MEKAR RAYA, Indonesia — Yulius Yogi kneels under the forest canopy here on the island of Borneo, surveying land he plans to reclaim for his Dayak Simpan Indigenous community. “Our ancestors safeguarded [the forest], now it’s our responsibility to look after it,” Yulius, 35, told Mongabay Indonesia on the outskirts of Mekar Raya village, in Ketapang district, West Kalimantan province. As leader of the local forest management institute, a village-level institution in Indonesia’s heavily decentralized political framework, Yulius is responsible for drafting a forest management proposal to the central government in Jakarta. That application requires merging centuries-old customary traditions, regulated by Dayak elders, with the rules of the modern state introduced after Indonesia declared independence in 1945. Here in Mekar Raya, a successful petition could entail the handover of up to 2,000 hectares (5,000 acres) of forest upland, bisected by rivers the Dayak consider protected by a higher authority. In August last year, then-forestry minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar said Indonesia’s community forestry program had so far transferred more than 8 million hectares (20 million acres) for local leases (hutan desa), and in some cases Indigenous control (hutan adat), comparable to a sort of communal freehold. These two categories of rural devolution had reached 1.4 million families by August last year, the minister said. In May 2020, the forestry ministry authorized a 9,480-hectare (23,426-acre) hutan adat forest to the Dayak Iban community in the north of Indonesian Borneo. That was the largest award to an Indigenous community at the time, spurring…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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