Power and Interest on Sumatra's Rainforest Frontier: Clientelist Coalitions, Illegal Logging and Conservation in the Alas Valley

Introduction 

The Indonesian archipelago contains the world's second largest expanse of tropical forest and is a major world centre for biodiversity. Yet, Indonesia has one of the highest rates of deforestation, an issue of increasing international concern. This problem has become more acute since a political and economic crisis struck Indonesia in 1997, leaving the country wracked by an epidemic of unregulated logging. Despite the significance of extra-legal resource extraction, however, the dynamics shaping the problem at the local level have not been well studied. This article combines theoretical approaches developed by legal anthropologists and others to develop an analytical framework for studying the problem. This framework is then applied to examine the institutional matrix associated with logging and forest pioneering in Southeast Aceh district during 1996-9. 

As other studies suggest, particular institutional or socio-political structures are characteristic of upland or frontier areas of Indonesia. As this case from Sumatra illustrates, in an upland frontier district networks of power and interest affect the distribution of key resources. I argue that as district networks of power and interest reach out into the wider society, they exert various degrees of control over access and use of the most valuable resources found in the area. As these networks encompass both state and customary (adat) authority structures, they constitute the most serious obstacle to the implementation of state policy, thwarting the best efforts of external project interventions and, seemingly in this area at least, leading inexorably to the transformation of the rainforest ecosystem. 

The article itself is divided into four parts. The first section provides the theoretical framework whilst the second describes both the area where this study was carried out and the research methods used. The third section discusses the actions and interactions of village communities, logging networks, field foresters and other officials, district politicians and conservation agencies, before drawing some final conclusions. 

Theoretical orientation

Legal scholars have long observed that in the context of a developing country, government attempts to use law as an instrument for change have often led to unforeseen or unwanted consequences. (2) Legal anthropologists have sought to explain this problem in terms of 'the primacy of "folk law" and "indigenous social ordering" over legislation and formal legal ordering'. (3) This approach, sometimes referred to as 'legal pluralism', endeavours to understand law as part of a far more encompassing and complex social organisation. In other words, it seeks to comprehend the consequences of the coexistence of more than one set of institutional arrangements pertaining to the same set of activities and relationships. (4) 

A critical moment in this tradition of social thought was Sally Moore's description of what she called 'semi-autonomous social fields' or SASF. Moore developed this concept as a methodological device to investigate 'a small field observable to an anthropologist's These SASF can be identified by a 'processual characteristic' -- their ability to generate their 'own custom and rules and the means of coercing or inducing compliance'. (5) In other words, what is essential to these SASFs is that they 'have some degree of autonomous regulation of behaviour', and that 'they can bring forth and maintain their own rules'. (6) However, Moore noted that given the multiple sources of rules, these SASFs do not exist on their own. A SASF needs to be analysed in connection with the wider society: it is 'semi-autonomous' because it 'is simultaneously set in a larger social matrix which can, and does, affect and invade it, sometimes at the invitation of persons inside it, sometimes at its own insistence'. (7) 

As Moore herself showed, the SASF concept is a particularly useful tool for providing insights into the ordering of social life in complex settings. …

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