Impediments to Establishing Adat Villages: A Socio-Legal Examination of the Indonesian Village Law

Abstract

As adat revivalism has begun to influence regulatory, legal and administrative outcomes in Indonesia, adat (tradition or custom) has also found a place in one of the largest policy reforms reshaping Indonesia’s local governance systems: the Village Law. The 2014 Village Law includes a specific mechanism for villages to be recognised as ‘adat villages’. However, five years after promulgating this law, no adat villages have yet been completely established. In this article I take a socio-legal approach to examine the challenges of adat village establishment. A case study in South Kalimantan illustrates how the district government utilised the flaws in the legislation to undermine a customary community’s demand for recognition and to justify the stagnation of adat village establishment in their area. In a broader context, adat recognition through the 2014 Village Law tends to incorporate adat into the existing administrative village, instead of empowering the adat communities.

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