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Drones for justice: inclusive technology and river-related
action research along the Kapuas
Irendra Radjawali and Oliver Pye
Department of Southeast Asian Studies, Bonn University, Bonn, 53113, Germany
Correspondence to: Oliver Pye (oliver.pye@uni-bonn.de)
Received: 2 February 2016 – Revised: 31 October 2016 – Accepted: 19 December 2016 – Published: 17 January 2017
Abstract. This article discusses the potential of using drones for community-based counter-mapping. Drawing
on action research conducted along the Kapuas River in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, we describe how drones
were used for political interventions against land grabs by palm oil and mining companies. We share our experi-
ence of how to use drones to generate high-resolution aerial photographs that can be stitched together to create
GPS-referenced maps that can support local communities’ land rights. We argue that do-it-yourself drones can
reduce the costs of and expertise hitherto associated with counter-mapping. While this creates the potential for
a more inclusive technology, the question of who controls the technology and to what end is a political one. We
conclude by comparing two interventions and discuss why the drone technology could be appropriated by local
activists in one case but not in the other.
1 Introduction
This article discusses the potential of using drones, or
unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs), for community-based
counter-mapping. Drones have become notorious over re-
cent years as “weapons of mass destruction,” responsible for
the death of thousands of civilians (Cockburn, 2015; Cohn,
2015). But is it possible to appropriate this technology and
to use it for completely different goals, as a tool for environ-
mental and social justice? We argue that it is.
The findings are based on an action research project on
the political ecology of the Kapuas River, in West Kaliman-
tan, Indonesia (2011–2015). The Kapuas River is the longest
river in Indonesia. Emerging from the central mountain range
of Borneo, it is fed by streams and tributaries from the still
forested mountains of Kapuas Hulu. In the rainy season,
much of its overflow empties out into the lakes and swamp
forests of the Kapuas Lakes, home to a high diversity of fish,
bird and animal species. By the time the river reaches Pu-
tussibau (900 km inland) it becomes a muddy, slow-moving
river connected to countless swamps and oxbow lakes that
are created when a meandering arm is cut off from the main
source over time. The size of the river and its interconnect-
edness with this system of forests, swamps and lakes have
created immense ecological diversity, which is the source of
livelihood for the people there (MacKinnon et al., 1996).
In recent decades, however, the river and the province
of West Kalimantan have seen enormous economic, social
and ecological transformations. Widespread logging in the
1980s and 1990s has been eclipsed by rapid conversion of
forested areas into palm oil and wood pulp plantations (Pot-
ter, 2008). Small-scale to medium-sized gold mining activi-
ties are ubiquitous along the river’s tributaries (Peluso, 2015),
while large-scale coal and bauxite mining operations are
spreading rapidly. In the upper reaches of the river, various
conservation programs including national parks and REDD+
projects are imposing different regimes of resource control
upon the local populations (Eilenberg, 2015).
These socio-ecological transformations in West Kaliman-
tan are being implemented and enforced with the help of spa-
tial planning and mapping. National, provincial and district
governments that follow a development strategy of attract-
ing foreign direct investment use mapping to impose their
right to rent out large areas of land to investors, and this is
encoded in spatial plans (Lembaga Gemawan and Indone-
sian Corruption Watch, 2013). State mapping activities and
their access to geographical information “facilitates large-
scale accumulation strategies” and “consolidates state con-
trol” (Peluso, 1995:383). In Kalimantan, spatial planning has
Published by Copernicus Publications for the Geographisch-Ethnographische Gesellschaft Zürich & Association Suisse de Géographie.
18 I. Radjawali and O. Pye: Drones for justice
carved up most of the province into spatially defined cate-
gories of protected forest, productive forest, conversion for-
est, mining and local use. Often, the people living in the areas
that are classified in this way are not consulted and have no
idea that land that they use and view as theirs by customary
law is being classified and sold off by way of mapping.
In response to this use of mapping technology for state
and capital territorializations, a movement has developed that
uses counter-mapping “to appropriate the state’s techniques
and manner of representation to bolster the legitimacy of
“customary’ claims to resources“ (Peluso, 1995:384, italics
in original). In the 2 years leading up to the passing of a
new spatial planning regulation, the Provincial Regulation on
Spatial Plan Documents (RTRW) of West Kalimantan (2015)
and West Kalimantan NGOs joined forces to create the Civil
Society Coalition for a Just and Sustainable Spatial Plan in
West Kalimantan in order to intervene in the process and to
anchor local rights and participation within the new legisla-
tion (Lembaga Gemawan and Indonesian Corruption Watch,
2013). In this context, we introduced the drone as a way
of producing high-quality counter-maps to counter state and
corporate claims to land and to legitimize local claims. Our
argument is that technical advances have made this kind of
technology more accessible to local communities and that
drones could revolutionize the counter-mapping movement
by placing high-resolution and geo-referenced spatial data in
the hands of the grassroots. In this spirit, this article shares
our experience of using drones for counter-mapping, and we
hope that this can be shared widely and improved upon.
