Theme Issue Article

Knowing the subterranean:Land grabbing, oil palm, anddivergent expertise inIndonesia’s peat soil

Jenny E GoldsteinDepartment of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Abstract

So-called global land grabbing is not only a response to socio-ecological shifts but can also

generate substantial subterranean and atmospheric biogeochemical changes. As land

acquisitions for agricultural development play out in Indonesia, the country’s peatlands have

been a key to rapid and expansive oil palm development. Oil palm production in tropical

peatlands, however, requires soil drainage through hydrological engineering, which stimulates

carbon dioxide emissions. Research on the quantities and mechanisms of those carbon

emissions has been central to generating scientific consensus stipulating peatland conservation

and rehabilitation, rather than agricultural development. Yet, alternate scientific knowledge

networks have generated what I call divergent expertise, which supports a peatland

management strategy of continued development despite ecological risk. This divergent

expertise raises questions of how land is made suitable for large-scale acquisition and

investment for agricultural development, and how to manage the biogeochemical crises that

can ensue when land is incorporated into land grab regimes.

Keywords

Agricultural development, carbon emissions, Indonesia, knowledge production, land grabs,

ecological management, oil palm, subterranean

Introduction

Indonesia is often cited as the world’s third largest carbon emitter, owing to its high rates ofdeforestation and vast amounts of carbon stored in tropical peat soils, which emit carbonthrough fire and oxidation once drained (PEACE, 2007). Scientific knowledge of the precisequantity and source of these peat soil emissions was largely produced following catastrophicpeatland and forest fires in 1997–1998. These enormous land-based fires sent plumes ofparticulate matter across Sumatra and Kalimantan, and a noxious yellow-gray hazesettled over Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand for months. Though anthropogenic forest

Corresponding author:

Jenny E Goldstein, Department of Geography, University of California, 1255, Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.

Email: jgoldstein@ucla.edu

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DOI: 10.1177/0308518X15599787

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fires have been part of Sumatra and Kalimantan landscapes for centuries, if not thousands ofyears (Barber and Schweithelm, 2000; Page et al., 2009), the consensus among scientists,government officials, and local land users alike was that these fires were unprecedented intheir magnitude and extent. By the time the flames dissipated in mid-1998, an estimated 10million hectares had burned in Kalimantan and Sumatra, affecting the health of millionsacross Southeast Asia and costing roughly $10 billion in lost economic activity (Aiken, 2004;Barber and Schweithelm, 2000; Forsyth, 2014; Harwell, 2000).

In the years after what is still called Indonesia’s worst environmental disaster, the 1997–1998 fires crystalized two narratives about the socio-ecological relations regardingagricultural plantation expansion in tropical peatlands. One, in a shift from previousdiscourses surrounding forest and land fire in Indonesia that blamed smallholders forfires, publicly implicated agricultural plantation owners in causing the enormousconflagrations through poor land management (Byron and Shepard, 1998; Dennis et al.,2005). The second emerging narrative posited that peat fires are strongly correlated withpeatland drainage and release far more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than other typesof land-based fires. These two intertwining narratives gathered momentum, as morescientists researched the relationship between peatland development and carbon emissionsand as fires have frequently occurred since 1998. Simultaneously, Indonesia has become oneof the world’s most attractive countries for ‘‘land grabbing,’’ or the rapid, large-scaleacquisition of land for investment in agricultural production and the simultaneousdisplacement of people and/or activities. Much of the land grabbed for agriculturalinvestment in Indonesia has been located in the country’s vast peatlands for oil palmcultivation, further implicating the agricultural plantation industries in peatland mis-management.

Since the late 1990s, proliferating scientific research on the carbon stock, or the carboncontained within biomass, of peat soils has raised concerns in the international scientificcommunity that without protection and hydrological rehabilitation, these soils will continueto be a significant source of carbon emissions. Through this scientific research, peatlanddevelopment has been conceptualized as an ecological crisis and a threat to the planetaryatmosphere. Many oil palm industry actors argue, however, that through propermanagement agricultural production on peatlands can actually decrease peat-basedcarbon emissions. These counter-claims rely on alternate scientific research to justifyfurther corporate land acquisition for large-scale oil palm plantations. Divergentknowledge, though not taken seriously by most in the international scientific network,nevertheless succeeds in shifting the questions framing peatland-based land grabbing awayfrom whether peatland is suitable for agricultural development—and thus should bedeveloped at all—to whether it can be made suitable for investment and how associatedbiogeochemical risks should be managed. In doing so, industry-affiliated actors generateenough doubt surrounding the necessity of peatland conservation to sway regulatoryregimes in their favor. The tension between these two existing and potential uses ofIndonesia’s peatlands—protection/rehabilitation and development—and the knowledgeclaims that underpin them thus raises significant questions about the politics of expertisejustifying land grabbing.

