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The risk of investing on customary land in Raja Ampat is not a paperwork problem. It is a social and jurisdictional problem that no amount of notarial stamping can fully resolve. Customary (adat) land in Raja Ampat is held collectively by clans — known locally as marga or keret — under oral and ceremonial tenure systems that predate the Indonesian state, and a written lease agreement with one clan elder does not, by itself, bind the whole clan, the successor generation, or rival clans who claim the same coastline.
What Customary Land Actually Means in Raja Ampat
Indonesia’s Basic Agrarian Law (UUPA, Law No. 5/1960) formally recognizes hak ulayat — customary communal land rights — alongside the national title registry. The national constitution, Article 18B(2), goes further, protecting the rights of indigenous communities and their traditional lands. In Raja Ampat, the practical consequence is that a large share of coastline, small islands, reef flats, and forest land is marga/keret territory: unregistered at BPN (the national land agency), without a formal certificate, and governed by norms that operate entirely outside the cadastral system.
When investors describe a deal in Raja Ampat as “we have an agreement with the local family,” they are usually describing an arrangement with one or two elders who presented themselves as spokespersons. Whether those elders had genuine authority to bind the whole clan — let alone neighboring clans with overlapping claims — is a question that rarely gets answered before construction begins.
The Keret Structure and Why It Complicates Consent
A keret is a patrilineal clan grouping common across the Bird’s Head and surrounding islands. Land stewardship typically passes through the male line, but inheritance disputes, migration, and intermarriage mean that at any given time multiple sub-lineages may assert standing over the same territory. There is no single registry of who belongs to which keret, no public record of which keret claims which coastline, and no government office in Sorong or Waisai that maintains a reliable map of marga boundaries.
A legitimate Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) process — the international standard for projects affecting indigenous communities — requires identifying all rights-holding groups, not just the ones willing to talk. In practice, many resort and eco-lodge agreements in eastern Indonesia have been reached through conversations with whichever community members showed up. The members who did not show up have the same legal standing, and they know it.
Sasi: The Customary Conservation Overlay
Sasi is a traditional resource-management practice under which a community imposes a seasonal or long-term prohibition on harvesting from a particular reef, beach, or forest area. When a sasi is in force, access to that resource is restricted — not by government decree, but by customary law that community members are expected to observe and that village leadership enforces through social pressure and, historically, ritual sanction.
For investors, sasi creates a layer of constraint that sits entirely outside the formal permit system. A resort operator may hold a valid Pondok Wisata license and a signed clan lease, and still find that the adjacent reef is under sasi — meaning diving over that reef, harvesting seafood from it, or allowing guests to walk the tideline is, in community eyes, a violation. That violation does not generate a government fine. It generates a community grievance, and grievances in small island communities tend to compound.
The Documented Pattern: What Goes Wrong and When
Across Papua and the wider eastern Indonesia island arc, a recognizable sequence of events has repeated often enough to be called a pattern. It is worth understanding each stage, because investors who know the pattern can at least structure their agreements to slow it down.
Stage 1 — The Initial Agreement
A clan elder or small group of relatives agrees to a long-term lease — often 25 to 30 years — in exchange for an upfront payment, an annual fee, a construction-labor commitment, and sometimes an employment guarantee for community members. The agreement is drafted by an Indonesian notaris, signed, and filed. The investor begins site works.
Stage 2 — The Renegotiation Demand
Within one to five years of opening — often timed to coincide with the resort reaching operating profitability, a booking-season peak, or a change in the original clan signatories — a new set of community representatives appears and declares the original agreement “insufficient,” “unfair,” or “signed without proper consultation.” The demand is typically for a higher annual fee, a lump-sum payment, or equity in the operating company. This is not primarily opportunism, though that element exists. It reflects the reality that the earlier signatories did not have unanimous community mandate, and those who were excluded from the original deal are now asserting their share.
Stage 3 — Access Blocking
If renegotiation talks stall, the dispute tends to escalate to physical access interference. Boats are prevented from landing at the resort jetty. Staff from the community are pressured to walk off the job. In documented cases in the Raja Ampat and broader West Papua region, community members have physically blocked guests from reaching facilities, or confronted dive guides in the water above claimed reef territory. None of this requires a court order. The leverage is the resort’s geographic isolation — it is on an island, it depends on community cooperation for labor, water, fresh produce, and basic logistics, and its guests can be made to feel unwelcome.
