Koalisi Lahan–Gambut: Assembling Peat–Land Futures in Kalimantan

Abstract

Throughout Indonesia’s colonial and postcolonial histories, the peatlands of Kalimantan have been not only politically contested spaces but also sites of ontological struggle. From transmigrasi programs to Suharto’s Mega-Rice Project and most notably today’s carbon offset regimes, peat has been transformed into a paradoxical ecology: degraded yet investible, conserved yet profitable. These transformations enclose land, force communities to choose between extraction or restoration, criminalize fire, and abandon regenerative forms of cultivation. These are histories of ontological occupation institutionalized: the marginalization of both peat’s inhabitants and the soil itself as world-making agents, shaped by speculative regimes of governance, rooted in planetary imaginaries of climate salvation and fantasies of productivity. This thesis proposes Koalisi Lahan–Gambut (Peat–Land Coalition), a speculative parainstitution that explores how coalitional spatial practices might reclaim inhabitation in peat ecologies. Situated in a Ngaju village within the buffer zone of one of the world’s largest carbon offset territories—between deep peat and riverine edges, between restoration enclosures and plantation areas—the coalition works through the murkiness of peat, the heterogeneity of its inhabitants, and the crowded terrain of overlapping institutional claims. It foregrounds the frictions between gambut (peat) and lahan (land). Structured across three inquiries, the document presents a Living Glossary that assembles field terms and relational epistemologies drawn from Kalimantan’s peatlands; a genealogy of Governance, Carbon Fix, and Buffer Zone that traces the historical and institutional processes that rendered peatlands governable; and Landing in the Buffer Zone, which turns to the coalition’s situated experiments in becoming-with, inhabiting, and reclaiming the space between peat and land.