RICH FORESTS, POOR PEOPLE, AND DEVELOPMENT: FOREST ACCESS CONTROL AND RESISTANCE IN JAV

This thesis examines the notion that forestry, in addition to being the science of tree production, comprises a political-economic system for controlling forest access. Forest access control entails land control, species control, and labor control; it is mediated by prevailing state ideologies. Peasant resistance to forest access control tends to reflect specific types of control imposed in particular forest settings.;An historical perspective is taken to analyze the sociology of forestry in Java. The origins of modern forestry in Java lie in the nineteenth-century German model of forest management adopted by the Dutch colonial state. The state superimposed European notions of land control over traditional mechanisms for forest labor and species control, monopolized commercial teak production, and reshaped forest village social structure in ways which facilitated forest production and protection. Since the Japanese occupation and the emergence of the independent Indonesian state, significant environmental and social changes have altered the context within which the State Forestry Corporation of Java controls forest land, species, and labor. The misfit of the custodial forest management system is evidenced particularly by forest villagers' persistent land-based, species-based, and ideological resistance to external control.;These conclusions are based on three stages of data collection. The first consisted of a year's fieldwork in two forest villages in Central Java and rapid rural appraisals in some twenty other forest villages. I interviewed reforestation laborers, loggers, traders, farm families, and foresters and other government officials from provincial to village levels. I also collected land-use histories and ethnobotanical data, household income studies, time allocation studies, and sample surveys on household land and forest use. Official documents, position papers, and in-depth interviews with key forestry administrators and planners completed this data set.;In the second stage, I participated in group problem-solving sessions during six weeks of social forestry training for field foresters. Historical research, using Dutch forestry and cultural journals and colonial reports comprised the third research stage. Not all these data are presented in this dissertation, but all contributed to my understanding of the dynamics of state forestry and local use.