Stage 4 — Reputational Damage
The era of social media has dramatically shortened the window between a community dispute and public knowledge of it. A guest who witnesses or hears about a land conflict posts about it. Dive operators who rely on the same reefs start to distance themselves. Travel platforms flag the property. Impact investors and conservation-oriented funders, who make up a meaningful slice of the eco-resort capital pool, withdraw interest quickly when a community conflict surfaces. The reputational damage can outlast the legal dispute by years, even if the underlying land question is eventually resolved.
Rival Clan Claims: The Overlapping Boundary Problem
A distinct but related risk is the rival clan claim — where two or more marga or keret groups assert rights over the same coastal stretch, and the investor has signed only with one of them. Because customary boundaries are oral and relational rather than mapped and registered, there is often genuine ambiguity about which clan’s territory ends and another’s begins. On inhabited islands near Waigeo, Gam, Kri, Mansuar, and Misool — the primary resort-development zones — the density of overlapping clan histories makes this a near-universal risk for any greenfield project.
Papua Special Autonomy law (Law 21/2001, amended by Law 2/2021) specifically strengthens Orang Asli Papua (OAP) land and resource rights and obliges local government to protect hak ulayat. It also enables the issuance of special regional regulations — Perdasus and Perdasi — governing consent and benefit-sharing. Investors who proceed without satisfying these procedures expose their projects to permit revocation and administrative challenge, in addition to the community-level risks already described.
What a Signed Agreement Actually Gets You
A notarized lease or use-rights agreement with a clan representative secures a written record that a transaction occurred. It does not, on its own:
- Guarantee title status
- Unregistered customary land cannot transfer formal title (HGB, Hak Pakai, or any registered right) without a BPN survey, certificate issuance, and — critically — verification that the land is not subject to overlapping state, forestry, conservation, or mining concession claims. Many Raja Ampat islands have never been through this process.
- Bind successor generations
- Indonesian customary law does not treat a clan leader’s agreement as automatically binding on clan members who reach adulthood after the agreement was signed. Successors may and do reopen negotiations, particularly when the economic value of the land has become visible.
- Establish social license
- Social license — the ongoing community acceptance of a project’s presence and operations — is a continuous relationship, not a document. It requires communication, demonstrable benefit-sharing, respect for sasi and other customary protocols, and the willingness to renegotiate fairly when community circumstances change.
- Protect against rival clans
- A lease with Clan A provides no legal protection against Clan B asserting prior rights. Clan B’s claim is adjudicated — if at all — through customary dispute mechanisms or Indonesian courts, both of which can take years and produce ambiguous outcomes on unregistered land.
The comparison below summarizes what formal legal instruments provide versus what they do not, in the context of adat land in Raja Ampat.
| Instrument | What it provides | What it does NOT provide |
|---|---|---|
| Notarized clan lease | Written record, legal reference point for dispute resolution | BPN-registered title; binding authority over non-signing clan members or rival clans |
| PT PMA corporate structure | Legal operating entity; can hold HGB/Hak Pakai once land is formally titled | Title to unregistered customary land; community acceptance; sasi waiver |
| HGB / Hak Pakai from BPN | Registered land right; enforceable against third-party encroachment | Guarantee that customary rights were extinguished; reputational protection |
| FPIC documentation | Evidence of good-faith consent process; international standard compliance | Elimination of rival-clan risk; guarantee of community support in perpetuity |
The 2025 Mining Permit Revocations as a Governance Signal
In June 2025, the Indonesian government announced the revocation of four nickel mining permits in Raja Ampat — covering Kawe Island (PT Kawei Sejahtera Mining), Manuran Island (PT Anugerah Surya Pratama), Manyaifun and Batang Pele Islands (PT Mulia Raymond Perkasa), and Waigeo Island (PT Nurham) — following a Greenpeace Indonesia report and significant public protest. Twelve of the sixteen nickel licenses operating in the regency fell within the boundaries of the Raja Ampat UNESCO Global Geopark, designated in 2023.
Subsequent investigations by Earth Insight and Wallacea found no published revocation decrees and questioned whether the permits had actually been administratively cancelled. The gap between a political announcement and legal finality is itself instructive: in Raja Ampat, regulatory decisions affecting land use are subject to political pressure, procedural gaps, and reversal in ways that investors need to price into their risk models. The mining revocations were a victory for the conservation-tourism narrative, but the mechanism that produced them — public protest plus international scrutiny — is the same mechanism that can target a resort project perceived as extractive, exclusionary, or disrespectful of community rights.
