Traditions, Land Rights, and Local Welfare Creation: Studies from Eastern Indonesia

This research focuses on the impacts of traditional systems of land distribution among households, clans, and the government in two of Indonesia’s poorest provinces: East Nusa Tenggara and Maluku. Our main goal is to discuss and propose alternative ways of dividing and governing productive land to meet new needs in the management of agriculture and forestry. We apply a mixed research methodology that includes in-depth discussions with more than 50 key informants and survey interviews with 640 randomly selected respondents. We find that the number of land conflicts is rising, that land privatisation is becoming increasingly relevant, and that communal land ownership tends to lead to land under-utilisation rather than to natural resource overuse and environmental degradation. We argue that economic gains can be made by changing land-use patterns and land user rights. Our policy recommendations include introducing formalised and taxable clan land ownership with specified and registered family user rights.