As Indonesia struggles to contain one of the deadliest coronavirus outbreaks in Asia, the country’s president has quietly issued a new regulation on eminent domain.
Signed in May, the regulation expands the types of land that can be unilaterally acquired by the state for purposes deemed to be in the public interest. Limited under a 2016 regulation to land held by state-owned companies, areas that may be subject to eminent domain under the new presidential regulation now include forests, villages, and land bequeathed for religious and charitable use.
The regulation is just one in a series of steps the government is taking to ramp up dozens of major infrastructure projects billed as key to jump-starting the economy out of the current pandemic-induced slowdown. But for conservationists, environmental activists and indigenous rights defenders, this push comes at the expense of the country’s biodiversity, its climate commitments, and its most vulnerable communities.
On the government’s docket are 89 projects, most of them newly proposed and the rest expansions of existing projects. They include roads and railways, ports and airports, dams and power plants, industrial estates and plantations. The common hurdle, says President Joko Widodo, is land acquisition.
In a May 29 conference call to announce the slate of projects, tagged at a combined $100 billion, Widodo called them a national priority and said they have to continue.
Airlangga Hartarto, the coordinating minister for the economy, said it was in light of this urgency that the eminent domain regulation was issued: To speed up projects, because usually the roadblock, based on experience, is land procurement.
But the real impact will be to make it easier for the state to take over community lands, including those of indigenous groups, and degazette forests to allow them to be cleared, according to Siti Rakhma Mary Herwati of the Indonesian Legal Aid Institute (YLBHI).
This article makes it easier to shift villages’ assets and indigenous peoples’ customary lands for strategic projects or infrastructure projects, she said. It also speeds up the changing of the function of forest areas for those projects.
The regulation is bolstered by another from 2017 that allows projects of national priority to override local governments’ zoning plans. In practice, that means that projects can proceed in areas that would otherwise be off-limits, including forests and conservation areas.
Reynaldo Sembiring, executive director of the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law (ICEL) said zoning plans should only be revised if there’s a change in the landscape, adding that the plans should conform to the environment, not the other way around.
That theory is being thrown out of the window, because it all now depends on the national strategic projects, Reynaldo said.
Regulations for the sake of national strategic projects have been revised since a few years ago, he added.
2020 Copyright Conservation news