2025/12/15 by Mila Desi Anasanti · 1 voice
Environmental Science · Agricultural and Biological Sciences · #Oil Palm Production and Sustainability #Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development #Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management
paper · doi:10.31235/osf.io/sfmv8_v1
openalex created_date 2025/12/15 · openalex publication_date 2025/12/15 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
Indonesia, the world’s largest palm-oil producer, has undergone extensive forest conversion over the past two decades through forest-release policies and plantation licensing, particularly in Sumatra and Kalimantan. These land-use changes have degraded watershed buffering capacity and increased the frequency and severity of hydrological disasters for downstream communities. Yet such transformations are routinely obscured by political narratives that present palm oil as a green, pro-poor, and sovereign commodity, while dismissing concerns over deforestation as biased or misleading. Recent presidential claims that “palm oil is just trees that absorb CO₂” exemplify an emerging post-truth environmental discourse that equates plantations with forests and weakens climate commitments.This article develops a political-ecology analysis of Indonesia’s palm-oil–disaster nexus by bringing together three conceptual lenses: (1) the political ecology of commodity frontiers and forest governance; (2) post-truth environmental politics and the strategic denial of ecological harm; and (3) disaster populism and crisis-time “governance by spectacle.” Drawing on validated secondary evidence on deforestation, licensing decisions, watershed degradation, and major flood events, complemented by NGO investigations, media reporting, and selected policy documents, the article employs a within-case interpretive design combining process tracing and discourse analysis.We show how state–business coalitions facilitating forest conversion are legitimised through post-truth narratives, and how subsequent flood disasters become stages for personalised, mediatised food-aid spectacles that reinforce elite legitimacy while diverting attention from structural drivers of vulnerability. These findings suggest that Indonesia’s climate and disaster governance is increasingly organised around symbolic relief and denial rather than risk reduction and justice. Policy implications include re-evaluating forest-release permits in high-risk watersheds, clarifying legal definitions of “forest” versus “plantation,” improving data transparency, and de-personalising disaster relief within rights-based frameworks.