To lay the groundwork for this analysis, the following section briefly reviews literaturethat addresses interactions between recent, large-scale agricultural land grabs and thesuitability of socio-ecological systems for such development. It also reviews work on thepolitics of knowledge to show how scientific expertise can be complicit in sowing doubt andignorance. The next section first outlines the political-economic dynamics of land acquisitionwithin Indonesia’s oil palm sector and then describes how carbon-rich peatlands have

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underpinned much of Indonesia’s oil palm development despite being a major source ofcarbon emissions when they are drained. Drawing on semi-structured, qualitative interviewsI conducted in Indonesia in 2013 and 2014 with scientists, oil palm industry actors, andenvironmental non-governmental organization (NGO) workers, I show that scientificknowledge about peatlands’ subsurface carbon was developed as a response to the 1997–1998 fires, which was catalyzed by agricultural expansion in the peatlands itself. Finally, Iargue that oil palm expansion in the peatlands has enabled—and is enabled by—theproduction of divergent scientific knowledges of subterranean biogeochemical change,which presents a challenge to ‘‘expert’’ understandings of how to manage the multi-scalarbiophysical consequences of development.1

Knowledge politics of land suitability

Global land grabbing has become shorthand for recent, rapid, and large-scale landinvestments for agricultural commodity production (Borras and Franco, 2012; DeSchutter, 2011). National and transnational land acquisitions have indeed occurred priorto this contemporary moment. But McMichael (2014) argues that a particular crisis-motivated juncture of food, fuel, and climate shapes current mechanisms of large-scaleland control, particularly in developing countries (see also Peluso and Lund, 2011).Particularly in tropical countries, climate change narratives justify biofuel crop expansionby promoting oil palm and other biofuels as fossil fuel alternatives, even though the vastmajority of oil palm is consumed as food, not biofuel (Borras and Franco, 2012; Nalepa andBauer, 2012). Furthermore, climate change mitigation strategies can justify large-scale landacquisitions if expanded food or biofuel crop production in a particular location enableshigh-carbon value forest conservation elsewhere (Hecht, 2010; McMichael, 2014; Perfectoet al., 2009).

But these drivers of land grabbing, while critical to analyze, do not in themselves explainthe complexity of socio-ecological responses—and crises—that ensue when land isconsolidated and acquired by corporate and transnational actors. Several scholars haveanalyzed the uneven socio-political outcomes of recent land grabbing dynamics. Theseland deals have generally been detrimental to smallholders and other rural inhabitants,though inconsistently so (Fairhead et al., 2012; Hall, 2011; Li, 2011). Less attention,however, has been paid to the ways in which land grabbing generates socio-ecologicalcrises at multiple scales, which in turn catalyze or alter further land grabbing mechanismsand outcomes (Dauvergne and Neville, 2010 is one exception). As Wolford et al. (2013) note,the ways in which specific ecologies enable, respond to, and push back against contemporaryland grabbing has been attended to unevenly in recent research on land transactions. Manyanalyses of land deals highlight the multi-faceted dimensions of biophysical environments toshow how they are considered appropriate for certain types of land grabs (Baka, 2013;Eilenberg, 2014; Nalepa and Bauer, 2012). Few studies, however, have articulated howcertain lands and ecologies are managed through land grabbing, and how thatenvironmental management is underpinned by knowledge claims of land’s suitability forconsolidation and development.

It is no longer enough for scientists, policymakers, and developers to ask what land issuitable for large-scale acquisition and cultivation and can thus be smoothly incorporatedinto land grabs. Following Li (2014), the question has instead shifted to what land can bemade suitable and thus attract additional investment. Suitability, for some actors witheconomic interests in land grabbing, is synonymous with profitability. For others,suitability raises concerns about socio-ecological changes following large-scale agricultural

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development. What, then, are the politics of considering land suitability: appropriate forwhat, for whom, and how do we know?

One set of actors that has been conspicuously absent from many land grabbing analyses isresearch scientists, particularly those who interact with biophysical systems in situ or remotely(though Scoones et al., 2013 point out the significance of social scientists and policy makers ingenerating land grabbing knowledges). Fairhead et al. (2012) argue that scientific experts arekey actors in circulating knowledge about human-ecological relations, particularly in thecontext of land appropriation. In considering how political economy shapes the productionand circulation of knowledge claims, scholars engaged with Science and Technology Studies(STS) have pointed out that epistemological differences can create divergent understandingsof environmental change (Duvall, 2011; Goldman and Turner, 2011; Lave, 2015). ForWhatmore (2009), scientific knowledge is not only used to settle disputes but alsomobilized to produce disputes that can be leveraged to obscure political relations. Claimingexpertise and working within international networks that circulate their claims (Braun, 2000;Vandergeest and Peluso, 2006), scientists’ knowledge is crucial in determining land’s potentialecological suitability, or unsuitability, for agricultural development.

While scientific consensus can form ‘‘a kind of operational common sense,’’ as DavidBond (2013) shows in relation to managing the effects of the 2008 BP oil spill, science is alsocomplicit in generating ignorance and doubt (Proctor, 2008). If scientific expertise isdeployed to determine what land is suitable for investment, divergent expertise can stakea claim in countering consensus about how land should be managed. In the tobacco industryfor example, industry-funded research deliberately diverted public and legislative opinionthrough decoy research findings, which were used to elicit doubt over the validity ofscientists’ research linking smoking to disease (Oreskes and Conway, 2010; Proctor, 2008).The value of such research is not, then, in the advancement of scientific knowledge. Much astobacco industry-funded scientists sought to counter beliefs that smoking causes lung cancerby conducting basic research showing otherwise, the value of such knowledge production ispolitical. The very fact that such research is funded and disseminated at all can generateenough doubt to sway legislative agendas. For Indonesia’s oil palm industry, as I arguehere, the objective of oil palm industry-affiliated research is not to advance scientificknowledge of peatlands. It is rather to manipulate policy agendas through which they cancontinue to expand their land control by maintaining claims of land suitability for expandedinvestment.

