Part 1

• Making Digital Governance in Cambodia Kimhean Hok Lund University

  This paper examines the emergence of new executive agencies under Cambodia’s digital transition agenda and their role in shaping digital governance in Cambodia. Situated within broader shifts toward digitalization and innovation-led growth, these agencies bring together state and non-state actors in the design and implementation of policy. The paper argues that they function as a form of institutional brokerage through which global agendas around innovation and digitalization are negotiated, translated, and turned into concrete state projects in Cambodia. Drawing on an in-depth case study of the Techo Startup Center (TSC), an executive agency and flagship national innovation centre, the paper traces the institutional processes underpinning the development and rollout of major national digital platforms that form the backbone of Cambodia’s digital governance architecture. Close examination of TSC’s organizational structure and operational model further shows how this is achieved through the selective incorporation of non-state actors and practices, including new approaches to recruitment and staff development.
  TSC’s effectiveness and operational agility, characteristics shared by other new agencies, derive in part from its insulation from a broader, slow-moving, and fragmented state bureaucracy, even as it remains embedded in Cambodia’s rigid party-state political structure. In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on how global policy ideas are translated into practice through new institutional forms under specific socio-political conditions in Southeast Asia.

• Trading Floating Livelihoods: Patronage and Intermediary Power in South Sulawesi’s Seaweed Economy Elio Della Monica Dublin City University

  Informal institutions play a central role in shaping coastal economies in Southeast Asia, yet their function as intermediary structures remains underexplored. This paper examines the seaweed farming sector in Indonesia, focusing on the patron–client system known as punggawa–sawi in South Sulawesi. It argues that punggawa operate as key intermediaries who mediate access to markets, capital, and information, effectively bridging the gap between local producers and broader economic and regulatory environments.
  In a context where formal state regulation is limited, the seaweed trade relies heavily on informal governance mechanisms. Through the provision of microloans and market access, punggawa establish enduring debt-based relationships with farmers (sawi), who are often required to sell exclusively to their patron. These arrangements allow intermediaries to shape production decisions, influence prices, and control participation in the value chain. At the same time, they function as crucial social safety nets, providing support in times of economic or environmental stress.
  Drawing on ethnographic interviews and participant observation, the paper shows how these intermediary actors navigate and reconcile competing logics of market efficiency, social obligation, and institutional absence. It highlights the ambivalent role of brokerage, whereby punggawa simultaneously reproduce structural inequalities and sustain local livelihoods. By operating in the interstices between state absence and community resilience, these actors effectively translate and enforce economic norms, blurring the boundaries between formal governance and informal practice.
  The paper contributes to debates on brokerage and informal governance by demonstrating how intermediary actors shape the distribution of power, resources, and risk in coastal economies. It further shows how local systems of patronage constitute not merely adaptive responses, but active sites of negotiation where global market pressures and local socio-cultural norms intersect. In doing so, it provides new insights into the role of intermediaries in mediating socio-economic and environmental transformations in Southeast Asia.

• “Indigenous People Know Their Territory”: Socio-spatial De(knowledge) of Indigenous Territory Mapping Muntaza Muntaza University of Bonn

  Over the past decade, the existence of indigenous territories has become a prerequisite for a community recognized as an indigenous people in Indonesia. Indigenous peoples’ organizations and activists have responded by accelerating the mapping of indigenous territories, particularly through internal organizational policies requiring community members to possess maps of their territories. This trend is transforming counter-mapping to existence-mapping. Mapping models generally adopt Cartesian assumptions, which treat boundaries as fixed, thereby potentially excluding or including other groups in the use of natural resources. Such mapping models are generally useful pragmatically in legal advocacy and political recognition efforts. However, it does not illustrate how the processes and practices of indigenous territory mapping actually unfold. Based on participatory engagement research with indigenous organizations in Indonesia, I discuss in my presentation the indigenous territory mapping process of the Seano community in Banggai Kepulauan Regency, Indonesia. My research demonstrates that indigenous territory mapping is a program focused on the establishment of indigenous territories on paper or digitally, resulting from the translation of boundaries which are articulated and agreed upon by the community or between communities. In practice, mapping facilitators tend to be pragmatic and non-critical, assuming that customary territories simply exist and can be identified based on the community’s articulation, thereby failing to recognize the gap between spatial-body knowledge and the articulated spatial representations facilitated by digital maps. This research argues that the mapping of customary territories that disregards historical narratives, practices, and socio-spatial knowledge in the everyday lives of communities during the formation of customary territories results in socio-spatial de(knowledge) in its implementation.