The question of using drones for emancipatory purposes
is more than one of reducing costs. If mapping by the state
is enthused with categorizing power connected to the repre-
sentation and production of space (Harley, 1989), then so too
must the counter-mapping movement ask who controls the
production of these counter-maps, who fills them with mean-
ing, and how mapping technology and activities change rela-
tions of power, gender and knowledge production within the
participating community (Parker, 2006). Introducing drones
in counter-mapping activities can end up repeating mistakes
and ambiguities associated with previous counter-mapping
movements (Bryan, 2011). So far, advances in civilian drone
technology have been made in the context of humanitarian
crisis intervention (Sandvik and Lohne, 2014) and in envi-
ronmental surveillance (Watts et al., 2010), which is usually
NGO-led spatial control, albeit in the interests of biodiversity
conservation. So, for example, Koh and Wich (2012) pursue
an exclusively technical discussion of the use of drones to
monitor land use changes and neglect entirely questions of
environmental justice and who is able to use this technology
and to what end. The issue here is whether the increasing
popularity of non-military use of drones represents only a
shift towards civilian technical surveillance of various shades
or whether drones could also become an inclusive technology
for grassroots activists and for emancipatory purposes?
The first part of the article discusses how drones could
contribute to the counter-mapping movement by addressing
some of these problems and, therefore, places the develop-
ment of the “community drone” within the method of action
research that informed our exploration of the political ecol-
ogy of the Kapuas River. In the following sections, we dis-
cuss the social and political dynamics of introducing drone
technology into a conflict over palm oil and into commu-
nities impacted by bauxite mining. We then show how the
combination of action research and politicized drone use led
to an explosion of interest across Indonesia in the drone as
a counter-mapping tool and also to some successful political
interventions.
2 Counter-mapping dilemmas and drones
Counter-mapping usually refers to the practice by which
indigenous communities map their customary or ancestral
lands in order to back up legal claims to their territory. As
Nancy Peluso put in 1995 (384), the counter-mapping move-
ment appropriates “the state’s techniques and manner of rep-
resentation to bolster the legitimacy of “customary” claims to
resources” (italics in the original). Indigenous people, partic-
ularly in North America, started using participatory mapping
to fight for the legal recognition of their ancestral lands from
the 1970s onwards. Since the 1990s, the counter-mapping
movement has spread across the world and has seen their
counter-maps recognized by courts and nation states in a se-
ries of legal victories (Chapin et al., 2005; Wainright and
Bryan, 2009; Bryan, 2011). In Indonesia, a large network
of groups and organizations involved in counter-mapping
emerged in the early 1990s as movements fighting against
large-scale development projects started to campaign for cus-
tomary rights over land and forests. By 2009, communities
active in the Community Mapping Network (Jaringan Kerja
Pemetaan Partisipatif, JKPP), in close collaboration with the
Alliance of Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago (AMAN),
had mapped 510 territories and 2.5 million ha of land (JKPP,
2009).
Despite its proliferation and popularity as a strategy, how-
ever, counter-mapping soon encountered several dilemmas.
One of these was related to technology and scale: if the maps
were produced as (geo-referenced) sketches (participatory
and culturally sensitive), they “could not take on land tenure
and legal battles with the state” (Chapin et al., 2005:628).
This is the main problem of the counter-mapping movement
in Indonesia – despite the intense work of decades and over
2 million ha of land that have been mapped – little has yet
been legally acknowledged by the state. If, however, counter-
mappers used GIS technology, the resolution of satellite im-
agery was so low that experts were needed to translate the in-
formation into maps that could both communicate to the state
and to those on the ground initiating the counter-mapping.
GIS technology remains “complex, highly technical, and ex-
pensive, especially for rural villagers” and GIS laboratories
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I. Radjawali and O. Pye: Drones for justice 19
“must be bankrolled by international donors” (ibid: 629).
This is the basis for Nancy Peluso’s assertion that counter-
mapping would never become a “science of the masses”
(1995:387).
This leads to a second and perhaps more fundamental
dilemma. The funding and expertise required for counter-
mapping leads to “new types of power relations around the
control and knowledge of mapping technologies” (ibid). As
Parker (2006) argues, unequal power and gender relations
within a geographically defined “community” are amplified
or reconfigured by the political and social processes emerg-
ing from the introduction of a counter-mapping strategy. In
their counter-mapping work with indigenous communities in
Belize, Wainright and Bryan observed that women were ex-
cluded from participatory mapping exercises because they
are “often not seen as bearers of the sort of geographical
knowledge that should be mapped to define the community’s
territory” (2009:161). This leads to a gendered “cartographic
portrayal of customary use.” The “cartographic–legal strat-
egy” leads to new inequalities and hierarchies, as those com-
munity members who work with the legal and cartographic
experts come to occupy a more powerful position vis-á-
vis other community members. Wainright and Bryan (2009)
also show how the cartographic–legal strategy led to “sub-
tle shifts” in strategy, as the leadership of the Maya move-
ment changed to reflect the requirements of negotiating with
state structures. In Indonesia, the community mapping net-
work JKPP, on reflecting their own work, noted an obsession
with the technicalities of mapping that led to neglect of po-
litical strategy (JKPP, 2009).