Oil palm and land acquisition in Indonesia

Oil palm cultivation has exploded in the past decade across parts of the humid tropics.2 Sincethe 1980s, Indonesia’s national policy has consistently promoted loans and investments foroil palm cultivation. This state interest in oil palm development as an economic growthstrategy reflects an assumption—probably well founded—that global oil palm prices,bolstered by international demand for biofuel vis-a-vis a looming energy crisis, willcontinue to climb (McMichael, 2014). The oil palm is adapted to lowland equatorialconditions and the oil from its fruit can function both as biofuel and as food.3 Indonesiaand Malaysia together currently produce over 85% of the world’s palm oil (Hall, 2011).While Indonesia has overtaken Malaysia in the amount of land under cultivation, much ofthe export production in Indonesia is partially controlled by Malaysian conglomerates orother Asian financial actors (Hall, 2011; McCarthy, et al., 2012). As Varkkey (2012)explains, although Indonesia is Southeast Asia’s largest oil palm producer, the network ofindustry-affiliated scientists, investors, government elites, lobbying groups, and plantation

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managers with vested interest in Indonesia’s oil palm sector is regional, reaching throughoutMalaysia and Singapore.

In Indonesia, rapid oil palm development has driven recent land transactions,consolidation, and clearing. The Indonesian Ministry of Forestry made roughly 10 millionhectares of state forest land available for oil palm concessions between 2000 and 2009 insupport of state development policy (McCarthy et al., 2012). Yet, national-level statistics forland concessions are widely considered inaccurate. Since state decentralization in the early2000s, all land transactions must be approved by local district heads, rather than thenational government in Jakarta. Many of these transactions are completed outside officialregulations and thus do not make it into national databases quickly, or at all. The nationalMinistry of Forestry once had jurisdiction over all concessions issued for development instate forests, which includes over 80% of land in Sumatra and Kalimantan. Now, districtheads—local elites—are politically successful if they are able to secure and control rents fromresources extracted within their boundaries. As such, district governments have themselvesissued 26 million hectares of oil palm concession permits between 2000 and 2010, but it isunknown how many of these concessions coincide with those issued by the nationalgovernment (Ito et al., 2014; McCarthy et al., 2012).

Recent policy directives, such as a 2011 Presidential Instruction issuing a moratorium onbiofuel development in peatlands and primary forests,4 reflect dampened enthusiasm forheavy reliance on forest-based resource extraction. This is motivated in part byinternational scientific knowledge regarding the importance of land-based carbon stockconservation. Yet, because land permit concessions are ultimately secured at local levels,these national conservation imperatives are not necessarily reflected in actual landacquisitions. Agricultural development, particularly in Indonesia’s resource-rich Sumatraand Kalimantan, is thus underpinned by messy political dynamics that make it difficult torelate policy directives framed by global ecological concerns to local processes that structuremany land transactions.

The underground as atmospheric threat

Indonesia’s peatlands underpin contestations over land acquisition and managementstrategies for oil palm cultivation. Over the past decade, monocrop oil palm plantationshave been expanded extensively onto peatlands in Sumatra and Kalimantan (Koh et al.,2011). Carlson et al. (2012) determined that over 60%of oil palm concessions granted tocompanies since 2000 have been on peatlands, significantly more than in previous decades.Indonesia has approximately 50%of the world’s tropical peat forests (Hooijer et al., 2010),spread across low-lying coastal areas on the islands of Sumatra, Kalimantan (IndonesianBorneo), and Papua. Tropical peat soils share some biophysical characteristics with peatsoils found in temperate and boreal forests, though vegetation decomposition occurs muchfaster in high temperatures of the tropics than it does in higher latitudes, making tropicalpeat vulnerable to rapid ecological change (Moore et al., 2013; Page et al., 2011).

Through this dead and decomposing biomass—trees, roots, and leaves—peat soilssequester and store extremely large amounts of carbon. Though scientists’ estimates vary,a point to which I will return, recent studies calculate that peat soils contain roughly 7000tons of carbon per hectare below the surface alone, while humid tropical forests on mineralsoils contain between 400 and 700 tons of carbon per hectare in above-ground and below-ground biomass combined (Moore et al., 2013). Other tabulations have calculated thatIndonesia’s peatlands contain approximately 65%of the global carbon stock found intropical peat soils and nearly 20% of peat soil carbon when temperate, boreal, and

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subarctic peat is included (Hirano et al., 2007; Moore et al., 2013; Page et al., 2011). Mostrecent scientific efforts to calculate the carbon stored in Indonesia’s peat are explicitly drivenby concern for planetary atmosphere, connecting the soil’s biogeochemistry to projectedgigatons of carbon dioxide that the soils could generate under certain conditions.

Many scientists further argue that the ecological processes through which carbon remainslocked in the soil or released into the atmosphere—carbon flux—are highly vulnerable tonatural and human disturbances (Hergoualc’h and Verchot, 2013; Page et al., 2002). Nearlyall of Indonesia’s peat forests receive water exclusively from rain, rather than from mountainrunoff or rivers, which makes for relatively nutrient-poor and highly acidic soil (Jauhiainenet al., 2008). For most of the year, under historically normal weather conditions, intacttropical peat soil is entirely waterlogged. Abundant yearly rainfall has historically meantthese peat forests are essentially year-round swamps. Trees shoot up from standing blackishwater pooled on the forest floor and roots grow upwards through water to reach oxygen.Under these hydrological conditions, the soil’s carbon remains locked up beneath thesurface. But if water tables decrease through a prolonged dry season or throughintentional drainage, the amount of organic material available for carbon dioxide-emittingaerobic decomposition increases (Hirano et al., 2007; Page et al., 2011).

