KITLV/VVI Seminar | Turning research into action: Rethinking land governance in Indonesia | Willem van der Muur
January 29 @ 15:30 - 17:00
This seminar explores how academic research can influence policy, with a focus on land governance in Indonesia. It highlights the impact of research at Leiden University on the World Bank’s $653 million Indonesia – Integrated Land Administration and Spatial Planning (ILASP) project, which integrates flexible approaches to registering customary and indigenous land. As the Bank’s largest ever land initiative, ILASP aims to strengthen tenure security, protect ecosystems, and align land administration with spatial planning.
The seminar will critically examine the opportunities and challenges of linking research to practice in addressing Indonesia’s complex land governance issues.
Speaker
Dr. Willem van der Muur is a Senior Land Administration Specialist at the World Bank, based in Jakarta, Indonesia. His expertise and experience span land governance, community engagement, customary land tenure, and sustainable landscape management. He currently leads the World Bank’s largest ever land project, which aims to strengthen land tenure security and spatial planning in Indonesia to address critical challenges in social and environmental resilience. Willem holds a PhD in Law and Governance from Leiden University, where his research examined local community efforts to secure collective land rights, supported by extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia.
Moderator
Ward Berenschot is a professor of comparative political anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and a senior researcher at KITLV. His current research focuses on three main topics: land conflicts, campaign finance, and public opinion manipulation through social media. He coordinates a research collaboration (with Wageningen University and Universitas Andalas) that studies the activism of rural Indonesians against palm oil companies.
Discussant
Jacqueline Vel is senior researcher at the Van Vollenhoven Institute of Leiden Law School on the theme of law, governance and society in Indonesia. While working in Leiden since 2006 at the VVI and KITLV, her research topics included democratization and local politics, changes in land tenure security, access to justice for the poor, and social and legal aspects of introducing new crops for developing biofuel production in Indonesia.
Format, date, time & venue
This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Wednesday 29 January from 15.30 – 17.00 PM (CET).
Registration
If you want to join this seminar on location, please register via: [email protected].
If you wish to join this seminar online, please register here.
Image
Local community members in South Kalimantan engaged in participatory mapping. Source: Indonesian Ministry of Agrarian Affairs and Spatial Planning/National Land Agency (ATR/BPN).
