Community advocates for land rights justice in post-reformasi Indonesia frame their claims in terms of either indigenous (adat) rights or agrarian justice discourses. This study considers how these framings function, how effectively they support land rights struggles, and how they advance justice claims. The article provides analytical insights by comparing two conflicts involving communities and large-scale forest plantation companies in Sumatra. It finds that, where democratisation has opened up political space, agrarian justice framing provides a more effective basis for mobilising a wider coalition of actors in heterogeneous contexts and can provide political leverage in such conflicts. While recent changes have widened the legal space for indigenous (adat) rights within de jure ‘state forests’, the customary framing needs to fit community claims into the restricted, bureaucratised adat concept found in state laws and, in diverse rural contexts, may provide a limited vehicle for social mobilisation. Irrespective of the framing, unless effective mobilisation and legal reform can provide legal and political empowerment, political, institutional and structural barriers will continue to generate truncated agreements in conflict negotiations that potentially cement the exclusion and marginalisation of local communities from land access and control.

Although Indonesia is experiencing one of the most complex transformations of social forestry policy in the world, there is a need to step back and more closely examine the politics, ecologies, and economies that provide context for its implementation. This introduction offers a synthesis of the collection of special section submissions in Forest and Society. We begin by navigating the current social forestry moment by presenting a heuristic for identifying the discourses underpinning the rapid expansion in support of social forestry schemes. These perspectives are fragmented across four continuously contested discourses: community-first, legal-first, conservation-first, and development-first. We then contextualize the historical developments that brought social forestry into its current form by laying out a genealogy of its antecedents across three distinct generations. These three generations of social forestry are roughly aligned with the overall political changes that have taken place in Indonesia, each of which engaged in their own mechanisms for defining and administering social forestry. The first generation roughly follows the period of New Order rule; a second generation began as the regime unraveled, resulting in a period of reform and restructuring of the political system. At this time, new legal frameworks were introduced, followed by the development of new implementation mechanisms. We argue that social forestry has entered a third distinct period that is characterized by the expanding interests of numerous stakeholders to formalize permitting schemes. This third generation presents new possibilities for redefining land management on Indonesia’s vast national forests. The contributions to this special issue shed new light on the overall implications of these changes. We divide the findings across submissions, covering broad topical engagement on the economies, ecologies, and politics at different governing scales. From these findings we suggest a course for future research, and identify key policy challenges for the future of social forestry and for Indonesia.