• Depoliticizing Development: Engaging Intermediary Actors to Contain Resistance Toward the Green Energy Project in Flores, Eastern Indonesia Venansius Haryanto University of Bonn

  As part of Indonesia’s government decarbonization agenda to tackle climate change, the government designated Flores Island, in eastern Indonesia, as the so-called “Geothermal Island” in 2017, and incorporated related initiatives into its National Strategic Projects. Framed as serving the national interest, this project is promoted as a driver for both the local and national green economy agenda.
  However, these ambitions have encountered growing opposition from indigenous communities in Flores. As with other renewable energy infrastructure resistance in other places, central to the resistance is that the project would encroach on the integrity of the indigenous living space. This unwavering resistance, in turn, has reinforced the community’s bargaining position vis-à-vis the project, contributing to delays in recent years.
  In response, the Indonesian central government and corporate actors sought to manage opposition by mobilizing intermediary institutions. In particular, they involve and encourage the local Catholic Church, scholars (anthropologists), and the local government authorities to mediate and reframe the community concerns to pave the way for the project’s implementation.
  Drawing on the author’s engagement as a scholar-activist (2018-present) with the community’s resistance to the project in Flores in recent years, this paper examines the role of those three institutions in depoliticizing development. Toward this end, this paper will examine how these three institutions produce knowledge and the discourses on development in ways that, on the one hand, justify the project’s implementation and, on the other hand, neglect the community’s concerns.
  From this standpoint, this study contributes to critical debates on the depoliticization of development by arguing that depoliticization is not merely a top-down technocratic process, but also enabled by the role of intermediary actors. Through their role of producing knowledge and discourses, these intermediary actors play a significant role in establishing development as a regime of truth, while closing the room for contestation.

Part 2

• Between Global ESG Norms and Local Realities: Corporate Brokerage and the Translation of Sustainability Frameworks in Indonesia Alessandro Gullo University of Bonn

  Global sustainability standards and ESG frameworks are increasingly shaping corporate conduct across the Globe. Yet, their implementation is far from linear, while neglecting specific localities. This presentation sheds light on how ESG departments and consultancy need to act as crucial intermediaries in translating, negotiating and operationalising ESG norms across scales and cultures.
  Drawing on ongoing doctoral research on ESG reporting and practice in Indonesia, this presentation examines how corporate actors navigate between international expectations, for instance global reporting standards or legislative requirements and local socio-political realities, particularly in resource-intensive contexts. Focusing on the mining sector the analysis highlights how ESG is not simply “implemented”, but actively reinterpreted and adapted through processes of brokerage, changing global standards and local demands. The dissertation conceptualises companies not only as rule-takers, but as strategic brokers that mediate between communities, state actors and global governance regimes. These actors selectively prioritise certain ESG dimensions, adapt narratives and develop context-specific rationalities to justify decisions in situations marked by conflicting interests, regulatory ambiguity and power asymmetries.
  This study is based on qualitative fieldwork, including interviews with corporate representatives, local stakeholders and experts, as well as insights from ongoing field research in Indonesia. The findings show that ESG practices and standards are shaped by dialectical negotiation processes in which global norms are followed, translated into local context and adapted to local realities resulting in – sometimes - controversial results. By foregrounding corporate brokerage, the dissertation contributes to debates beyond financial bargaining and positive financial effects through ESG, by looking on intermediaries in socio-political governance and offers a nuanced understanding of how sustainability agendas “travel” across scales. It further sheds light on the question of how ESG implementation differs and how western concepts shape and dictate global sustainable responsibility.

• The Role of Waste Recycle Educators in the Waste Recycle Chain in Bandung, Indonesia Rachma Lutfiny Putri Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

  This study focuses on the role of waste recycle educators in Bandung as intermediaries in shaping the discourse of circularity in the everyday life of the residents and household-level local waste management. It also highlights the challenges that the educators face in shaping and distributing the idea of circularity.
  This study is part of the broader dissertation project examining the dynamics of value chains in waste recycle processes in Indonesia from the perspectives of value theories, commodities, and labor processes. It examines how value, understood in both an anthropological and economic sense, is generated, captured, accumulated and experienced along the recycle chain from the waste pickers, via waste dealers, and waste recycle educators to the recycle factories and it seeks to understand how these actors perceive their own participation and that of others in the recycle chain. Focusing on plastic waste materials from households, a common waste product, this project conducts a case study of Bandung, a major city in Indonesia with a history of experiments and initiatives of waste management.
  Here, I will explore the role of waste recycle educators in the Waste Free Zone program from the municipality of Bandung. Waste Free Zone is a program to reduce waste from the household through sorting the organic and anorganic waste from home, running a waste bank program, and creating a greener space in the neighborhood. In this program, the waste recycle educators play an important role in educating the residents on how to manage their waste locally and maintain the program smoothly. They contribute to the discourse of circularity in the everyday life of the residents. Relatedly, I will discuss the challenges that waste educators face in distributing the idea of circularity to community members.

