsistent, fragmented, unfair and out of touch with reality (Lindsey 1998; Fitzpatrick 2006; Daryono 2010; Srinivas et al. 2015), and international donors have called for ‘a comprehensive overhaul’ (USAID n.d.: 1).

The informal is a key component of the city, a space of social and economic activity that is out of the sight and control of the state and out of the reach of capitalist investments. Informal arrangements have long been acknowledged in the employment sector but increasingly the term is being used to describe informal forms of land tenure, housing and infrastructure construction, health services, neighbourhood governance and so on (Guinness 2009). With migration to the cities surging, the informal has become the lifeblood of the ‘insignificant masses’ (rakyat kecil), who may constitute over 50 per cent of the urban population. A 1980s survey conducted in nine Indonesian cities, for example, showed that 63 per cent of households who claimed to own land held unregistered titles, while only 37 per cent held formal, registered titles (Struyk, Hoffman and Katsura 1990).

As urban populations continue to grow, urban planners across the world struggle to compose viable means of accommodating increasing numbers of poor within urban spaces. Urban poverty is inseparable from the insecurity of tenure and illegality of housing and income strategies characterising low-income urban settlements. In Indonesia's urban worlds, the poor have devised a vast range of informal strategies to facilitate survival, including informal trading and production, informal housing solutions and informal governance of the low-income, squatter or slum areas known as kampung.

Informality has become a key focus of urban planning discussions in recent years. In a special issue of the journal Planning Theory and Practice, the main editor, Libby Porter, defines informality as the ‘other’ to ‘ordered, regulated, efficient’ systems of management (Porter 2011: 116). Although frequently dismissed as illegitimate, anarchic, messy and dangerous, the informal is not outside formal systems, Porter insists, but is instead produced by formal structures. Rather than painting the relation-ship between formal and informal as a static segmentation of the formal and informal spaces of the city, I suggest that it is more useful to consider the dynamic processes of formalisation and informalisation that are powered by the state, capital and citizens contesting the structures of land, housing and livelihood within the city.

Kusno (2015) writes that cities like Jakarta are shaped by three powerful overlapping forces: the creative, destructive force of capitalism; the violence of state discursive categories in managing the population; and the vernacular environment of the kampung.