The issues, stakeholders, and solutions related to the peatland problem cannot be easily defined or easily addressed. The problem can thus be seen as one of today’s “wicked problems,” which have no true or false solutions, but rather better or worse ones. In addressing this kind of problem, academic researchers and NGO staff can play an important role to identify social and ecological issues and their inter-relationships, and to facilitate communication among local residents and other stakeholders. These activities should be done as continuous and flexible collaboration with local communities to find the better solutions to the peatland problem—or to realize a better future for society—together with those involved in the problem. This is the transdisciplinary approach that the authors seek.

Rantau Baru, an old fishing village on the bank of the Kampar River in Indonesia, is surrounded by peat hinterlands. The village territory has been recognized by previous local states for hundreds of years, and the villagers have managed it as ancestral common space based on a matrilineal system and headmanship. However, since the 1990s, acacia and oil palm companies have encroached on the peatlands of the traditional territory. In this situation, many villagers have either sold or plan to sell peat hinterlands in the village territory. How has their ancestral territory transformed into tradable land, and why have they chosen to sell it? What is the relationship between the traditional values of customary space and the adoption of the perspective of land as a commodity? Based on historical research on local land governance and a present-day household survey of land use and attitudes toward peat space, this chapter argues that the privatization of peatlands has transformed a once-common space into a commodity. Villagers sell peatland to actualize its potential amid anxiety and economic difficulty to contribute to the stable future of their descendants.

This introductory chapter explains the background of the book. The book was the result of transdisciplinary collaborative research on tropical peatland problems in Indonesia. This chapter describes how the tropical peatlands have emerged as a new development frontier for plantation opening and have experienced serious ecological degradation, causing fire and international smoke damage, and also how the Indonesian government and international organizations have begun to conserve and restore tropical peatlands. The chapter argues that today’s peatlands are a political arena involving diverse stakeholders including donors, central government ministries, local governments, environmental NGOs, forestry and plantation companies, and thousands of local communities as peatlands have become a contested space for plantation development and environmental conservation. And it is at the local level, especially the village level in and near the peatlands that the severe conflict of interests has occurred. There has not been much inter-disciplinary and transdisciplinary research on the peatlands at the local level. That is the reason why our research has focused on peatland conservation and restoration efforts at the local level, especially at the village level in this book.

Indonesian central and local governments have not made serious effort to recognize and protect the rights of the adat community (masyarakat adat; indigenous/traditional community) or adat law community (masytarakat hukum adat; customary law community), despite the Indonesian Constitution of 1945 and many national laws enacted to recognize such rights. In practice, government institutions facilitate conversation of traditional forest lands to other uses, often plantations. Rantau Baru is one adat community where customary territorial management has been eroded by outsider interests, including concession companies, leading to social conflict and environmental damages, including peatland fires. By presenting maps produced from the perspective of the Rantau Baru villagers, this chapter explores the difficulties that adat communities face regarding government mapping policies and suggests the significance of participatory mapping projects to re-establish sustainable adat community management of customary lands.