Policy narratives, landholder engagement, and oil palm expansion on the Malaysian and Indonesian frontiers

TLDR

The frontier regions of Malaysian Borneo and Outer Island Indonesia have rapidly converted former forests and fallows into oil palm plantations, facing shared challenges of labor, land delivery, legitimacy, and contestation while differing in governance and policy frameworks. The study argues that analogous policy narratives have shaped how landholders are engaged in oil palm expansion in both Malaysia and Indonesia. By shifting from state‑led to neoliberal agricultural governance, these narratives have redefined the frontier and facilitated the wholesale conversion of landscapes into oil palm. The result is the obscuring of indigenous agriculture and land tenure, the reservation of customary land for state use, and the framing of smallholders as marginal and backward relative to modern estate agriculture.

Abstract

Over recent decades a structural transformation has affected agriculture in the frontier areas of Malaysian Borneo and Outer Island Indonesia with the rapid conversion of agricultural lands, fallows, and formerly forested areas into oil palm. These frontiers have similar positions in the international political economy of oil palm and have complementary resource endowments. In both cases, state planners face the common challenges of finding a disciplined labour force, delivering land for estate development, maintaining local legitimacy, and dealing with local contestation. Yet there are significant differences in systems of governance and policy frameworks regarding land, shifting capacity of state actors to facilitate the transformation of these agrarian frontiers, and changing degrees of local, national and international contestation. Considering the generic and the specific elements at play in each case, this paper argues that analogous policy narratives have shaped the ways in which landholders have been engaged in the process of oil palm expansion in Malaysia and Indonesia. In both cases, with the shift from state‐led to neoliberal governance approaches to agricultural development, the ‘frontier’ has been created and transformed through policy narratives that facilitate the conversion of whole landscapes into oil palm. This has been achieved by obscuring indigenous forms of agriculture and land tenure, while creating reserves of available ‘state’ or ‘idle’ customary land, and counterpoising smallholder ‘marginality’ and ‘backwardness’ to the modernity of contemporary estate agriculture.