Transparency at stake

To analyse the situation in Papua Province, Greenpeace Indonesia searched online and sought information directly from government agencies involved in managing the province’s forests – agencies which operate at national, provincial and regency levels. Although some agencies did respond swiftly to information requests, other agencies did not respond, or only responded after repeated requests. In some cases the information they supplied was incomplete. These experiences reflect the dire situation in Indonesia's information management and natural resources governance.

After breaking free from decades of repression under Soeharto’s New Order regime, in 2008 Indonesia enacted a Freedom of Information Law;427 in 2011 it became a founding member of the multilateral Open Government Partnership,428 and Indonesia’s then President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono introduced a socalled One Map Policy on natural resources transparency.429 These legal and policy frameworks commit all levels of Indonesia’s government to proactive and timely publication of information, including maps of plantation concessions; guarantee the public’s right to request access to specific information; and establish an Information Commission to adjudicate freedom of information disputes.

A decade after this initial wave of transparency reform, however, it is clear that Indonesia’s government has not lived up to the promise of openness it made to its citizens and to the world – and one result is a failure to rein in forest destruction and land-grabbing by the plantation industry. The One Map Policy, conceived by President Yudhoyono but championed by his successor Joko Widodo both domestically and in his address at the Paris Climate Change Conference,430 promised to instigate a process of proactively collating and publishing detailed maps of concessions in order to address problems of overlapping claims between communities, the plantation industry and forest protection goals. To date, however, the government has published little more than figures for the area of oil palm plantations licensed and estimated total oil palm cover.431 It has stated that there are around 3.4 million ha of oil palm within the forest estate (where plantations are not allowed),432 but has not disclosed the all-important spatial data and licensing information which would allow public participation in addressing this issue.

427 Law 14/2008 on Freedom of Information / Undang-Undang no. 14 tahun 2008 tentang Keterbukaan Informasi Publik (full text available at https://peraturan.bpk.go.id/Home/Details/39047/uu-no-14-tahun-2008). 428 Open Government Partnership website ‘Indonesia’ 429 Kurniawan NI (2016) 430 Tempo.co (2015b) 431 Minister for Agriculture (2019a). See also Timorria IF (2020). 432 Alika R (2020)

To ensure that forests, their biodiversity and the land rights of those who live in them are protected, the public must have access to information, especially the permits, maps and other documents that show who controls forest lands, who has granted that control and under what conditions. Many palm oil traders and producers have recognised this fact and, bowing to public pressure, have pledged to make their supply chains transparent as part of No Deforestation, No Peat, No Exploitation (NDPE) commitments. Industry body the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) now provides downloadable versions of its grower members’ concession maps – everywhere except in Indonesia.433 This is because many government institutions in Indonesia insist that this information must be kept from the public, despite the Freedom of Information Law, and even when the Information Commission and the courts have ordered it released. Government departments have refused to comply with an order to release data on land cultivation right (HGU) in Papua, won in court by Greenpeace Indonesia;434 an order to release data on land title information, won from the provincial Information Commission by the Papua Legal Aid Foundation;435 and an order to release HGU data for the whole of Kalimantan, won in the Supreme Court by Forest Watch Indonesia.436

Despite several Supreme Court rulings that the government must provide the public with information related to oil palm concessions,437 a number of senior ministers have reportedly spoken out against this principle and taken steps to prevent the release of such information, even when plantation companies themselves wished to publish it.438 Officials who have been reported as having spoken out against transparency or made moves to block it include Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment Luhut Panjaitan,439 (then) Coordinating Minister for Human Development and Culture Puan Maharani (now Speaker of the House of Representatives),440 (then) Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Darmin Nasution441 and Minister for Agrarian Affairs and Spatial Planning Sofyan Djalil.442 In view of his position as the minister directly responsible for land title data, NGOs have reported Sofyan Djalil to the police for withholding public information,443 a crime under the Freedom of Information Law.444

433 RSPO (2020) 434 PTUN Jakarta no. W.2/TUN.1/552/HK.06/II/2020 tentang amar putusan perkara no. 225/G/KI/2019/PTUN-JKT 435 Putusan Komisi Informasi (KI) Papua no. 004/III/KI-Papua/PSA/2018 436 Putusan Mahkamah Agung (MA) no. 121 K/TUN/2017 437 See Putusan MA no. 121 K/TUN/2017, Putusan MA no. 83 K/TUN/2014, Putusan MA no. 322 K/TUN/KI/2017 and Antara Bengkulu (2016). 438 According to a statement by Tiur Rumondang, the RSPO’s Indonesia Director, as quoted in Elisabet A et al (2020). 439 CNN Indonesia (2019a) 440 CNN Indonesia (2019b) 441 Alika R (2019) 442 Bayu DJ (2019) 443 Rahma A (2019) 444 See Article 52 of Law 14/2008 on Freedom of Information / Undang-Undang no. 14 tahun 2008 tentang Keterbukaan Informasi Publik (full text available at https://peraturan.bpk.go.id/Home/Details/39047/uu-no-14-tahun-2008).

© Jurnasyanto Sukarno / Greenpeace

An award is placed near activists as they hold a banner reading "BPN, Not Transparent = Corruption" during a photo op in the Ministry of Agrarian Affairs and Spatial Planning/National Land Agency (ATR/BPN) in Jakarta. The coalition from Greenpeace Indonesia, Walhi, Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW) and Perdu urged the Ministry office to improve transparency around concession maps in Papua and Kalimantan. 20 Aug, 2018.

The National Land Agency does include HGU boundaries on its cadastral website,445 but does not give details of the title holders. Comparison of this data with maps of planted oil palm and of other permits shows that many companies across Indonesia are operating plantations without HGU. According to a member of the National Audit Board this includes millions of hectares operated by large listed companies.446 Since revealing the names of these companies and the reasons why they were not able to obtain HGU could prove costly to those companies (as well as being embarrassing for the government), it is reasonable to suspect that the National Land Agency's reason for maintaining secrecy may be connected to pressure from companies or others who would stand to lose.

445 https://bhumi.atrbpn.go.id/ 446 Thomas VF (2019)