• Mediating Local Knowledge: Teacher Agency and Epistemic Brokerage in Indonesia’s State Schooling Fadilla Mutiarawati University of Oulu

  Indonesia’s formal education system prioritizes dominant epistemologies embedded in standardized curricula, often marginalizing Indigenous knowledge and local ways of knowing. This study explores how primary school teachers in rural West Sumba, Indonesia, engage with Indigenous knowledge within formal schooling and how they navigate epistemic and institutional challenges to create more culturally and ecologically relevant learning. Drawing on theories of epistemic injustice, decolonial thought, critical pedagogy, and teacher agency, the research conceptualizes teachers as epistemic brokers who negotiate knowledge hierarchies and translate community knowledge into legitimate pedagogical practices.

  Based on participatory action research, teachers collaborated as co-researchers to develop culturally relevant literacy modules rooted in local ecological and cultural contexts. Employing ethnographically informed methods, they observed cultural practices, documented stories, and explored ecological knowledge from community members as sources of learning. Through cycles of planning, designing, piloting, and reflecting, teachers integrated local knowledge into classroom activities, mediating between community knowledge systems and national curricula.

  This participatory approach empowered teachers to exercise autonomy within institutional constraints. Instead of solely implementing standardized curricula, they designed and tested their own materials, reflecting critically on knowledge dominance. Initial findings indicate that teachers experienced epistemic tension and felt inferior toward local knowledge. However, through collaboration, they gained confidence in recognizing the pedagogical value of Indigenous knowledge and in their role as curriculum innovators.

  The study underscores participatory curriculum development as a process where teachers negotiate epistemic justice and foster professional autonomy. By examining teachers as epistemic brokers operating within state schooling, the study contributes to discussions on brokerage and everyday bureaucratic negotiation in Indonesian education, positioning teachers as active agents vital to democratic, locally rooted educational transformation.

• Geopolitical Crocodiles - Oily animations of human-wildlife conflict on the Timor-Leste south coast Alexander Cullen University of Cambridge

  This paper discusses the complex ecological entanglements of ancestral identity, rising crocodile attacks and oil extractivity through contested spaces of political ecology and ontology at the revived Timorese South Coast Supply Base project. Since the restitution of independence in 2002, populations of crocodiles have sharply risen, leading to migration from concentrated sites on the south coast to the more densely populated north coast whereby concurrent encroachment into their habitats has lead to increasing numbers of attacks and deaths. Yet crocodiles have traditionally been revered as potent ancestral beings of capable of interventionist punishment and redress across cosmological worlds for which the rise and frequency of attacks have troubled interspecies customary relations. The result has been cultural speculation that invasive Australian salt-water crocodiles were to blame for attacks, with such claims emanating most concerningly from the south coast communities where crocodiles and relations to them are most prominent. Yet they are also at risk from the development of the enormous South coast Tasi Mane oil and gas supply base project which became even great cause celebre for the state after revelations of Australia spying on Timor during oil and gas treaty negotiations. Through interviews, site visits, participatory engagement and observation, the paper presents an argument for a more-than-human geopolitics to articulate the competing concerns and contestations surrounding growing patterns of human-crocodile conflict in Timor Leste, and how such discussions link to emergent cosmopolitical ecologies of invasiveness, identity and land.

Abstract

Keywords

• Bandung
• Catholic Church
• ESG
• Geothermal Project
• Indigenous resistance
• Indigenous territory
• Indigenous youth
• Indonesia
• Orang Rimba
• Southeast Asia
• Sumatra
• Timor
• actors
• co-animation
• contradiction broker
• corporate brokerage
• cosmopolitical ecology
• depoliticization
• epistemology
• ethnography
• existence-mapping
• geopolitics
• human-wildlife politics
• informal governance
• intermediaries
• livelihoods
• local government
• patron-client relations
• practice
• process
• scholars
• seaweed farming
• spatial-social knowledge
• sustainability governance
• waste recycle chain
• waste recycle educators