Corporate contentious politics: Palm oil companies and land conflicts in Indonesia

Abstract

The intensification of corporate acquisition of land in particularly the Global South has generated widespread resistance from rural communities who are being forced off their land with little or no compensation. Yet, while community protests have received ample scholarly attention, the strategies that companies adopt to deal with land conflicts are rarely studied. In contrast with studies that misleadingly describe these strategies in terms of ‘corporate social responsibility’, we adopt a contentious politics perspective. On the basis of a detailed documentation of the trajectories and outcomes of 150 conflicts between palm oil companies and rural communities in Indonesia, we show that palm oil companies are contentious actors, in the sense that companies engage in conscious and strategic efforts to make and realize their claims, and for this purpose mobilize a particular contentious repertoire, involving the co-optation of local leaders, the cultivation of connections with local authorities, the suppression of community protests, and the criminalization of protest leaders. We employ our dataset to explore how common these strategies are, finding that companies that have adopted RSPO's code of conduct are not less likely to employ them. We argue that corporate contentious politics is a response to the informalized nature of Indonesia's state institutions, and call for more comparative research on this understudied dimension of land conflicts.