Furthermore, negotiating boundaries with the state means
accepting the latter’s legitimacy and its territorialization that
is connected to property rights, leading to the territorializa-
tion of “previously fluid and not mutually exclusive” claims
(ibid 165). This can lead to horizontal disputes between
different communities, disputes that can become “cast in
terms of ethnic difference” (ibid 165) rather than in terms
of “local vs. state or corporate” land appropriation. Counter-
mapping can thereby “racialize debates over land rights”
(Bryan, 2011:45). This is also a problem in the Indonesian
context. In West Kalimantan, counter-mapping by indige-
nous groups led to a “revitalization of Dayak identity” (Pra-
mono et al., 2006:8). Given that Dayak elites had organized
communal violence against immigrant farmers of Madurese
origin in 1997 (Van Klinken, 2008), an ethnic framing of land
conflicts can be problematic. If counter-mapping is organized
along racial lines (rather than in terms of class solidarity for
land reform for example) it can become a tool for the pro-
duction of new “racialized territories” (Peluso, 2008).
In their book on the “good drone”, Sandvik and Jum-
bert (2016) discuss the overlaps of military and civilian
drones in “the global battlescape, the humanitarian emer-
gency zone, and the field of everyday politics.” However,
they have not looked closely at the use of drones for counter-
mapping. Elsewhere we have developed the argument that
the drone represents a technical revolution that can poten-
tially address some of the key problems of counter-mapping
(Radjawali et al., 2016). The high quality and high resolu-
tion of the aerial photographs contrast with the lower resolu-
tion and often outdated information of satellite images. This
means that they could be more readily recognized by legal–
cartographic state systems. Self-made drones are also more
affordable for local NGOs or community organizations, re-
ducing dependency on donor organizations. Less expertise
is needed to fly the drones and to produce and interpret the
maps compared to the GIS-based analysis of satellite images.
This can potentially reduce the hierarchy of knowledge and
power accumulated in the hands of technical and legal ex-
perts. Because maps can be produced on a laptop very soon
after the drone flight, local people can be more actively in-
volved in discussing the information contained in the aerial
photographs. Ideally, a fairly large number of people can
be involved in identifying which areas to map and why, in
operating the drone or at least witnessing its flight and in
analysing the map within a period of a few days.
For these reasons, drones are currently revolutionizing the
counter-mapping movement. Since Irendra Radjawali intro-
duced the drone in our project on the Kapuas River, he has
been contacted by hundreds of activists and organizations in
Indonesia and as far afield as Guatemala and Brazil, ask-
ing him to show them how to build and operate drones for
counter-mapping purposes (see Radjawali et al., 2017). How-
ever, the drone technology as such does not solve the polit-
ical problems of territorialization connected to the “legal–
cartographic strategy” sketched above. Its exciting techno-
logical potential also makes it susceptible to prioritizing the
technical over the political. In her discussion of development
in Indonesia, Li (2007) analyses how political struggles over
access, rights and power were marginalized by the “rendering
technical” of the dominant (neoliberal) poverty reduction de-
velopment strategy. In a similar way, the use of drones could
perpetuate the problem of depoliticizing social struggles over
land into a technical exercise of (improved) mapping and le-
gal recognition.
3 Rendering political: the drone project
In our project, we attempted to counter a “rendering tech-
nical” of drone technology by “rendering political” the ap-
propriation of a technology of control for community em-
powerment. Our starting point was neither counter-mapping
as such nor a focus on territoriality but rather a spatially in-
formed analysis of the socio-ecological transformation of the
Kapuas River. We followed a political ecology approach –
looking at the production of nature, actors, power relations,
discourses and political struggles and conflicts (Robbins,
2004) – to the transformations impacting the river and their
socio-ecological interactions with society. Spatially, we re-
jected currently hegemonic concepts of river basin manage-
ment that “see river basins as rational units” and that strive
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20 I. Radjawali and O. Pye: Drones for justice
to optimize the management of the river basin by technical
expertise and improved coordination between manifold insti-
tutions located upstream and downstream (Molle, 2007:358).
A conceptual exclusivity to territorial spatiality (i.e. the river
basin as a bounded, physical space) neglects other spatial-
ities of power and resource flows that are created by inter-
actions between territory, place, networks and scale (Jessop
et al., 2008). As Molle (2007:359) notes, “many causes of
water-related problems as well as their solutions may indeed
lie outside river basin boundaries”. Instead, we adopted an
approach that looked at how different city–hinterland–river
transformation loops involved different economic, social and
ecological dynamics at different scales, in distinct networks
and involving specific places (Pye et al., 2017).
To this end, we identified key transformation processes
that were connected to and impacted the political ecology of
the river in different ways. Some of these (the river as a site of
social reproduction, gold mining, fisheries) are directly con-
nected to the river as a flowing body of water, while oth-
ers (expansion of palm oil plantations, conservation projects,
logging, bauxite mining) impact adjoining landscapes and so
impact the riverine ecological system as a whole. All these
transformations have direct impacts on the ecology of the
river. Upstream, conservation initiatives are undermined by
the degradation and conversion of tropical forests that jeop-
ardizes the biodiversity of the river system, while palm oil
mill effluent (POME), an organic pollutant, is dumped in Ka-
puas tributaries. Fishermen react to the resulting declining
wild fish stocks by investing more into aquaculture, which,
because it relies on catching fish fry, exacerbates the decline
in fish stocks. Gold mining, with its use of mercury for amal-
gamating the gold, contaminates water and fish downstream
(Pye et al., 2017).
