KASA Sustainability’s 2025 Summer Environmental Change Workshop

Supported by ICC and GPGS

Recognized Forests:

Environmental Indigeneity, Recognition, and the Politics of Land Returns

Prof. Micah Fisher (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa)

Date and Time: July 28, 2025 | 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM (JST)

Venue: Zoom Online

Registration link: https://www.kasasustainability.org/event-details/summer-2025-environmental-change-workshop

In the growing resistance to global land grab during the 2010s, for a time, it seemed that states long known for enclosures and development of natural resources had passed a slew of formal initiatives to recognize and return land rights to Indigenous and rural communities. Nowhere was the scale of such commitments as ambitious as Indonesia, with activists suggesting potential claims to 40 million hectares, and populist Indonesian elections ushering commitments to at least 20 million hectares of land designated for agrarian reform, social forestry, and Indigenous rights. Such framings discursively pointed to the politics of Indigeneity linking environmental stewardship as a fundamental solution to the climate crisis. In this presentation I bring into conservation literatures on land grabbing and land back to the processes and aftermaths of land returns around securing land rights recognition on the basis of restoring the commons. I draw on multi-year research in Kajang, Sulawesi, a community notable for its precedent-setting example of formally securing Indigenous land rights from Indonesia’s state forests. Although Kajang is notable for its symbolic victory and inspiration for the politics of possibility, it also showcases a set of dilemmas that provide useful entry points for extending explanations of recognized forests elsewhere. These dilemmas are brought into sharp contrast through the positions of customary leadership, forestry agencies, farmer groups, and activists involved in negotiating the processes of recognition. Taken together, the many intersecting positions show that formal recognition and title are by no means an end to the ongoing contestations of successfully securing land rights and local livelihoods, and fall well short of succeeding in doing what they are imagined to do. Nevertheless, the placeholder of Indigenous land rights recognition and social movement victories could reshape politics around the commons for generations to come.