The Kalimantan Forest Fires: An Actor Analysis Based on Supreme Court Documents in Indonesia

Abstract

Forest fires in Indonesia are of a local, national, and global concern, which is why the activities of local actors have emerged as a new problem in Indonesia, especially in Kalimantan. The current study employed a network content analysis method to examine the involvement of actors in forest fire cases based on Supreme Court decisions, complemented by several reputable online news sources such as kompas.com, detik.com, and tribun.com. By examining the cases, the actors involved were able to be identified as key actors, contest setters, and subject actors. Key actors, referring to companies and landowners, were found to have high correlations between one another. Moreover, key actors were observed to be involved in providing funds for land clearing or burning, yet they remained legally untouchable. Meanwhile, contest setters—permanent employees—were found to be the most involved in land burning/clearing, and they were often convicted in the Supreme Court rulings as they were merely commoners, farmers, and jobseekers in need of cash. Nevertheless, the subject actors, i.e., jobseekers and farm workers, were seen to have a weak relationship with key actors in the Supreme Court rulings, particularly in terms of forest burning and its operational funding.

Bureaucratic inertia in dealing with annual forest fires in Indonesia

“…The lack of an Incident Command Structure (ICS) can contribute to opposing views between local officials from fire brigades, forest services and district emergency management agencies as well as military, local police and local volunteers (Lassa 2015). In the case of annual forest fires in Sumatera and Kalimantan (Sukrismanto et al 2011;Purnomo et al 2021b;Matangaran et al 2019), it was noticed that there was poor cooperation between forest and land fire protection organisations; thus, forest and land fire management is inefficient. The cooperation among relevant multi-level organisations is shown in Fig.…”

Forest covers, land fire hotspots, and atmospheric pollutions (CO, SO2) in the lower Batanghari River Basin landscape during dry season (June-August 2021)

“…Burning takes place, starting with a broadcast burn, followed by pile-and-burn. The reasons for using fire, as mentioned by the farmers, were that burning could create space, burning can produce ash that can be used as fertilizer, burning can improve soil structure, enabling the faster establishment of seedlings especially herbaceous plants, burning can reduce weed/tree competition, and burning can also reduce the occurrence of pests and diseases (Njeri et al 2017;Purnomo et al 2021). One of the greater concerns and consequences regarding land fires, followed by the presence of atmospheric pollutants, falls into the following issues.…”

Effectiveness of the Prohibition of Farming Land Splitting Policy (Study on Land Sale and Purchase)

“…Land conversion is an unavoidable consequence of development [24]. Efforts might well be implemented to slow and prevent the conversion of agricultural land to non-agricultural land.…”