When tropical peat forests are no longer waterlogged, most scientists conceptualize peatsoil carbon as an environmental risk through its transformation from an inert to abiogeochemically reactive substance. There are two mechanisms through which tropicalpeatlands emit carbon dioxide: oxidation and fire. Dry peat soil will begin to oxidizeimmediately once exposed to oxygen, a process through which carbon dioxide and othergasses are continuously released into the atmosphere. The soil molecules subside and becomecompacted through this oxidation process, leaving the dry peat to gradually disappear at arate of roughly half a meter per year. The other process through which drained peat soilsrelease carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses is through subterranean fire. Dry peatsoils, particularly the deepest ones, are particularly susceptible to burning because of theirhigh-carbon content (Moore et al., 2013; Usup et al., 2004). While forest and otheraboveground vegetation generally burns quickly with visible hot flames, sub-surface peatfire has the capacity to burn slowly at low temperatures. These subterranean fires rarelyrelease visible flames but instead smolder, emitting thick white smoke laden with hazardousparticulate matter as they eat through the soils. Fires like these are only extinguished bydrenching rain that sufficiently raises the water table. One peat fire ecologist described thesefires as similar to a charcoal campfire: the bright, hot flames burning through wood aredifferent from the coals underneath, which remain hot and prone to re-ignition even after theflames have died down.5 From this perspective, dry or smoldering peat soil is a doubleenvironmental crisis requiring ecological management: a localized and compounded firerisk and a continual source of carbon emissions that penetrate the global atmosphere.

Developing peatlands, cultivating risk

Many of the same characteristics that enable tropical peatland formation also make this landattractive for agricultural investment. Indonesia’s peatlands have coastal access alongrelatively calm seas and are intersected by myriad navigable rivers for easy transport. Yet,the peatlands have often been characterized asmarginal or idle land, lacking both the intensiveirrigated agriculture of Java and Bali and the richly valuable timber species found throughoutIndonesia’s humid forests rooted in mineral soils. Population densities throughout thepeatlands have also always been much lower than in Java and Bali, with most villagesettlements clustered only along rivers. The perception that these low-lying forests have few

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inhabitants, and few land conflicts, makes this land further attractive to developers for bothagribusiness and conservation projects. In many ways, Indonesia’s peatlands fall into dualcategories that have enabled land grab dynamics elsewhere: land perceived to be marginal‘‘wasteland,’’ while simultaneously having suitable biophysical characteristics and existinginfrastructure that makes it accessible for development (Baka, 2013).

Yet, despite their beneficial position for development within Indonesia’s broader economicnetwork, peatland requires intensive management to make it productive for monocropagriculture. Because of its unsuitability for smallholder agriculture, forests situated on thedeepest peat soils have been altered through decades of selective logging rather than throughagricultural cultivation. Selectively logged peat forests are often designated as ‘‘degraded’’because of their diminished tree canopies (Gingold et al., 2012; Sist et al., 1999). As a result,NGOs and governments have justified subsuming these degraded forests into developmentregimes on the basis that they are not suitable for conservation or other ecosystem protections(Borras and Franco, 2010; Hall, 2011). Lands that have low natural fertility, such aspeatlands, have also been targeted as marginal and unproductive, driving interest incapital-intensive projects to make them profitable. One persistent question raised throughthe expansion of oil palm plantations onto peatlands, particularly on deep peat soil, iswhether companies can operate profitably on peatland if such production requires capital-intensive land management. As McCarthy et al. (2012) describe in their analysis of oil palmexpansion, land can be considered marginal if the costs of developing it exceeds the benefits.The process through which agricultural rents can be extracted from marginal lands,particularly those in volatile ecological systems, thus requires making the land suitable forproduction, as opposed to finding existing suitable land. For oil palm industry actors, makingland suitable is synonymous with rendering profitable (cf. Li, 2014).

Indonesia’s peatlands are made suitable for land grabbing through extensive investmentin infrastructure and agricultural technology, including fertilizers. Though oil palm is aversatile crop adaptable to a wide variety of growing conditions, peatlands need to bedrained with canals prior to cultivation so the water table falls below the soil surface.Drainage, however, creates risk that the soils will catch on fire. Plantations on peatlandalso require ongoing monitoring and hydrological management to ensure that the watertable neither drops too low nor rises too high, flooding the plantations. Many scientistsalso contend that even if plantation managers are able to prevent fire through monitoring,and thus mitigate soil loss through combustion, the dry peat layer will continue to oxidizeuntil the water table is exposed, emitting greenhouse gases and making the flooded landunusable for further development. Contrary to many land grabs that have been matched tolocalized ecological systems that fit notions of a suitable or ideal environment fordevelopment (Wolford et al., 2013), Indonesia’s peatlands have been swept into this mostrecent developmental trajectory in spite of their volatile nature, which renders them a globalatmospheric threat.

