Changing to Gray: Decentralization and the Emergence of Volatile Socio-legal Configurations in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

The views presented in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the INTRODUCTION Donor and development organizations have prescribed decentralization to promote accountability and transparency, public participation in policy making and democratization. The donor agency and development administration literature considers the types of decentralization, the dynamics leading governments to embark on decentralization programs, the set of programmatic objectives that these reforms seek to address, and the associated problems that emerge as state administrations attempt to implement their decentralization blueprints. By taking such a global comparative perspective and attempting to locate patterns among diverse variables, development agencies and practitioners have developed a broad set of explanatory narratives concerning decentralization policy design and implementation (cf Roe 1991; Roe 1995). In contrast, a social scientist attempting to understand how decentralization is affecting a specific local context is likely to come across a muddled and rather chaotic state of affairs that hardly seems to resemble the scenario described in the decentralization policy narratives. Decentralization tends to be just one element in wider processes of socioeconomic and political transformation, and it is difficult to isolate this process from wider changes. In remote districts of Indonesia, decentralization involves a dynamic and highly uneven process of change that is generating quite specific local socio-legal configurations. Here I will consider how decentralization policy narratives have coalesced with domestic dynamics to inspire a decentralization process that helps generate particular socio-legal configurations in the districts of Kapuas and South Barito within the Indonesian province of Central Kalimantan. I am concerned with how the international decentralization policy narratives – interpenetrating with national and district legal processes – affect administrative practices and local social fields governing access to and use of forest resources. This discussion necessarily focuses on the productive role of the decentralisation laws, considering how these laws and the various legal innovations that follow, reflect and have the power to structure the discourse within which issues and conflicts are framed. i I examine how, as actors interact in a dynamic situation, emergent socio-legal configurations develop as increasingly heterogeneous national and district legal regimes interact, conforming with and/or opposing each other as well as volatile district social fields and re-assertive customary normative orders. This article analyzes the overlapping socio-legal configurations arising from parallel developments at the national, district and village levels to advance three arguments. First, in complex polities like Indonesia, after decades of …