Fuat Edi Kurniawan, Sadar Ginting, Anna Christi Suwardi – In the upper reaches of the Mahakam River, inside one of the last intact rainforest corridors of Borneo, the Dayak Bahau community of Long Isun has been fighting a long, layered battle for justice. Their history on the land predates the Indonesian state, yet on official maps their existence is reduced to an administrative code printed on a sheet of paper, with no record of the rivers they follow like family, the sacred groves where their elders are buried, the hills that hold ancestral stories.
In the documents that decide the fate of their territory, their cosmology disappears beneath lines drawn to serve other interests. Erasure becomes technical: their land is not seen, so their rights are not acknowledged. The consequence is real. When companies arrive with permits approved in distant government offices, those papers speak louder than generations of lived governance. And now, international climate finance mechanisms have entered this same forest, treating the landscape as a source of carbon emission reductions while the people who protected it have yet to see their rights recognized.
In November 2025, representatives from Long Isun filed a formal grievance against the World Bank's Emission Reduction (ER) Program in East Kalimantan province, arguing that the project infringed upon their rights, ignored unresolved territorial conflicts, and failed to uphold a meaningful process of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). The complaint is not a sudden reaction, but is the culmination of more than a decade of resistance, from daily patrols and adat (customary laws and traditional practices) hearings, to advocacy carried into global forums. Their story is not of a community resisting change. It is a community insisting that any solution to the climate crisis must first repair the injustices that created it.
For the Dayak Bahau, justice is not a slogan. It is the right to decide how their forest is governed.
Long before 'carbon' first appeared in provincial planning documents, the Dayak Bahau of Long Isun were confronting industrial encroachment. In 2008, and again in 2014, two timber companies – PT Kemakmuran Berkah Timber (KBT) and PT Rimba Mutiara Tradisi Kalimantan (RMTK), both under the Harita Group – were approved to access 21,443 hectares (almost 53,000 acres) of customary land, which is roughly a quarter of their territory. These permits were granted solely on the basis of state administrative maps that did not acknowledge customary boundaries shaped by rivers, peaks or oral history.
What the state saw as legal, Indigenous people experienced as dispossession. In 2014, when a group of residents attempted to document evidence of logging for an adat hearing, armed police arrived. A respected community member, Theodorus Tekwan, was detained and charged with extortion after refusing to return a logger's chainsaw, which he thought could help document the violations. Tekwan spent more than three months in detention without trial. Upon his return, community members recall he struggled to speak as he once did, carrying the weight of confinement after a lifetime spent in open forest environments.
That moment revealed the truth: the law was not built to protect them, but to discipline them.
Despite the trauma, the Dayak Bahau did not surrender. Resistance matured through everyday acts of stewardship: women continued rotational management of forest gardens; elders reaffirmed ancestral boundaries through ritual; youth digitized testimonies, photographs and conflict archives; and patrols monitored logging routes. What looked like tradition to outsiders was, in fact, political resistance expressed through care.
These acts were assertions: the forest belongs to those who tend it. The community sought official recognition as Masyarakat Hukum Adat ("Indigenous Law Community"), but the process stalled due to district politics and overlapping claims. In 2011, an external consultant mapped their land with minimal community involvement, producing straight lines that cut through customary areas and ignored the natural markers used for generations. Despite protest, the inaccurate map was legitimized by local authorities. Mapping became a tool of dispossession.
Over time, the community's strategy expanded. In 2017, after reviewing evidence submitted by Long Isun and civil society groups, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) revoked KBT's sustainable logging certification due to rights violations and unresolved conflicts. It was a rare victory for a remote community deep in the rainforest, a sign that Indigenous archives could speak to global institutions. That experience prepared the Dayak Bahau for a new kind of negotiation: not with companies in their forest, but with multilateral institutions headquartered half a world away.
When the World Bank and East Kalimantan government launched the Emissions Reduction (ER) Program, it was framed as a breakthrough: a province could receive financial incentives for reducing emissions from deforestation, evolving from the REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus) framework. Safeguards, benefit-sharing plans, and the inclusion of Indigenous communities were repeatedly emphasized.
But in practice, carbon arrived before justice, as forest areas still in dispute with the Harita Group were included in the emissions accounting. Crucially, only administrative villages were recognized as beneficiaries, while Long Isun – whose customary rights remain unrecognized due to bureaucratic obstruction – became invisible in the benefit-sharing mechanism. In carbon calculations, the Dayak Bahau count as contributors to emissions reductions. In political terms, they are absent, and FPIC was conducted as a technical process rather than a political one. The foundational question of "Who holds legitimate authority over the forest?" was treated like a checklist item rather than a matter of justice.
The ER Program did not create the conflict, but by moving forward on land that was still contested, it risked reinforcing the same power structures that enabled companies to operate without genuine consent.
The November 2025 grievance reflects a sophisticated form of resistance and argues that the ER Program failed to ensure meaningful FPIC, ignored unresolved land disputes, channels benefits through structures that erase Indigenous governance, and may violate the World Bank's own Environmental and Social Standard 7 (ESS7).
The Dayak Bahau are not seeking compensation. They are demanding recognition, mediation, and a resolution on territorial claims. It is a remarkable move not because Indigenous communities rarely resist, but because Long Isun has strategically shifted the conflict from local hearings to international environmental law.
This is what scholars call the politics of scale, jumping from the riverbank to the global stage. The community has become a practitioner of grassroots diplomacy, using testimonies, land knowledge, conflict archives and the language of safeguards to challenge a multilateral institution. Their message is clear: climate solutions built on unresolved dispossession cannot be legitimate.
The Long Isun case carries lessons far beyond East Kalimantan. Carbon markets are not neutral; they operate through existing power relations. When those relations exclude Indigenous peoples, climate finance can reinforce harm instead of reducing it. FPIC cannot be symbolic. A meeting does not equal consent. Consent requires equality, and equality is impossible without recognition of customary rights. Benefit sharing cannot compensate for the erasure of sovereignty.
The forest stands today because generations of Dayak Bahau have defended it, long before 'emission reductions' became a metric. Their rotational gardens, ritual prohibitions and forest patrols are governance institutions in themselves. Sustainability cannot be engineered through incentives alone. It depends on whether the people who protect forests have the political power to govern them.
The outcome of Long Isun's complaint will reveal whether global climate finance systems are willing to address the political roots of forest governance. A genuine response from the World Bank could set an important precedent: resolving customary land disputes before launching carbon projects. If not, the ER Program risks becoming another example of climate initiatives that reproduce the injustices they aim to fix.
Meanwhile, life in Long Isun continues. Women tend their forest gardens, men patrol the river, and elders tell stories of hills with names older than the republic. Their guardianship comes not from external rewards, but from the inseparable connection between land and identity. In the eyes of the Dayak Bahau, justice – like a forest – grows from the soil upward.
[Fuat Edi Kurniawan is a researcher at DEEP EnGender, which supports peace & gender justice, Indigenous food systems, ecological regeneration, and Indigenous rights in Southeast Asia. Sadar Ginting is the chair of DEEP EnGender and a public health scholar. Anna Christi Suwardi founded DEEP EnGender and is a lecturer at Mae Fah Luang University in Thailand.]