Scientific consensus and environmental crisis management

Within a network comprising international scientists, some affiliated Indonesian scientists,and environmental NGOs, it has become well-founded consensus that Indonesia’s peat soilcarbon should remain locked underground rather than risk emissions through development.This understanding emerged out of a recent historical conjuncture of expanding large-scaleagriculture, emergent techno-scientific tools, and a political climate in which the Indonesianstate sought to avoid responsibility for socio-ecological disaster at all cost. A series ofextensive forest fires in the 1980s and early 1990s appeared to coincide with El Nino

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weather patterns, which can induce a prolonged dry season in Indonesia. After each of thesefire incidents, smallholder farmers in Sumatra and Kalimantan were especially blamed forusing ‘‘outdated’’ slash-and-burn techniques, mismanaging fires on their own property, andallowing fire to escape into neighboring forests (Barber and Schweithelm, 2000). But duringbreaks in smoke plumes in late 1997 and early 1998, academic researchers and local andinternational NGOs began to analyze the spatial distribution of post-fire burn scars. Theyused publicly available remote sensing data to determine that many of the fires had actuallyburned on land held by large companies, most with timber or oil palm concession permits(Barber and Schweithelm, 2000; Harwell, 2000; Page et al., 2002; Tomich et al., 1998).

While many NGOs and at least one government sector—the Ministry ofEnvironment—publicly accused the companies of mismanaging fires used to cheaply clearland before planting, the Ministry of Forestry instructed the media and other state sectors tosidestep or deny those claims. Instead, the government officially blamed the disaster on thedroughts wrought by that year’s El Nino (Barber and Schweithelm, 2000; Harwell, 2000).The El Nino phenomenon does indeed cause serious drought across Kalimantan andSumatra (Langner and Seigert, 2009). But this ‘‘unnatural’’ disaster, as Harwell (2000)describes it, could not be explained through El Nino conditions alone. The prolonged dryseason created the fuel, but the fires still quite literally needed a spark. That spark appearedto come from plantation managers setting fires to clear their land in preparation for planting.Furthermore, in areas where plantation expansion occurred rapidly and without recourse,smallholders were suspected to have started fires as retaliation against land claims made bycompanies (Page et al., 2009; Tomich et al., 1998).

Research by teams of international and Indonesian scientists working inKalimantan later determined that the drought conditions in Kalimantan and Sumatrawere exacerbated in the peatlands because they had been drained for large-scaleagricultural development (Hirano et al., 2007; Page et al., 2009). Undisturbed peat forestsare typically submerged in standing water for most of the year. Even during long dry seasonsthe water table is presumed to be no lower than 50 cm below the surface, making sub-surfacefires extremely rare in these conditions. In plantation areas where the soils have beenintentionally drained, however, the water table can be as low as 100 cm below the surface,which increases fire risk and stimulates peat oxidation, thereby emitting greenhouse gasses(Page et al., 2009).

In addition to illuminating the relationship between land use change and the increasingamount of land under corporate control, the 1997–1998 fires also catalyzed scientificresearch on the relationship between carbon emissions and peatland fire. The firstprominent study by a group of Europe-based peatland scientists was published in 2002 inthe journal Nature and drew strong links between Indonesia’s peat fires, large-scaleplantation management, and risks to the global atmosphere (Page et al., 2002). This studymapped the location and extent of the fires that occurred in 1997 in Central Kalimantanprovince in a peatland area that had been cleared by the government for large-scale riceproduction. To do so, they measured the difference in fire damage between intact and clearedor drained peatland and extrapolated the amount of carbon released from that year’s firesacross all of Indonesia’s peatlands. Using Landsat and radar imagery from a contiguous 2.5Mha area overlaying the Central Kalimantan site, they showed that 32% of the site hadburned that year, 91.5% of which was peatland. The researchers concluded that the 1997Indonesian peat fires had released between 13 and 40% of the mean annual carbon emissionsfrom all fossil fuels globally (see also Levine, 1999; Page et al., 2002). Put in other terms, thiswas equivalent to the total annual emissions from Western Europe’s power plant andtransportation sector combined (PEACE, 2007).

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Circulation of this expert knowledge in the years since the mega fires has generatedconsensus within certain policy networks about how peatlands should be managed. Afterthis study was published, the World Bank and other development agencies began citingIndonesia as the world’s third largest carbon emitter, owing to land-based emissions suchas these peat fires (PEACE, 2007). Among the international scientific community and actorswho draw on their work, the 1997–1998 fires rapidly shifted the ecological scale of theperceived consequences of peat soil fire and oxidation, from local and regional to global.It also solidified the role of large-scale plantation agriculture in enabling these carbonemissions and thus contributing to planetary atmospheric crisis. Through this shift andthe peatlands’ recapitulation as land suitable for agribusiness investment, experts began tounderstand tropical peatlands as a hazardous carbon source needing protection and/orrehabilitation. Prior to the late 1990s, biophysical research on Indonesia’s tropicalpeatlands in Kalimantan and Sumatra focused largely on biodiversity, soil composition,hydrological function, and localized impacts of agricultural development (Maltby, 1995;Rieley and Page, 1995). Soil scientists, physical geographers, and ecologists knew thattropical peat soils were composed of a high proportion of carbon (Neuzil, 1995) but priorto the 1997–1998 fires, there was still considerable debate about whether or not peatlands arenet absorbers or emitters of carbon (Rieley and Page, 1995). Yet following these fires, littledoubt remained in the international scientific community that Indonesia’s peatlands weretransformed from a carbon sink to a carbon source under the conditions produced by large-scale cultivation. Draining peat soils, scientists continue to caution, guarantees steadyemissions of carbon dioxide via fire and oxidation (Galudra et al., 2010).

