How Informality Drives Forest and Land Use Decision-Making in a Legislative Setting

Abstract

This note from the field traces how informality shapes forest and land-use decision-making within a provincial legislative arena in Indonesia. Drawing on an insider-expert perspective from 2021–2024, I reflect on how personal ties, symbolic recognition, and off-record exchanges quietly rework formal policymaking. The story begins with a seemingly simple greeting, kakanda, and follows how this sense of belonging opens access, shapes the selection of experts, and influences which programs survive. Along the way, it becomes clear that budgets operate as political currency, not simply as planning tools but as instruments through which alliances are negotiated and policy survival is secured, and that environmental initiatives often persist through what can be understood as policy piggybacking, attaching themselves to commodity agendas such as corn or emerging crops like porang. Engaging with debates on rendering technical, the anti-politics machine, and civic epistemologies, I argue that informality does not remove politics from policymaking but shifts how it operates, moving it into relational spaces where trust, proximity, and recognition matter. These reflections point to a broader insight: informal practices are not deviations from governance, but part of how forest and land use decisions are actually made.

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