Land for the People by Lucas Anton;Warren Carol;

Author:Lucas, Anton;Warren, Carol;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2013-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Legal Certainty for Whom?

Land Contestation and Value Transformations at Gili Trawangan, Lombok

Carol Warren

The conflict over land on the island of Gili Trawangan, Lombok, is one of the many intractable cases inherited from the late New Order. It evolved in the context of rapid value transformations in the local, national, and global economies, as smallholders competed for land with commercial plantations, then resort development, and more recent incursions of the international property market. The case involved repeated government land clearance campaigns, reclaiming actions of local settlers, and emerging social divisions among the island’s smallholder farmers and tourism businesses in the ongoing struggle against eviction by a regional government openly allied with big capital. It is a complicated story in which capital accumulation is set against livelihood needs, and value transformations are manipulated to privilege the interests of economic and political elites. But it is also a story of contestation and accommodation as diverse conceptions of equity are pitted against opportunity among local people as well as state actors.

Two Tales of Trawangan—the People and the State

The story of the three-decades-long land conflict at Gili Trawangan, now one of the “jewels” of Indonesia’s tourist circuit, very much depends on who tells it, in what social context, and from which perspective on the law. Local settlers recount how Sasak and Bugis fishers had long used the island as a shelter during seasonal stopovers and had begun planting subsistence crops and coconut palm in the early 1970s (interviews, OM and MS, 11 August 2002; SK, 30 May 1999). They recount the difficulties of clearing the land and the satisfactions of building good livelihoods from productive soil once they had transformed the land from its natural state into a smallholder economy. The early pioneers proudly tell also of their role in opening small homestays and food stalls to make Gili Trawangan an international destination before Lombok itself achieved any prominence. But in the embittered rendition of one settler, after all their hard efforts, “When everything was good and beautiful, along come investors without even knocking, trying to take over” (MH, quoted in Nusa Tenggara, 29 June 1995).

The regional government (Pemda) account, in contrast, emphasizes its role in fostering the development of the island, in the first instance as an addition to the nation’s plantation economy. It has settlers arriving on the island on government invitation to take up land in this “uninhabited mosquito nest” only in 1976 with the plantations’ establishment (Suara Nusa, 30 September 1991; Pemda Tingkat II 1995, 1). But the plantations soon failed, and after a hiatus of more than a decade, provincial and district governments turned their attention to the more lucrative opportunities of the nascent tourism industry, determined to promote a high value-added resort development on the former leasehold. The state’s assertion that ordinary people were incapable of developing a sophisticated and environmentally sound tourism industry provided its rationale for promoting private sector investment over smallholder development.311 The two accounts differ fundamentally on who cleared and developed the land first

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