Countering carbon emissions claims

Alongside the well-researched findings of international scientists and their Indonesianaffiliates that peatlands contribute significant amounts of carbon dioxide to theatmosphere through oxidation and fire, a subset of scientists working in Indonesia andMalaysia have made alternate claims about the relationship between oil palm, peatlands,and carbon emissions. Though their research circulates along different institutional axes, thisdivergent knowledge community offers a challenge to the notion of planetary crisisengendered by greenhouse gas emissions from Indonesia’s peatlands. Funded in part byoil palm companies and based largely at Indonesian and Malaysian universities, asopposed to overseas universities or international research centers, industry-affiliatedscientists are part of an Indonesia’s oil palm sector network with close political andeconomic ties to Singapore and Malaysia (Varkkey, 2012). Some industry-affiliatedscientists also work for the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture while others are funded bythe Malaysian Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment; both of these stateinstitutions have been tasked with expanding oil palm production for national economicgrowth.

Countering expert claims that tropical peatlands only release greenhouse gasses when theyare drained for large-scale agricultural production, industry-affiliated scientists have arguedthat peatlands’ greenhouse gas emissions are naturally high regardless of land use (GAPKI,2013; Melling et al., 2005). Oil palm development, the logic follows, does not increaseemissions from this elevated baseline and even has the potential to lower emissionsthrough proper land management (Sabiham et al., 2012). For example, a recentIndonesian Oil Palm Association report states that ‘‘even without human intervention(e.g. used for agriculture land/plantation) peatlands will produce CO2 emissions frommicroorganism decomposition and respiration’’ (GAPKI, 2013: 29) in reference to an

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unpublished Indonesian agricultural department study. The report and associated citationsdo not discount the relationship between peatlands and carbon emissions but insteaddownplay Indonesia’s role in peatland-based emissions. They argue that high rates ofagricultural conversion in Russia’s boreal peatlands and the proportionally small surfacearea of tropical peat in comparison to sub-tropical and temperate peatlands is evidence thatthe majority of peatland-based carbon emissions occur outside of Indonesia. Furthermore,rather than publishing in internationally recognized science journals, such as Nature orProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as foreign scientists and theirIndonesian affiliates working in peatlands often do, Indonesian scientists based at thecountry’s technical universities tend to publish in Indonesian language journals or inbusiness-funded trade publications, limiting the reach of their knowledge claims as well astheir international credibility. These publication outlets nevertheless enable industry-alignedscientists to publicly publish their findings and provide officials with citable data to referenceso they can strategically support their claims.

This industry-aligned knowledge network is far from a cohesive scientific body. Whilethey do present in some of the same venues and appear at the same working groups asinternational scientists, their calculated emissions values are generally dismissed by foreignscientists as being incorrect or contradictory. The latter network attests that they use faultymethodologies or erroneous baseline measurements to attempt to prove that peatlandemissions are comparatively lower under oil palm cultivation than in intact peat forests.Citing mainly non-peer-reviewed scientific research, Indonesia’s Oil Palm Association arguesthat they can best manage peatlands’ greenhouse emissions, as they would soil acidity or pestinfestations. While other scientists have made substantial claims about dry peat soil’songoing carbon emissions through oxidation, research presented by the Indonesia PeatAssociation at conferences and in Indonesian language reports offers evidence that carbonemissions can be reduced through techno-fixes, such as planting cover crops. Theseresearchers further claim that management strategies can successfully reduce emissions onplantations to rates lower than those of secondary peat forests (Sabiham et al., 2013), thoughseveral prominent papers present evidence to the contrary (Carlson et al., 2012; Hooijeret al., 2010; Koh et al., 2011; Paoli et al., 2011).

To further make peatlands suitable for large-scale mono crop production, the oil palmindustry and its associated knowledge communities point out that companies have amassedinfrastructure to reduce carbon emissions on plantations, through early-warning hotspotdetection and on-plantation local fire brigades, which reduces fire risk. The brigades canboth quickly extinguish flames using hoses and trucks to disperse water from the canals andquickly dig ditches to contain flames. Large plantation companies have the capital to protecttheir agricultural assets and subsequently reduce combustion-related emissions. Yet, theyalso have the capital to continuously dredge and drain their land, thereby creating additionalrisk for fire crises beyond their plantation boundaries because of the far-reachinghydrological consequences of drainage.

These alternate claims to peat carbon knowledge do not necessarily challenge the validityof the claims made by other experts. But that might not be the purpose of generatingalternate scientific research (Proctor, 2008). The ends of such knowledge claims areperhaps more significant than the data itself, if it can justify certain land managementpractices over others. By creating scientific divergence through alternative expertise, oilpalm industry actors can divert attention from land classification practices—such as thosethat enroll certain lands into conservation regimes—that threaten agricultural expansion.The political obfuscation that occurs through lack of scientific consensus (Whatmore, 2009)also drives more knowledge production within each scientific network, as politicians and

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planners can postpone or resist alternatives to peatland development on the basis of needingmore scientific evidence. These are, of course, not tactics particular to Indonesia oragricultural development. When scientific knowledge threatens to upend economic growthor political norms, expertise can quickly become contentious. Similar processes of divergentknowledge have played out more broadly in climate change ‘‘debates,’’ for example, whereclimate change skeptics have deployed fossil fuel-funded decoy science to stir up controversyin order to stall regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. As Oreskes and Conway (2010)show, such skeptics manipulate scientific knowledge to push back against experts—whooften come bearing bad news about the harmful effects of tobacco, acid rain, pesticides,and so on—and enforce the status quo. By maintaining controversy just as expert consensuswas forming and most scientists would consider any debate to be over, Indonesia’s oil palmindustry-funded scientists are similarly able to slow regulatory change that might threatencorporate land acquisition.

