Historic recognition of the first ever customary forests in Indonesia took place on December 30, 2016, with nine adat communities receiving titles over 13,000 hectares of forestland. The titles were handed over to communities by President Jokowi, who has set a target of recognizing the rights of indigenous communities to over 12.7 million hectares of forestland. This breakthrough is built on a landmark 2013 Constitutional Court ruling that restored Indigenous Peoples’ rights over their customary forests, but did not result in concrete actions until now.

Read more here, and learn more about RRI’s Strategic Response Mechanism, which helped support this work.