The empirical visibility of land use conflicts: From latent to manifest conflict through law enforcement in a national park in Indonesia

- We developed a three-dimensional methodology to assess the conflict's visibility.
- We used bureaucratic politics and interest theory.
- The conflict's visibility methodology was tested through a heuristic case study.

The rich literatures about land use conflicts make a valuable contribution by empirically describing the substance of local land use conflicts and through this making those cases accessible for research from multiple science disciplines. Those studies, however, often are descriptive in nature, and have a rather vague theoretical conceptualisation of conflict. We propose a conceptual model of conflicts that is based on political theory and the interests of political actors. It stresses that land use conflicts will rarely be solved, but are merely settled by policy and eventually its enforcement. Throughout the policy process, however, the conflict of interests will remain, while the empirical visibility of land use conflicts will vary.This article aims to construct a framework for analysing the empirical visibility of land use conflicts, and to apply it for analysing the empirical visibility of the dispute between the Tallasa community and the national park bureaucracy in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. To test this methodology, we conducted observations and interviews. Since 2004, we have been involved both directly and indirectly with the conflict mediation process for the dispute involving the Tallasa community. The results show that the conflict between people-livelihood interests and conservation interests remains the same over forty years but regulations and visibility changed. The national park did not provide a final resolution, but instead supported both conflicting interests. In latent position, policy for enforcing existing formal regulations did not change implementation and visibility in practice. We also find that policy for enforcing a new formal regulation triggered more conflict visibility. Due to the short period of visibility, the development of regulation during the latent period remains open. We conclude that conflict visibility in political discourse and media has an impact on reformulating formal regulation.