Transforming the Classic Political Forest: Contentious Territories in Java

Java’s extensive political forests and their contentious social relations have been profoundly transformed since the turn of the 21^st century. This paper analyses new forms of forest land use, control, and revenue distribution, shaping and shaped by political-economic changes and neoliberal-era reforms. Villagers’ expanded uses, access to, and control of the forest understory under the violently thinned out canopies of the main tree species has generated newly spatialised forest politics, with new institutions and forest labour practices. The changes in land, species, and labour controls, and in villagers’ access to forest products and revenues define this historical transformation in the constitution of Java’s classic political forest. Contentious co-production has resulted in fragmented territories and a momentary (at least) weakening of state controls within the old imperial political forest.