Papers

• Observing Governmentality and Indigenous Peoples’ Resilience in the Southern Papua Food Estate Project Vidhyandika D. Perkasa Centre for Strategic and International Studies-CSIS Indonesia

  The Merauke Food Estate, a flagship National Strategic Project in South Papua, proposes to convert more than one and a half million hectares of customary land into industrial sugarcane, rice, and bioethanol production. Framed by the Indonesian state as a solution to food insecurity, regional underdevelopment, and Papua’s prolonged political instability, the project has nevertheless been met with sustained opposition from indigenous Papuan communities, religious leaders, and civil society organizations who experience it as a new chapter in a longer history of dispossession, militarization, and what local actors call the memoria passionis of Papua. Rather than asking whether the project will succeed on its own technical terms, this paper draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality to ask how the Food Estate functions as a technology of power. Particular attention is given to the production of expert agricultural knowledge, the biopolitical reorganization of land, labor, and food, the disciplinary mechanisms embedded in spatial and bureaucratic restructuring, and the new subject positions through which indigenous Papuans are being reconstituted as “modern farmers” or “agricultural workers.” Drawing on in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, the paper also traces the counter-conducts, negotiations, and everyday forms of resistance through which indigenous communities sustain their livelihoods. The study contributes to debates on development, indigenous resilience, and the political economy of agrarian megaprojects in the global South.

• Opening the Black Box of Climate Adaptation: Lessons from Indonesia for the Global South Wijayanto Universitas Diponegoro

  This paper explores the decision-making processes behind climate change adaptation (CCA) at the local level, using Semarang, Indonesia as a case study to draw broader lessons for Global South cities. While Semarang is frequently highlighted as a model of urban climate resilience, this research interrogates how adaptation policies are actually shaped, whose knowledge counts, and what this reveals about wider governance trends.

  Using a qualitative approach that combines policy document analysis and semi-structured interviews with government officials, NGOs, and academic actors, the study applies framing theory to examine how climate change is understood and operationalized. The findings show that decision-making is a multi-actor but uneven process, dominated by local government agendas. Three competing framings emerge: a resilience-development framing aligned with global city networks, a justice-oriented critique emphasizing inequality and environmental contradictions, and a technocratic risk-management framing grounded in scientific expertise.

  The interaction of these frames produces partial and selective outcomes. While infrastructure-led interventions have reduced flood risks, deeper structural drivers—such as land-use change, environmental degradation, and private sector accountability—remain insufficiently addressed. Participation mechanisms exist but are often procedural, limiting meaningful inclusion.

  The Indonesian case reflects broader Global South patterns: the influence of transnational resilience discourses, the persistence of technocratic solutions, and the marginalization of critical and community-based perspectives. The key lesson is that effective adaptation requires not only technical capacity, but also more inclusive and politically aware governance. Opening the “black box” of decision-making is therefore essential to advancing more equitable and context-sensitive climate adaptation pathways across the Global South.

• Slow and Spectacular Violence: Technologies of Dispossession in Indonesia’s Climate–Food Frontiers Annisa Hartoto University of Zurich

  Across Indonesia’s agrarian frontiers, climate governance and food security interventions are increasingly enacted through infrastructural and technological projects that promise sustainability while reconfiguring socio-ecological relations. This paper examines these interventions as technologies of dispossession, focusing on how they produce both spectacular and slow forms of environmental violence. Drawing on comparative ethnographic research in Wadas (Central Java) and Takalar (South Sulawesi), I analyse how extractive and agro-industrial projects are legitimised through overlapping narratives of national development, food security, and climate resilience.

  I argue that these projects operate through a dual temporality of violence. On the one hand, spectacular violence manifests in visible and immediate forms—land seizures, militarised repression, and the criminalisation of dissent, as seen in conflicts over andesite quarrying in Wadas. On the other hand, slow violence unfolds through gradual and often less perceptible processes, including soil degradation, water contamination, and the erosion of local food systems and ecological knowledge, as observed in Takalar. Together, these forms of violence reconfigure agrarian relations while obscuring the long-term costs of “green” and food security interventions.

  Local governments emerge as key enablers in these processes, translating global climate and development imperatives into district-level land use policies and programmes that facilitate resource extraction while managing dissent. These dynamics disproportionately affect smallholders and are deeply gendered, with women bearing the cumulative burdens of ecological degradation and livelihood precarity.

  By foregrounding the interplay between slow and spectacular violence, the paper contributes to critical debates on environmental justice and the climate–food nexus in Southeast Asia. It demonstrates how climate and food security interventions, when embedded in unequal power relations, can intensify dispossession across temporal scales. The paper concludes by pointing towards alternative pathways rooted in agroecology, food sovereignty, and community-led governance that resist extractive futures at the region’s frontiers.

• The Ungovernance Dividend: How EU-China Normative Competition Fuels Extractive Climate Solutions in Southeast Asia’s Frontier Communities Andrea Valente Universidade de Lisboa

Abstract

Keywords

• Indigenous Papuans
• Merauke
• agrarian development
• biopolitics
• climate change adaptation
• counter-conducts
• environmental justice
• food estate
• food systems
• framing theory
• global South
• governmentality
• infrastructure
• land dispossession
• local governance
• slow violence
• spectacular violence
• urban resilience