Land suitability and the uncertain underground

Despite producing research that most international scientists and their affiliates do not takeseriously, there is growing indication that the divergent expertise surrounding peatlands’emissions is swaying legislative agendas in Indonesia in favor of corporate land grabbing.In 2014, a national peatlands protection and management law was passed that mandatedrehabilitation of damaged (e.g. drained) peatland and conservation of undeveloped peatlandgreater than 3m deep. One of the law’s articles stipulates that peatland is considereddegraded or damaged, and thus in need of rehabilitation, if the water table falls to morethan 40 cm (1.3 feet) below the surface and/or the mineral soil beneath the peat layer isexposed (Presidential Instruction, 2014, article 23). While conservation groups heralded thelaw’s passing, they drew attention to the fact that—based on mainstream scientific data—ifeven 40 cm of peat is drained, it will emit carbon emissions through oxidation. Conservationgroups claim that this stipulation was not based on ‘‘sound’’ science to begin with but onexisting plantation management strategies that keep water tables at or below 40 cm tooptimize crop yields (Bell, 2015). Pressure from oil palm and pulpwood producerlobbying groups, however, successfully fought to have the law’s article changed to statethat only peatlands with water tables lower than 100 cm be considered for rehabilitation.Even with water tables at 40 cm below the surface, they argued, several million hectares ofcultivated peatland would flood, killing the oil palm crop (Salim, 2014). This ruling by theMinistry of Forestry and Environment advances the notion that peatland of any depth canbe suitably managed by plantations, a notion which relies on industry-supported counter-science to protect existing peatland-based oil palm plantations so long as the companiesmonitor their water tables.

Such regulation effectively cedes already developed peatland to indefinite corporatemanagement, but uncultivated peatland remains up for grabs. For most peat scientistsand internationally funded research centers, protecting remaining peatland with peat soildepths over 3m from agricultural development is a priority. The means of doing so, theybelieve, is by demonstrating the land’s unsuitability for mono-crop agriculture throughdepth measurements. Until recently, the Indonesian government’s singular objective inpeatland mapping was to determine which areas were suitable for agriculture. Peat soilless than 2m deep was considered suitable for agriculture; this has now expanded to 3min official regulations. Only areas of shallow peat were therefore mapped with any degree ofaccuracy. Mapping peat depth and volume has therefore taken on a sense of urgency amonginternational scientists, who are anxious to prove that much of the peatland remaining

Goldstein 11

outside oil palm concessions is more than 3m deep and thus can be protected throughexisting regulation. The difference between 4m and 15m of peat was insignificant togovernment officials paving the way for agricultural development. Scientists, on the otherhand, argue that peat of such depth is capable of producing the most carbon emissions. Butwhile experts consider the surface area of Indonesia’s peatlands relatively consistent acrossexisting maps, peat depth is more difficult to calculate than peat area and thus less accuratelymapped (Hooijer, 2012). Field workers sampling peat depth must contend with muddyareas, water transportation, and deep, heavy soils that contain large rocks and treestumps that are difficult, if not impossible, to cut with soil-coring equipment (Page et al.,2011). Some peatland scientists believe that existing maps of Indonesian peatlandsunderestimate peat depth of 25 to 400%in many areas of Sumatra and Kalimantan,indicating that the volume of peat—and the quantity of potential carbonemissions—could be twice as large as indicated by previous maps (Hooijer, 2012; Sari,2013). This underestimation includes a frequently cited peat map published by theNetherlands-based NGO Wetlands International in 2008, which at the time had recordeddeeper peat depths than any previous maps (Wahyunto et al., 2008). Scientists point to thisunknown underground as justification for further data collection and urge that peat depthmapping methods, like ‘‘quick and targeted, surgical, peat thickness field surveys,’’ be usedto generate additional peat depth certainty within a year (Hooijer, 2012; Sari, 2013).

The rush to know the subterranean is a thus rush to halt corporate land grabbing. Part ofscientists’ peatland mapping agenda is to use soil depth data to demonstrate that mostremaining peatland is too deep to be cultivated by oil palm companies without riskingmassive carbon emissions and thus can be protected by existing government regulation.Yet, because of government regulations rendering peatland less than 3m deep availablefor investment, scientists have been put on the defensive, having to generate more of theirown research to show the unsuitability of peatlands for land claims, and prove that existingmaps used by the national government are incorrect. Many scientists and policymakersargue that what is at stake in mapping this underground is conservation of existingcarbon stores in peatland areas that are still relatively intact. Yet, the data itself may beless significant than the claims it enables among those seeking to prevent agriculturalexpansion. In this context, peat depth and subsequent carbon stock calculationsunderscore support for land claims made through environmental conservation projects,particularly those that involve rehabilitating degraded peatlands through hydrologicalrestoration, including re-flooding large swaths of drained peatland (Joosten et al., 2012).Within scientific communities in which the connection between peatland development andcarbon emissions is no longer merely expert knowledge but operational common sense (cf.Bond, 2013), these proposed conservation projects offer an alternative strategy for landmanagement to corporate land acquisition.

