Fia Hamid-Walker – On 31 August 2026, President Prabowo Subianto issued Presidential Instruction (Instruksi Presiden, Inpres) 11 of 2026 to strengthen enforcement of the ban on slash-and-burn farming and to control forest and land fires (kebakaran hutan dan lahan, karhutla).
At first glance, the Inpres appears to be another effort to strengthen Indonesia's ongoing fight against the raging forest and land fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan, the smoke from which has choked residential areas, including across neighbouring countries.
The Inpres reinforces law enforcement to prevent fires, expands concession holders' responsibilities, and seeks to prevent commercial actors from exploiting customary burning practices by making kearifan lokal (local wisdom, traditional practice) exceptions unavailable to commercial actors.
But Inpres 11/2026 also does something less obvious: it reorganises who has authority over fire.
Under the regulation, as I explain below, the central government assumes a stronger standard-setting and supervisory role. Regional governments retain extensive responsibilities, but operate within tighter national constraints. Concession holders are now given broader preventive responsibilities. And, importantly, communities practising kearifan lokal, mainly slash-and-burn farming, must increasingly make those practices legible through verification, registration, and government supervision.
This redistribution of authority may prove as consequential as the Inpres' tougher approach to fire prevention.
Reconfiguring central and regional authority
The new architecture of Indonesia's fire governance is evident in the Inpres's first operative provision, or Point 1, which outlines the instruction's overall guidance. It directs central and regional governments to prevent any policy, legal instrument, administrative decision, permit, approval, or exercise of discretion from allowing, or being interpreted as allowing, burning that conflicts with higher legislation.
Additionally, this section emphasises that the kearifan lokal exception for smallholder farmers should be applied carefully and proportionately, rather than serving as a broad justification for land clearing through burning. This importance becomes clearer in the duties later assigned under Point 2 (discussed below).
Point 3 is where authorities over fire management are distributed. The Home Affairs Minister is now responsible for inventorying and assessing regional regulations, regional-head regulations, decisions, circulars, and other regional policy tools that govern limited burning by smallholder farmers. Meanwhile, regional governors oversee the review of regency and municipal rules to ensure they align with national laws.
Notably, the Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs must now submit a report to the President within 30 days. The report should assess regional legal instruments related to customary land-clearing practices in which smallholders use controlled burning for subsistence cultivation, and include recommendations for amendments, repeals or cancellations.
This should not be understood as a wholesale re-centralisation of fire governance. Regional governments continue to play a significant role in fire governance, but their authority shifts. They still retain significant responsibilities for implementation and oversight, but nationally-set regulations represent a limited re-centralisation of fire governance by more tightly constraining regional discretion over the standards governing legally permissible burning.
Making kearifan lokal legible
This change is especially noticeable in how the instruction addresses land clearing practices based on kearifan lokal.
The instruction explicitly aims to offer 'measurable legal certainty' for its implementation. Point 2 then outlines conditions to identify acceptable kearifan lokal practices.
They must be authentic and intergenerational, carried out by a recognisably established community, and its history, methods, territory, and community norms should be verifiable.
Burning is restricted to two hectares per household, for non-commercial subsistence cultivation of local food varieties only.
Firebreaks need to be maintained, ecologically sensitive areas are off-limits, and the kearifan lokal exception cannot be used for corporate, commercial plantations, mining, or concession interests.
Meeting these criteria alone is not enough. Customary slash-and-burn land clearing by smallholder farmers also requires a recommendation from the central or regional government and support from regional authorities.
The administrative structure extends further. The Environment Minister is now responsible for creating operational guidelines to verify, register, and supervise customary slash-and-burn land clearing. Locally, registration should include details such as the household head's identity, geographic coordinates, area, local seed variety, proposed date, firebreak readiness, and fire-monitoring arrangements.
There appear to be legitimate reasons for implementing safeguards. Inpres 11/2026 specifically prohibits plantation corporations and industrial entities from using the notion of kearifan lokal as a pretext to justify clearing land by fire for commercial purposes. However, preventing corporate misuse and defining what constitutes legitimate customary practice are two distinct issues.
Under this new framework, kearifan lokal is acknowledged and made central to solving and preventing forest fires, but mainly through practices the state can identify, verify, register, and locate.
This prompts a broader and more critical question beyond fire prevention: who ultimately decides when local knowledge is deemed sufficiently 'local', customary, and verifiable to be granted legal recognition?
One issue deserves particular scrutiny. Point 2 excludes kearifan lokal exception from peat ecosystems – meaning customary burning is not permitted in those areas. The Inpres also prohibits burning within a 500-metre buffer zone associated with peat ecosystems, as identified through national peat-ecosystem and ecological mapping, and in protected areas and river margins.
The objective is clear: fire on or near peat can create serious, hard-to-control risks. But Point 2 may have uneven consequences for smallholders whose customary cultivation areas lie within or near landscapes now captured by these spatial restrictions. This matters because permitted burning is already tightly limited in scale, confined to small subsistence plots, and subject to firebreak and supervision requirements.
This means the question will now be whether a blanket spatial exclusion is proportionate to the scale and character of the customary burning being regulated.
Expanding responsibility beyond the state
The redistribution of authority is not unidirectional. Inpres 11/2026 also broadens the preventive duties assigned to private actors.
The Environment Minister is directed to mandate concession and land-right holders to safeguard their concession zones and a buffer zone of at least five kilometres from their edges against fire risks. They are also required to maintain emergency-response capabilities and heavy machinery, such as excavators.
The instruction supports these duties with administrative penalties and instructs authorities to focus on environmental restoration and enforce strict liability on accountable parties. This is significant. Corporations are not just being told not to start fires – now they are to become an integral part of the prevention framework.
The resulting distribution of power is quite complex. Central government gains more authority to set standards and oversee compliance. Regional governments keep many implementation responsibilities but face stricter limits on their regulatory discretion. Corporations take on additional preventive duties. Communities continue to recognise kearifan lokal, but now do so within a more formal system of verification and supervision.
Who gets to govern fires?
Indonesia has strong reasons to enhance its efforts against forest and land fires. Companies should not be allowed to pass off commercial burning as traditional practice, and concession holders require greater accountability.
Fire governance goes beyond simply preventing ignition or penalising those responsible. It also involves deciding which fire uses are legitimate, whose knowledge defines that distinction, and which institutions have the authority to make those decisions.
As Inpres 11/2026 takes effect, the focus should go beyond whether it reduces hotspots. Its impact on the relationship between Jakarta and regional governments, as well as between administrative authorities and customary knowledge, warrants equal examination.
Indonesia's new fire regime prompts a crucial question – not just how the state will manage fire, but who will govern it, under what conditions, and based on whose knowledge?