To understand the social and political dynamics connected
to these environmental changes, we selected seven places
to start our enquiry into the territories, networks and scales
of these transformation loops. This is where we developed
the concept of participatory hydro-political appraisals (PH-
PAs) that were transdisciplinary (Lang et al., 2012) and that
added an action research element to the project. Action re-
search seeks to “form partnerships with community mem-
bers to identify issues of local importance, ways of studying
them, collect and interpret data, and take action on the result-
ing knowledge” (Smith et al., 2010:407–408). In this sense,
drones were an instrument to be used by community activists
in order to produce maps for objectives identified in a collab-
orative research process.
Each PHPA consisted of seven interrelated steps that
started with a reconnaissance and grouping exercise in which
we introduced the project to the group/community and the
setting up of a citizens research group (CRG) with whom
we then discussed the research plan and the idea of con-
necting up with other communities along the Kapuas and
its tributaries. In this way, we hoped our research would be-
come a jointly owned process of “social learning” (Buchy
Figure 1. A group discussion with the women’s group in Tayan.
Figure 2. Spatial problem and intervention analysis. Key issues and
interventions identified by the citizen research group were related
spatially to the river.
and Ahmed, 2007). We continued with a series of “place
biography narratives” exploring the history and changes to
the place and the river and with a “river transect,” i.e. a trip
by boat up and down the river to identify key issues, prob-
lems and changes. The heart of the PHPA consisted of a se-
ries of group discussions, i.e. the “spatial problem analysis”,
“change objectives” and the “spatial intervention analysis”
(Fig. 1). The idea was to discuss perceived problem and key
actors (affected by and responsible for) and to locate these in
sketches where the village or place of the PHPA was related
via the river to other nodes of relevance (Fig. 2). The line of
enquiry was then determined by key change objectives iden-
tified by different groups (women-only group, youth group,
men’s group, etc.) and by potential interventions that could
be followed up by the community itself.
Drones were introduced by Irendra Radjawali in two of
these PHPAs, where counter-mapping was seen as a po-
tential intervention. Instead of a narrow focus on counter-
mapping for indigenous territorial claims, the drones were
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I. Radjawali and O. Pye: Drones for justice 21
deployed in the sense of a broader understanding of “criti-
cal cartography” by which “social movements employ spatial
and cartographic knowledges in order to analyse and trans-
form existing spaces and prefigure alternative ones” (Cobar-
rubias and Casas-Cortes, 2009:339). In the first case we dis-
cuss, small-scale farmers near Sintang used the drone tech-
nology to counter their criminalization by a palm oil com-
pany. They could show that the company – a member of the
Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO; see Pye, 2016)
– had encroached upon customary land and had breached
requirements not to plant along river banks. In the second
case, communities impacted by a large bauxite mining op-
eration in Tayan in the lower reaches of the Kapuas decided
to use drones for four different purposes. Firstly, one ham-
let wanted to use aerial photographs to prove that their area
was inhabited and to challenge the status of their land as
“forest land”. The land classification by the spatial planning
agency had used satellite images that had “erased” the peo-
ple’s dwellings. A second village wanted to map their cus-
tomary fruit tree forest in order to get it recognized as a cus-
tomary forest by the forestry department. Thirdly, villagers
wanted to take aerial photographs of a wetland area jeopar-
dized by pollution from a rubber company and from bauxite
tailings, an area that they plan to use as a destination for eco-
tourism. A fourth intervention was to use drone-produced
images to prove that the bauxite mining operation had ex-
tended beyond the concession area and that the company had
laid an oxbow lake completely dry by diverting a Kapuas
tributary. The politicization of the latter case went far be-
yond the local issue when evidence provided by the commu-
nity drone images was used in an NGO intervention into the
provincial spatial planning process and when a Tayan com-
munity representative gave testimony to the Constitutional
Court in a hearing on Indonesian national mining policy that
was being challenged by multinational mining corporations.
We first introduced drones into our project after physical
access to the bauxite mining site was denied by company
security guards. We were looking for a way to create aerial
photos of the area, and drones seemed to be one possibility.
Without prior experience, we had to develop the drones from
scratch and, without funding to pay for ready-made drones,
we also had to keep costs down. The result of this trial and
error process was that we managed to build and operate a
drone for around USD 500. At this price, drones for counter-
mapping have the potential of becoming a “science of the
masses” (Radjawali and Pye, 2015). However, the question
of who controls the drone and the maps remains.
4 Mapping palm-oil-related land conflicts
In Indonesia and in West Kalimantan in particular, palm
oil expansion is one of the main causes of land conflicts
and environmental destruction (Pye and Bhattacharya, 2012).
When companies are awarded concession permits to estab-
lish oil palm plantations, communities with customary land
that is not acknowledged by the state and local farmers who
have no official land titles find themselves in a weak position
to assert their land rights. However, after obtaining a permit,
the palm oil company must secure permission from local land
owners for at least 50 % of their total concession area within
2 years. Otherwise, their permit will be withdrawn by the lo-
cal government and can be given to another company. This
opens up the possibility for communities to resist the expan-
sion of palm oil into their area. In practice, however, com-
panies are often able to win over local leaders and individ-
ual farmers with the promise of development (e.g. roads) and
higher incomes. Most expansion areas are therefore charac-
terized by messy “horizontal” conflicts within local commu-
nities, with some supporting and others rejecting palm oil.
In our action research location, in Ketungau Hilir subdis-
trict, Sintang Regency, these dynamics created a complicated
situation. The palm oil company, a subsidiary of Triputra
Agro Persada, a RSPO member with a track record of de-
forestation, peatland conversion and social conflicts (Chain
Reaction Research, 2015), was granted a concession for
20 000 ha and succeeded in gaining approval from the vil-
lage head and the customary council. However, not all local
farmers gave permission to the company to use their land for
the oil palm plantation. The action research with the CRG re-
vealed serious environmental problems that were impacting
the daily lives of the farmers. Wetlands, important for subsis-
tence fishing, had been drained. The polluted drainage canals
were no substitute for the loss of clean water sources and lo-
cals now had to bring in bought water by motorcycle into
their area. Farming for both rice and vegetables became dif-
ficult because of the changed hydrology and because of pesti-
cide run-off. In addition, members of the CRG had seen their
land taken by the company. In one case, 100 ha claimed and
farmed by one family had been converted into palm oil and
no compensation had been given. The company just cleared
the land and cut down rubber trees that they had planted. The
farmer could not really do much about it as he had no official
land title to prove that it was his land. Two other members
of the CRG had been criminalized by the company after they
had pulled out the seedlings that the company had planted on
their land. They were put in prison for 1 month and 12 days
without trial.
In this context, the CRG thought that mapping their area
could help to establish proof of company violations to sup-
port their resistance as well as to go further for possible le-
gal actions. We used drones to map two conflicting areas.
The first area was the 100 ha of farmland and rubber that
had been taken by the company mentioned above (Fig. 3).
We were able to map only about 30 ha of the area due to the
bad weather (hard rain) and due to security reasons (threats
by company staff and surveillance by local police). We lost
one drone and a mapping camera as the drone crashed due
to battery failure. We were able to find the drone and anal-
yse the cause of this fall. The photograph shows cleared land
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22 I. Radjawali and O. Pye: Drones for justice
Figure 3. Drone-produced orthophoto showing palm oil planted on
local farmland, rubber gardens and customary forest.
recently planted with oil palm and enclaves left out of the
conversion. The land south of the horizontal transect road is
claimed by the family, while the land north of the road was
customary forest released to the company by the customary
council leaders. In the northwestern corner, a site was be-
ing prepared for a palm oil factory that has recently been
opened by the head of the district. The photo is actually a
high-resolution and georeferenced orthophoto which can be
zoomed into for more detail. The CRG hopes that it can be
used to claim back the land or to obtain reasonable compen-
sation.
The second area was about 30 ha and previously a wet-
land swamp (Danau Meradung) and a customary cemetery
forest (Fig. 4). The area was drained and turned into an oil
palm plantations. The company also left part of the cemetery
forest as an enclave inside the plantation. Several influential
community members gave permission to clear the land with-
out consulting the others, leading to dissatisfaction within the
wider community. CRG members and other locals accompa-
nied us to the area and thought that a drone map would be
beneficial for their struggle in the future. The orthophoto-
graph shows the extent of the draining canals in the centre,
Figure 4. Drone-produced orthophoto showing the drained swamp
forest lake Danau Meradung and the enclaved cemetery forest.
as well as new plantations and roads and the cemetery forest
enclave. It also shows planting right up to river banks, which
contravenes both RSPO criteria and Indonesian law.
Our work in Ketungau Hilir showed that drones can be
useful for mapping palm-oil-related conflicts. The high reso-
lution of the aerial photographs and the relatively easy (open-
source) software for stitching the photographs together to
produce a map make drones ideal for capturing detailed land-
scape information. However, in this case, the appropriation
of the drone technology by grassroots activists was limited.
Members of the CRG were actively involved in deciding why
and where the drones flew and in flying the drone (Fig. 5). In
this sense, the orthophotos were co-produced because they
developed from the biographies and perspectives of the local
activists themselves. However, the local group did not appro-
priate the stitched maps or the drone technology. One prob-
lem was the remote location (8 h motorcycle trip along dirt
roads) and the marginalization of the community involved
(no electricity). The lack of electricity not only was respon-
sible for the drone crash but also prevented us from stitching
the images to create an orthophoto map in situ. These maps
could only be created after we returned back to the city of
Sintang where we had access to electricity some days later.
Local activists were not able to fly the drone, then stitch pho-
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I. Radjawali and O. Pye: Drones for justice 23
Figure 5. Flying the drone with the citizen research group in Ken-
tungau Hilir.
tographs and discuss the map directly, and thus a key em-
powering moment of the drone technology was lost.
The main political problem was the political rift within the
community itself. It was not just that the corporation has im-
mense economic and political power in these remoter regions
of the palm oil frontier but that political representatives at
the local level actively supported the company. The group of
farmers in the CRG was politically marginalized in the face
of an alliance between local leaders, company management
and local police and courts. This meant that we had to meet
clandestinely, making it difficult to conduct open training on
how to use the drone. Politically, this also prevented a uni-
fied strategy at the local level that could use the drone maps
against the land grab by the company.
Our intervention in Ketungau Hilir was conducted in co-
operation with the Front Aliansi Masyarakat Korban Inves-
tasi (FAMKI), a local Sintang people’s organization that or-
ganizes local communities in struggles against land grabs.
We hoped that by linking up with FAMKI, the CRG could
develop a strategy to resist the land grab. While discussing
the follow-up of the action research, however, it became clear
that FAMKI was too fragmented and had too limited finan-
cial capabilities. FAMKI members were only able to travel
to Ketungau Hilir because the cost had been covered by our
research project, so the follow-up of drone mapping activi-
ties had to be postponed until they had secured more finan-
cial support. This meant that local activists have not become
drone builders and operators. We could discuss the maps with
FAMKI in Sintang and they were enthusiastic about the po-
tential use for their work, especially because of the quality
and precision of the data and the speed in which large ar-
eas could be mapped. Previously they had relied on GPS
tracking, a method that requires much more time. So far,
the Ketungau Hilir drone maps have only been used as pre-
liminary data for analysis by NGOs in Pontianak. This was
useful to support their advocacy for protecting community
managed land to be recognized by government at the spatial
planning processes. The map has been used as one field evi-
dence of how encroachment happened. Narratives have been
built around the map and the PHPA processes. Nevertheless,
the maps were not appropriated by the local activists them-
selves, but rather by NGOs in the city.
5 Challenging a mining company
Another major industry in West Kalimantan with severe im-
pacts ecological impacts on the river is the mining industry.
Our research location, Tayan Hilir in Sanggau Regency, is in
an area where a large number of companies mine bauxite.
Large quantities of water are used to wash the bauxite de-
posits, and the bauxite tailings (“red mud”) are flushed into
the river. In Tayan Hilir the mining company PT. Mahkota
Karya Utama (MKU) obtained their permit in 2009 to ex-
ploit the area. Apart from the deforestation that accompanies
the huge open pit mining sites, pollution of the rivers is a
major concern. In particular, fish stocks have plummeted –
formerly a key source of livelihood in this wetland area. In
Tayan Hilir, the company had drained the Semunduk lake,
formerly an important fishing ground, and used it as a dump
site for bauxite tailings.
Opposition to the mining companies was much more co-
hesive than in the Sintang case, and leaders from the custom-
ary council supported the action research. A citizen research
group made up of men and women and from different eth-
nicities played an active role throughout the process. With
the help of our partner, the Swandiri Institute, based in Pon-
tianak, we set up a “drone school” in order to train locals
how to fly the drone and how to use the software to stitch the
orthophotographs together. About 25 people from different
ethnic groups, including members of the customary council
but mainly younger, technophilic men, took part in the train-
ing. The CRG organized larger meetings where the goals of
the research and the areas to be mapped were discussed and
decided. Flying the drones was quite an event, with lots of
onlookers, curious children and questions. The CRG also en-
sured that many locals took part in a meeting that discussed
the aerial photographs after they had been stitched together
as maps.
During the river transect exercise, we prepared the drones
to map the drained lake. CRG members and other members
of the community were trained to set up the flight mission
in Mission Planner (Fig. 6). We used a tricopter drone as
the area to be mapped was not too large. The mapping took
about 30 min and we were able to capture around 30 ha of
the drained and polluted lake. CRG and community members
were able to observe and to learn about the whole process of
using drones to map an area, from creating the mission to
the operation of the drones. The drones was flown at the al-
titude of 350 m a.g.l., which gave us images with the ground
resolution of about 12 cm (Fig. 7). The drone images could
show that the mining company was operating outside its con-
cession area (the grey overlay). The devastated lake at the
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24 I. Radjawali and O. Pye: Drones for justice
Figure 6. A flight mission prepared by the citizen research group
in Tayan.
Figure 7. Drone orthophoto showing the drained Semunduk lake
area and the bauxite mining concession (grey).
left of the picture has become a dry desert compared to the
(polluted) wetland area below. After stitching, local activists
were able to zoom into the picture and were able to identify
individual trees, company trucks and further details.
With the active involvement of local activists, the Tayan
case was taken up by our local partners Swandiri Institute
and Lembaga GEMAWAN, two Pontianak-based NGOs, to
support their advocacy work towards more just and sustain-
able spatial plan in West Kalimantan. In September 2014,
the Civil Society Coalition Towards a Just and Sustain-
able Spatial Plan, of which Swandiri Institute and Lem-
baga GEMAWAN are members, was invited by the provin-
cial government of West Kalimantan to discuss the District
Regulation on Spatial Planning. Lembaga GEMAWAN and
Indonesian Corruption Watch (2013) argued that the Dis-
trict Regulation on Spatial Planning had not been able to
cope with several problems related to spatial allocations in
West Kalimantan Province, such as (1) the existence of set-
tlements inside the forest area, (2) social forests including
community-managed forests, village forests and customary
forests that were not recognized in the regulation, (3) recog-
nition of community-managed areas, and (4) mechanisms on
the prevention and resolution of conflicts over space. The
coalition demanded that the passing of the regulation needed
to be postponed until the provincial government dealt with
these issues to promote a more just and sustainable spatial
plan. When the provincial government demanded evidence,
Swandiri Institute and Lembaga Gemawan used the map of
the drained lake to support their argument that there are still
unresolved conflicts as well as illegal operations of extrac-
tive industries activities in West Kalimantan that need to be
tackled. All the coalition’s demands related to the promotion
of a more just and sustainable spatial plan were accepted.
In a related intervention, the same orthophotograph was
used by a member of the Tayan community to give testi-
mony before the Constitutional Court that was reviewing the
challenge by large mining corporations to the 2009 National
Mining Law. The court invited testimonies by local commu-
nities impacted by mining in order to decide whether the
stipulation requiring mining companies to install further pro-
cessing facilities should be upheld or not. In 2014, the court
ruled against the mining corporations, upholding the 2009
law. The fact that the Constitutional Court accepted a map
produced by local activists with a drone as evidence created
a legal precedent, which suggests that drone counter-maps
could be recognized by the Indonesian legal system more of-
ten in the future. This decision and the evidence presented
also prompted the Ministry of Energy and Mining Resources
to review existing mining concessions. The Swandiri Insti-
tute used drone-produced orthophotographs to show that sev-
eral mining operations had been operating illegally in West
Kalimantan, and these were subsequently shut down, includ-
ing the mine in Tayan Hilir (Eyes On The Forest Jaringan
Kalimantan Barat, 2016).
In the Tayan case, community activists have learnt how
to build and operate drones and how to use drone images
for political objectives. Drones were used inclusively to sup-
port participatory mapping and became a tool for advocacy
around spatial planning. The work of local community mem-
bers and Swandiri Institute has generated interest not only at
the national level but also at the international level. The work
has been covered by the media, increasing the awareness of
the need for reliable, accessible and accountable spatial data
for the promotion of more just and sustainable spatial plan-
ning. Developing a more general narrative, Swandiri Institute
has been promoting what they call “inclusive technology for
just and sustainable spatial planning”, in which drones play
a key role (Swandiri Institute, 2014).
Swandiri Institute and local community members are still
working on mapping community-managed land and custom-
ary land in Tayan. They have two targets to further politicize
their work with drone maps. The first goal is to register their
maps with the One Map Indonesia Policy through BRWA
(Badan Registrasi Wilayah Adat/Customary Territory Reg-
istration Body), a non-governmental body formed by several
NGOs with the aim of consolidating the data and information
Geogr. Helv., 72, 17–27, 2017 www.geogr-helv.net/72/17/2017/
I. Radjawali and O. Pye: Drones for justice 25
on customary territories that have been mapped (Radjawali
et al., 2016). The second objective is to promote the District
Regulation on Customary Forest as the legal umbrella for the
protection of customary land in Sanggau District. Another
strategy that the local community and Swandiri Institute will
take is through the opportunity of the recently passed Village
Law (law no. 6/2015), in which villages are given more au-
thority to manage their territory and their socio-economic af-
fairs. At the village level, the local activists are now promot-
ing the village customary areas organization with the aim of
promoting collective action and management of their areas.
Drones ares seen as a technology that is inclusive and liber-
ating, and the decision to use them was a collective decision.
The maps made by the drone became collective maps.
Perhaps the most important development in promoting
drones as an inclusive and emancipatory technology has been
the creation of a “drone school” in Pontianak by Swandiri
Institute. The objectives are threefold: (1) to train drone pi-
lots, (2) to train local activists how to use the drones for sup-
porting participatory mapping of community-managed and
customary areas, and (3) to provide high-resolution, georef-
erenced and accessible data to support the advocacy work
of NGOs and communities in West Kalimantan and in In-
donesia. Swandiri Institute has been able to train several lo-
cal community members in Tayan to be drone pilots as well
as to train some NGO activists in West Kalimantan and in
Papua to use drones for mapping forest areas. Together with
Publish What You Pay Indonesia, the institute has also con-
ducted courses for organizations working on the issues of
transparency in extractive industries. The drone school is in-
tended as a programme for learning to build and to operate
drones for mapping as well as to perform post-processing
activities to produce maps. However, the technical training is
embedded in education on the legal and political context and
opportunities for action on promoting local community land
rights. The main aim of the drone school is to support the
political activism of NGOs and local community members
through the provision of good quality data.
6 Conclusion
The development of affordable drones creates the potential
for grassroots activists to appropriate technology as a tool
for social and environmental justice. Drones are no longer
the exclusive property of the military or of financially pow-
erful actors. An expanding do-it-yourself drone community,
low-cost UAVs and cameras as well as open-source software
all mean that it is now possible to put drones in the hands of
grassroots activists. The high-resolution images that can be
produced by drones can be a powerful tool to challenge spa-
tial planning and maps that have traditionally been controlled
by state and corporate interests. In a world where corporate
land grabbing is leading to land conflicts and environmental
destruction in the Global South, we expect that drones will
increasingly become a “weapon of the weak” to fight for a
more just and inclusive spatial planning.
The use of drones in action research on the Kapuas River
shows that counter-mapping can be used for a variety of
purposes and not only for mapping territorial claims. The
detail in the aerial photograph maps is so great that socio-
ecological dynamics can be captured. The grabbing of land
of individual families, the draining of wetlands, operations
outside of allocated concession areas, customary forests, etc.
can all be mapped with drones, leading to different kinds
of campaigns for environmental justice. Academics at UN-
TAN University in Pontianak, for example, have started to
develop a drone that uses infrared cameras to document or-
ganic pollutants in the Kapuas River. This could become
a tool for campaigning around pollution by POME dis-
charges into river systems. The example in Tayan also shows
that counter-mapping does not necessarily lead to racialized
claims: Dayak and Malay farmers joined together to cam-
paign against the destruction of the Semunduk lake by the
bauxite mining company.
In our action research on the Kapuas River, the use of
drones was still very localized. Due to temporal and financial
constraints, we were unable to use drones in all of our PHPA
sites and to scale up and connect our counter-mapping to cap-
ture the spatial dynamics of networks and scales that char-
acterize the flows of investment, power, corruption and pol-
lution that define the socio-ecological transformation of the
river. However, the Swandiri Institute expanded their work
with drones across West Kalimantan in order to push for a
more just and inclusive spatial planning process. As more
local activists are trained in the building and deployment of
drones and in the analysis and political use of the counter-
maps, they can increasingly use the opportunities now in
place as a result of this campaigning.
Whether civilian drones will be used in this way is fore-
mostly a political question. The proliferation of drones as a
hobby, for commercial mapping services and for surveillance
purposes shows that there is no automatism linking technol-
ogy to emancipatory aims. In their discussion of the “good
drone”, Sandvik and Jumbert (2016) show that there is a
lot of overlap between military use of drones and civilian
surveillance projects. In environmental politics, the question
of who controls the drones and to what end is particularly
important. While the use of drones to monitor forests and to
combat illegal logging might seem benevolent and politically
neutral, it really depends on the political ecology context in
which this happens. In Indonesia, placing drone surveillance
technology in the hands of the forestry department, which
legalizes large-scale corporate logging whilst criminalizing
local “illegal” logging, would most likely cement existing
power structures and would not challenge the structures fa-
cilitating the logging of natural forests. Placing drones in the
hands of local forest-based communities would be a different
political project.
www.geogr-helv.net/72/17/2017/ Geogr. Helv., 72, 17–27, 2017
26 I. Radjawali and O. Pye: Drones for justice
Our aspiration in using drones was not only to produce
high-resolution orthophotographs that could be used by local
communities in their struggles for environmental and social
justice. We also hoped that the drone technology could be ap-
propriated by local activists themselves and have an empow-
ering and liberating effect. In theory, this should be achieved
by integrating drones into action research, where they can
support citizen research groups in co-producing “their own
knowledge, with their own biographies, explanations and ap-
plications (Conde, 2014:69). In practice, this is more difficult
to achieve, as our two examples show. Active involvement
in building and operating drones and in using the results to
develop and follow through political strategies varied con-
siderably as a result of technical, financial and geographical
constraints. Most importantly, the concrete political context
of the drone-related action research in the specific locality
and the connection to wider networks were crucial.
As we have seen, the goal of an inclusive drone technol-
ogy in the hands of communities is not so straightforward
to achieve. To start with, “communities” are not homoge-
nous entities fighting for local control vs. corporate interests.
Rather, they are politicized and divided along social, politi-
cal and gender lines and embedded within larger transforma-
tion networks (Waylen et al., 2013). If “maps emerge in pro-
cess through a diverse set of practices” (Kitchin and Dodge,
2007:340), any initiative that aims to introduce drone-based
participatory mapping must decide on who to include, who to
exclude and whether to accept or challenge localized power
structures. If researchers include drones in their work, they
need to develop strategies that prevent a hit-and-run kind
of intervention, where the technology and the maps pro-
duced remain or end up under the exclusive control of the re-
search institution (Buchy and Ahmed, 2007). We have argued
that an action research approach can overcome this problem,
but that it needs follow-up support by local NGOs and so-
cial movements to succeed. Apart from financial and logisti-
cal challenges, particularly in remote areas, this can lead to
NGOs appropriating the technology and the data rather than
the grassroots.
A promising initiative to develop an explicitly inclusive
and emancipatory approach can be seen in the founding of
the drone school by Swandiri Institute in Pontianak. The
school trains local activists to build and operate their own
drones and to then process and use the data for collectively
developed political strategies. Locating the mission planning
in the locality is a concrete opportunity for community in-
volvement in deciding what and why to map. Stitching the
images into orthophotos on site is also an inclusive step, lead-
ing to broader discussions on interpretation when the results
are shown and shared. When local activists create their own
high-resolution images and can use their own maps to ne-
gotiate eye to eye with government or corporate representa-
tives, drones can contribute to an empowering process of self
emancipation.
7 Data availability
Due to the sensitive nature of the research topic and the social
and political conflicts involved, we need to protect the citizen
research groups involved in the project. For this reason, we
have decided not to make the recordings and transcripts of
the PHPA exercises publicly available.
Acknowledgement. Thanks to the German Research Foundation
for funding the research project, to UNTAN and the Swandiri
Institute for their help and cooperation, and to the citizen research
groups that participated in the project.
Edited by: F. Klauser
Reviewed by: two anonymous referees
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