ALSA 2025 meeting

In Indonesia, approximately in the last ten years, a movement acknowledging customary forests and recognising indigenous peoples' right to territory has emerged. This movement was organised after constitutional court decision No. 35/2012, which gave the chance for indigenous people to get their own rights, particularly in their own territories. Currently, on 30th December 2016, peoples of nine customary forests have acquired state acknowledgement of their land rights by the Indonesian president. This momentum marks Indonesia’s first ever recognition of the rights of people who call their forests home. However, for such recognition of forest rights, the national law requires that the regional government first needs to recognize the communities as customary people with the regional product of law to adopt their adat (customary) law system intact. This processes intense inefficiency in order legal procedures and budget to publish the customary law as the formalization to state law. Approximately 461 the regional product of law spread in Indonesia provinces and regencies. In formal regulation, there are eleven (11) ways to gain access to natural resources that are derived from regional legal products recognizing indigenous communities, 10 of which require the existence of regional legal products to access the natural resource objects. This presentation analyzes the product of law in regional level about the indigenous people as discourse, rationales, and legal consciousness for indigenous people’s struggle in the customary forest movement, in order to answer the question why and how the adat people struggle with this formalization, why they mobilize the struggle to achieve the desired recognition as indigenous people/adat community into the Indonesian legal system.