How to Approach Adat Land More Carefully
This publication is an information source, not legal or investment advice. What follows is a description of practices observed in projects that have maintained longer-term community relationships — not a guarantee that any particular approach will succeed.
Projects with better track records in eastern Indonesia typically approach adat land through a multi-stage consent process: preliminary engagement with all identifiable stakeholder groups across the relevant marga/keret; a waiting period that allows internal community deliberation before any agreement is signed; legal mapping (to the extent possible given the absence of formal cadastral records) by a Papuan customary-law specialist, not just a national notaris; benefit structures that spread economic value across the wider community rather than concentrating it in the hands of the initial signatories; and ongoing governance mechanisms — a community board, a benefit fund, a formal dispute channel — built into the operating model from day one.
None of this eliminates the underlying structural risk. What it does is create a relationship architecture that makes the “renegotiation demand” and “access blocking” sequence significantly less likely, and gives both parties a framework to resolve disagreements before they reach the physical confrontation stage.
If you are evaluating a specific opportunity and want to think through the due-diligence questions that matter in Raja Ampat’s context, plan your next step with our team. We connect investors with on-ground legal and customary-law specialists in Sorong and Waisai — reach us by WhatsApp or the contact form for an initial orientation.
The Homestay Model as a Risk Comparison
The Papuan community homestay sector — over one hundred family-run operations spread across Waigeo, Kri, Mansuar, Arborek, Gam, and Misool — offers an instructive contrast. These businesses are owned and operated by Orang Asli Papua families on their own adat land. There is no external investor holding a lease that can be challenged. The land question is internal to the clan, not contested across a transaction boundary. This structural simplicity is part of why the homestay model has been politically durable and has avoided the conflict patterns that have troubled some larger resort projects.
For foreign investors, this creates a practical question: rather than leasing adat land to build and operate a resort, is there a partnership or support role — capacity funding, equipment, marketing infrastructure — that allows participation in the sector without taking on the full stack of customary-land risk? That model involves different commercial returns and different relationships. It is worth understanding before committing to a greenfield build on contested coastline.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a notarized agreement with a clan elder be challenged by other clan members in court?
Yes. In Indonesian law, a written agreement with one representative does not automatically bind all members of a communal landholding group. If a clan member was not party to the agreement and can demonstrate standing as a rights-holder under customary tenure, they have grounds to contest the agreement in court or through customary dispute mechanisms. The absence of a registered BPN title makes this challenge easier, not harder, because it means the land’s status has never been formally adjudicated.
What is the typical timeline for a customary land dispute to escalate in Raja Ampat?
There is no standard timeline. Disputes have surfaced within months of an agreement being signed, and others have remained dormant for years before triggering. The most common trigger is visible profitability — when the community can see that the investor is earning significant revenue, the calculation about what constitutes a fair share shifts. Leadership transitions, generational turnover, and external advice (from NGOs, lawyers, or other community members who see similar disputes elsewhere) also tend to accelerate escalation.
Does Papua Special Autonomy law give additional protections to clans that investors should know about?
Yes. Law 21/2001 and its 2021 amendment (Law 2/2021) specifically strengthen the land and resource rights of Orang Asli Papua as a recognized indigenous group. The law obliges regional governments to protect hak ulayat and empowers the issuance of Perdasus (special provincial regulations) on consent and benefit-sharing. Projects that bypass or abbreviate FPIC processes face administrative and legal exposure under this framework that is separate from — and in addition to — any civil dispute with the clan itself.
Can sasi be formally lifted so that a resort can operate without customary restrictions on reef access?
Sasi can be lifted by community decision — it is a customary institution, not a government prohibition. However, the decision to lift sasi is made by the community that imposed it, on their own terms and timeline, and the decision can be reversed if relations with the resort deteriorate. There is no formal legal mechanism an outside investor can use to force a sasi waiver. This is why projects that maintain strong community relationships tend to fare better — the community’s ongoing goodwill is what keeps customary restrictions from becoming operational barriers.
Is there any way to get clear title to adat land in Raja Ampat so that these risks go away?
Formal BPN registration is theoretically possible, but it requires the clan to convert their customary holding into a registered right, which involves surveying, boundary agreement among all rights-holders, and administrative processing — steps that can take years and may surface the exact inter-clan boundary disputes the investor was hoping to avoid. Even after registration, social license issues remain separate from title status. The honest answer is that the risk does not go away; it changes form. Working with Indonesian land law specialists and a Papuan customary-law advisor together is the minimum threshold for any serious due-diligence process in this context.