The Politics of Misalignment: NGO Livelihood Interventions and Exclusionary Land Claims in an Indonesian Oil Palm Enclave

Across Southeast Asia’s extractive frontier, Indigenous people increasingly negotiate an influx of nonstate actors pushing partnerships and projects to steer livelihoods away from extractivism and toward forest conservation. Yet, NGOs and their donors often struggle to grasp Indigenous peoples’ changing needs and expectations that may prioritize sustaining an income, often via the promises extractive industries propose, over preserving fragmented forests for posterity. This paper examines three interventions by conservation NGOs in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, which leveraged custom (adat) and “alternative” livelihoods through territorial practices to dissuade a Dayak Modang community from releasing ancestral lands for palm oil plantations and coal mines. Drawing on the state’s definition of adat to demarcate Modang territory, NGOs and some Modang engaged in counter-mapping and livelihood initiatives as hopeful expressions of indigeneity and making a living through acts of territorialization. We explore how NGO territorial practices unfolded as simplified spatial expressions that leveraged adat identity, enclosures, and livelihoods, neglecting the contemporary realities of living in a fragmented forest frontier. Although NGO-Modang strategies temporarily slowed dispossession and deforestation, their misaligned livelihood and conservation programs may have reinforced social differentiation between and across Dayak and migrant groups to ultimately facilitate extraction’s expansion.