Indirect Recognition. Frontiers and Territorialization around Mount Halimun-Salak National Park, Indonesia Christian Lund a , Noer Fauzi Rachman b a University of Copenhagen, Denmark b The Indonesian Center for Agrarian and Rural Studies, Bogor, Indonesia article info Article history: Available online 28 April 2017 Key words: Indonesia recognition frontiers territorialization citizenship property summary Government institutions and local people in Indonesia have entrenched, resurrected, and reinvented space through their different territorial and property claims. From colonial times, onward, government institutions have dissolved local political orders and territorialized and reordered spatial frontiers. Local resource users, on the other hand, have aligned with, or undermined, the spatial ordering. We ana- lyze government-citizen encounters in West Java and the dynamics of recognition in the fields of govern- ment territorialization, taxation, local organization, and identity politics. Spatial categories are struggled over, and groups of actors seek to legitimate their presence, their activities, and their resource use by occupation, mapping, and construction of ‘‘public” infrastructure. In the case of conservation in the Mount Halimun-Salak National Park, we find that rather than one overarching recognition of a single direct spatial claim to property, a web of direct and indirect claims for recognition emerges between and among claimants and institutions. If direct claims to resources are impossible to pursue, people lodge indirect claims. In everyday situations, indirect recognition can perform important legal and political work. After the authoritarian New Order regime, in particular, claims to citizenship worked as indirect property claims, and indirect recognition of such claims are important because they serve as pragmatic proxies for formal property rights. Two case studies examine how people struggle over the past, negoti- ating the constraints of social propriety for legitimation and indirect recognition of their claims. Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Mount Halimun-Salak was declared a national park (covering some 113,000 ha) by the Indonesian government in 2003. Conser- vation of nature has been on the increase in the world over the past 50 years as a way of protecting and preserving landscapes, bio- mass, biodiversity, water resources, and the intrinsic value of nat- ure (Brockington, Duffy, & Igoe, 2008). In many cases conservation has implied displacement and dispossession of local populations, or submission to fundamentally undemocratic control by a variety of statutory and non-statutory governing agencies (Agrawal & Redford, 2009; Arsel & Büscher, 2012; Fairhead, Leach, & Scoones, 2012; Oldekop, Holmes, Harris, & Evans, 2016; West, 2006; West, Igoe, & Brockington, 2006). The government practices in Indonesia and around Mount Halimun of destroying existing spatial rights to open a frontier for territorialization and consolida- tion of new spatial claims fall neatly within this pattern. Previously, the area around Mount Halimun had been catego- rized as ‘‘forest” and was legally under the control of the Ministry of Forestry. Based on its gazetted status in the earlier Dutch colo- nial period, the Indonesian government had declared 40,000 ha of Mount Halimun a ‘‘nature reserve” in 1979. 1 In 2000 a drought compromised the water supply to Jakarta, a mere 100 km away, and, the year after, flooding in the area left more than 60,000 people homeless and in need of temporary relocation. Studies showed, moreover, that forest cover in the Mount Halimun area had been reduced by 25% during 1989–2001 (JICA, 2006). This became a national issue, certain government agencies joined conservationists in pressing for action, and the outcome was the decree in 2003. The reclassification of the area as a national park and its extension to cover more than twice the original area provoked a series of con- flicts over territory, property, and authority. The area around Mount Halimun straddles West Java and Banten provinces within three regencies (Bogor, Sukabumi, and Lebak (see Figure 1)). 2 Over time, in the colonial period and after, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.04.003 0305-750X/Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1 Ministerial decree No. 40/1979. 2 Indonesia is divided into provinces. Provinces are made up of regencies and cities. Regencies and cities are divided into districts. Districts are divided into villages (desa) or urban communities (kelurahan). Villages and urban communities are sometimes made up of kampungs or sub-villages/hamlets. World Development 101 (2018) 417–428 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect World Development journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev