Custom, codification, collaboration: Integrating the legacies of land and forest authorities in Oecusse Enclave, East Timor

Historical and contemporary practices of rural land and forest regulation demonstrate a wide range of interactions among customary and state authorities. In East Timor's Oecusse enclave, autonomous local authorities have long sought to access and to control forest products, including sandalwood and beeswax, through a political and ritual hierarchy that demonstrates a fluctuating relationship to state governance.; After centuries of mercantilism, Portuguese colonialism, Indonesian rule, and United Nations administration, the newly independent nation of East Timor bears the environmental and political effects of a long history of forest product extraction. Oral narratives and written accounts illustrate periodic forest abundance and decline in response to trade, customary regulation, state intervention, and changing agricultural practices. Political histories parallel popular environmental histories, particularly regarding the changing position of customary authorities and the decline or resurgence in accompanying practice of forest prohibitions. To counteract the forest losses that occurred when customary authorities lost power under recent administrations, the new government has supported collaborative initiatives to reinstate these figures and to revive the forest protection ceremonies, leading to new roles for customary authorities. Tracing the changing place of embodied local state and customary authorities in rural land and forest oversight is central to understanding the causes of change in forests and landscapes.; Successive states' efforts to formalize landholdings in East Timor, alongside modern codification of forest protection, demonstrate the complexities and ambiguities of efforts to codify existing land and forest practices. Different political regimes' rhetoric and laws about customary land recognition have variously emphasized a legally distinct status for East Timorese, regional commonalities, and urgency for the new nation to develop a modern land administration system, without offering substantive recognition of rural people's status as landowners.