Conclusions

Scientific knowledge can be mobilized to create contestations not simply settle them(Whatmore, 2009). When the contestations are ultimately over land use and control,scientific consensus legitimates certain management practices and, in the process of doingso, delegitimates others. The ecological stakes of forming scientific consensus around thedepths and carbon content of Indonesia’s peatlands are high. Within a climate changeparadigm in which concern for the planetary atmosphere is paramount in many scientificcommunities, oil palm development in peatlands has been well established by the scientificmainstream as a risk, contributing to carbon emissions and global atmospheric change. The

12 Environment and Planning A 0(0)

land use strategy that logically follows from this research agenda encourages peatlandprotection and/or rehabilitation and requires curbing large-scale oil palm expansion.

Yet as I have sought to show here, industry-affiliated science can also conjure doubt andambiguity through what I have called ‘‘divergent expertise’’ in support of continuedagricultural development. Because mainstream scientific expertise has framed the dangersof peatland development as a problem for planetary carbon emissions, industry-affiliatedactors have been able to produce counter-scientific knowledge purporting to show thatcarbon emissions can be reduced through land management practices. Despite not beingtaken seriously by most scientific experts, these data are nevertheless successful in persuadinga broader political community about the potential suitability of peatlands for mono-cropagriculture. There is a predominant assumption among many scientists that if they generatemore knowledge about peatland area and depth, these peatlands will be deemed unsuitablefor development, leading to protection and/or rehabilitation rather than allocation foragriculture. The international scientific community, therefore, continues to operate underthe assumption that the knowledge they produce will be taken as ‘‘truth.’’ But they do nottake seriously the possibility that competing knowledge claims—divergent expertise—maybe marshaled to generate scientific ambiguity that can then be used to support oil palmdevelopment. The lack of knowledge that matters is thus not a lack of knowledge aboutpeatlands’ precise carbon content but an ignorance about how counter-scientific claims mayundermine ‘‘mainstream’’ scientific research in order to serve political-economic ends. Foragribusiness, whose profitability model relies on seeking new land for expansion, creatinguncertainty through the production of counter-science—a kind of deliberately engineeredalternative knowledge—remains one strategy to sway legislative and public opinion awayfrom mainstream scientific consensus. Such counter-scientific narratives remain significantfor land contestation outcomes so long as they remain in circulation.

While much scientific expertise surrounding global atmospheric change is still producedin the Global North, the ways in which that expertise is deployed, contested, and remadethroughout the Global South warrants further empirical and conceptual attention. To besure, scientific expertise does not arrive in the Global South pre-packaged and ready forapplication, as several scholars have pointed out (Goldman and Turner, 2011; Lahsen,2009; Mahony, 2014). In newly democratic countries such as Indonesia, a plurality ofenvironmental knowledge producers—in and beyond the academy—have a voice inshaping land policies and practices far more than in decades past, when land usedecisions were made autocratically. But there is no guarantee that the emergence of‘‘horizontal knowledge’’ (Lave, 2015) outside the academy, in industry groups or publicforums, will necessarily support broadly laudable environmental objectives, such as carbonemissions reductions from tropical peatlands. While horizontal knowledge pointsoptimistically towards a dismantling of scientific hegemony by intellectual elitesalongside the emergence of new knowledge producers, it also provides an opening foreconomic elites to bolster their land claims. Still, these shifts may indeed be moredemocratic. In the case of Indonesian peatland management, a wider base of knowledgeproduction allows opportunity for actors to challenge scientific consensus, and use theresultant ambiguity to challenge policy objectives that originate with scientific elites in theGlobal North.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Julian Yates, Gregory Ferguson-Cradler, Chris Rea, Steven Wolf, and Kara

Schlichting for comments on various drafts. The author would also like to thank three anonymous

Goldstein 13

reviewers and Cornell’s Contested Global Landscapes workshop participants, where a version of this

paper was originally presented in 2014.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or

publication of this article.

Funding

This research was made possible with support from the University of California Pacific Rim Research

Program, the American Institute of Indonesian Studies, and UCLA’s Lemelson Fellowship.

Notes

1. The author has no affiliation with any scientists or researchers interviewed or cited in this article.

2. Other crops used for biofuel and/or edible oil have also expanded in the same time period, includingjatropha, soya, and sugar cane (Zoomers, 2010).

3. Most of the oil is extracted from the pulp of the fruit; this is called crude palm oil. The kernels arealso crushed to produce palm kernel oil, which is added to processed foods and used as cooking oil

throughout much of Asia and increasingly in Africa.4. A Presidential Instruction signed by the President of Indonesia in May 2013 extended the 2011

moratorium that effectively banned new plantation concession licenses on primary forest and

peatland for another two years. Financed by the Government of Norway through a REDDþstart-up fund, the 2011 Presidential Instruction orders the Ministry of Forestry to cease issuingnew licenses on land designated by official government maps as primary forest or peatland,

regardless of whether it is also classified as production forest and thus legally available foragricultural conversion. The Ministry of the Environment, meanwhile, is instructed to ‘‘makeefforts in reducing emissions form forest and peat land by improving governance in business

activity proposed in forests and peat lands within the Indicative Map for Suspension on NewLicenses through environmental licenses’’ (Presidential Instruction, 2013).

5. Fieldwork interview, February 2014, Jakarta, Indonesia.

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