Part 1

• Coal mining conflict settlement: between legal certainty and protection of the environment and society Mohamad Nasir Universitas Balikpapan Muhamad Muhdar Mulawarman University

  In Indonesia, coal mining expansion often leads to contestations and conflicts among related parties. We note that at least two leading causes of conflict are overlapping land and environmental damage. To settle the conflict, the parties adopted two schemes, namely non-litigation such as negotiation of the parties, mediation by local governments, or making joint land use agreements in a case of overlapping land between coal mining and oil palm plantations. The second pattern is through litigation, either through the administrative court that questions the validity of mining permits, or district court through civil claims for compensation; criminal charges for alleged environmental destruction by mining companies, or vice versa; mining companies consider the community to be interfering with mining operations.

• Implications of Foreign Investment in Mining on Land Tenure in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia Agus Lanini Tadulako University

  This study aims to find the format of foreign investment policy in the mining sector and its implications for the people of Central Sulawesi while the specific targets of this research are first; explore and/or find several policies in the field of foreign investment in Central Sulawesi, secondly explore and/or find several alternative policies in the field of land use and the environment in the mining area and its surroundings. To achieve this goal, empirical legal research methods will be used, supported by document studies. Field data collection in the form of observations, in-depth interviews and participatory discussions (PRA). Since 2009 through the mineral and coal mining law, all legal figures for foreign investment in the mining sector must comply with the provisions of the law as mandated by Articles 169 and 170 of Law No. 4 of 2009. On the other hand, investors still stick to the agreement. previously agreed upon works, this is also in accordance with Article 169 letter a of the Minerba Law. Meanwhile, the community around the mining area responds to this provision as an opportunity to ask for the restoration of their rights to land that has been controlled by investors based on the work agreement, so this research is urgent to be carried out.(Keyword: Foreign investment, mining, land rights)

• Seeing Indonesia from East Kalimantan: Coal Extractivism, Social Vulnarability and Ecological Justice Haris Retno Susmiyati Mulawarman University

  Since the colonial period, the island of Kalimantan has been seen as wild and backward. The perspectives it continues and beliefs that the island must be opened and promoted to economic growth through extractivism, such as logging mining to a proposal of the new capital city. This paper refers to the experience of East Kalimantan province as the largest coal production area in Indonesia in the last 25 years that without counting the socio-ecological costs burdened to the local environment and community, mining is claimed to contribute to the national and regional economy. However, extractivism continues the colonial spirit and makes the law a tool of power to legitimize the massive exploitation of coal and benefit the elites. As a result, mining law reform has become an arena of consolidation for oligarchs, a tool for businesses to run from legal obligations and criminalize the people. Using the Environmental Justice lens, this paper argues that the dependence on coal extractivism has weakened the law and created the social-ecological vulnerability spaces that produce the intergenerational and inter-island injustice and make the most vulnerable groups, especially the poor, women, children, and disabled, suffer the most. Furthermore, the new policies supporting the extractivism economy have created a “legal setback.” Facing the complexity of mining problems, this paper explains the need for responsive laws to “multiple of environmental injustice” and the “policy affirmations” that ensure intergenerational and inter-island justice, as well as climate justice.

Part 2

• Smallholder-Worker Politics in an Indonesian Mining and Farming Frontier Nancy Peluso University of California

  Small-scale gold mining in West Kalimantan, Indonesia has a deep social history that has long been entangled with small-scale farming. In this paper, I examine some 50 years of history to argue that both rural landscapes and the work of farming and mining have changed with the introduction, spread, and maturing of plantations. Changes in the environments of mining and farming are changing the terms of local subjectivities through “resource frontier” discourses that manifest through varied forms of territoriality, mask past militarizations of the landscape, and have repeatedly dispossessed local people of land, resource access, and work. On the surface, household members and their state and “customary” interlocutors continue to identify and be identified with “the smallholder slot,” as argued elsewhere. Yet, smallholder farming-mining-worker households are constituting an emergent Indonesian working class, as the political ecological context and their positions in it are rapidly and radically changing.

• Violent Energy Orders: Coal Power Plants & the Making of Local Energy Landscapes in Indonesia Anna Fünfgeld German Institute for Global and Area Studies

  Energy generation can be a pretty violent endeavor. In Indonesia, this is closely related to the extraction and use of coal, which makes up nearly 60 percent of the country’s electricity generation. Especially on the local level, coal mining and the construction of coal power plants lead to multifold transformations and the making of new energy landscapes. These concrete materializations of the energy system often have destructive effects on the environment and the livelihoods of mostly subaltern communities.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• Extractivism
• Governance
• Indonesia
• Mining
• Pollution