Achmad Zacky raised four fingers into the air, then smiled.
“Social Forestry in North Maluku has not reached five fingers yet—only four. Because there is still no customary forest.”
Laughter filled the meeting room. But the joke made by the Head of Community Extension and Empowerment Division of the North Maluku Provincial Forestry Office carried a reality that was anything but funny. The five-finger salute is the symbol of Social Forestry, a gesture used by its advocates as a sign of recognition and solidarity. In North Maluku, that salute remains incomplete. Customary forests, the component that should complete it, have yet to exist. Behind that missing fifth finger lies a number that Pak Zacky mentioned moments later: fifty-eight thousand hectares of identified potential customary forests, yet not a single regional legal framework exists to recognize the communities that manage them.
Five fingers, but only four are standing. The fifth finger, it seems, is still waiting.
***
The Socialization and Focus Group Discussion on Handling Tenurial Conflicts and Customary Forests in North Maluku Province, held on Monday, May 25, 2026, brought together people who do not always sit at the same table: government officials, academics from Khairun University and several private universities, customary leaders, and representatives of civil society. For an entire day, in one room, one question kept circling without ever being fully answered: who are customary forests really for?
Opening the forum was North Maluku Governor Sherly Tjoanda. The first woman to lead the province did not begin her remarks with achievements. She began with an acknowledgment.
Indigenous peoples, she said, are currently facing two major forces: mining and state forests. In North Maluku, approximately 2.5 million hectares—more than thirty percent of the province’s total area—are designated as forest zones. Across this vast landscape, communities such as the O’Hangana Manyawa have, for generations, cultivated gardens, built homes, and buried their ancestors. Yet without legal recognition of their existence, those lands remain vulnerable to claims by anyone who arrives carrying documents and heavy machinery.
Governor Sherly used a word that sounds fair but carries considerable complexity: proportional. Proportional for indigenous peoples, proportional for investment, proportional for forest areas. From the podium, the word sounded wise. But outside the meeting room, in villages whose lands have already been eroded long before the word “proportional” could be spelled out in any regional regulation, a much sharper question remains: proportional according to whom, and measured by what standard?
Numbers That Have Not Yet Become Rights
Pak Zacky mentioned the figure of fifty-eight thousand hectares in a tone that sounded like good news. And in one sense, it is. The potential has been identified, documented, and someone cared enough to count it.
But numbers are one thing. Recognition is another.
The discussions throughout the day produced two findings that only reinforced one another. First, to date, there is not a single regional legal product in North Maluku that officially recognizes indigenous peoples. The most recent progress has only reached the stage of an Academic Draft for a Regional Regulation on the Recognition of Indigenous Peoples in North Halmahera Regency, a document jointly initiated by the Provincial Forestry Office and the ECONUSA Foundation. A document—not yet a regulation. An intention—not yet certainty.
Second, and perhaps the most unsettling conclusion of the day, even customary forests whose status has already been formally designated do not automatically change the fate of the communities that manage them. Their utilization remains subject to the functions assigned when the area was still classified as state forest. In other words, indigenous communities inherit the label of “customary forest” without inheriting the authority to determine for themselves how they will live within it.
Customary leaders and several local government representatives raised the same question in different ways: what tangible benefits do customary forests provide to indigenous peoples themselves?
That question was not answered during the forum. Perhaps it cannot yet be answered.
Resolving Conflict on Paper
The provincial government did not come without initiatives. Sherly Tjoanda outlined two ongoing efforts. Around fifty-four thousand hectares of disputed forest areas are currently being processed through the PPTPKH scheme—Settlement of Land Tenure in the Context of Forest Area Reorganization—a mechanism intended to address overlapping land claims between communities and state forest areas. Another sixteen thousand five hundred hectares have been registered with the Land Bank to obtain Management Rights.
These schemes are not without significance. Yet for communities whose lands already overlap with mining concessions and large-scale plantations, administrative processes unfolding on paper often feel far removed from the ground that continues to shift beneath their feet.
In North Maluku, this irony carries an even larger dimension. The province holds Indonesia’s second-largest nickel reserves, within a country that controls more than half of the world’s nickel reserves. The global race toward a greener future relies heavily on electric vehicle batteries, and nickel is one of their key ingredients. Demand continues to rise. Investment continues to flow. Beneath all of this, the O’Hangana Manyawa and other indigenous communities are still waiting for a single regional regulation that acknowledges they exist, that the land they inhabit belongs to them, and that they have the right to determine their own future.
As the forum approached its conclusion that afternoon, I found myself thinking again about Pak Zacky’s joke about the incomplete salute.
The five-finger Social Forestry salute is a simple gesture: an open hand, nothing clenched, nothing hidden. It symbolizes a state that is present for communities that have long managed forests in their own way. But in North Maluku, the salute still stops at four fingers. Not because there is no land—fifty-eight thousand hectares are already waiting. Not because there are no people—the O’Hangana Manyawa and other indigenous communities have been there long before those numbers were ever counted.
What is still missing is one simple but decisive thing: a regional regulation that states, clearly and unconditionally, that the land belongs to them.
The fifth finger remains folded.
And no one can say for certain when it will finally rise.
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