The Disenchanted Grove

This article explores the erosion of ri’i, a traditional ecological governance system practiced by the Ngadha people in Flores, Indonesia, in the face of modernization and postcolonial development. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with cultural elders, ritual practitioners, and local authorities, the study documents how ri’i—a ritual-based regulatory system for bamboo resource management—has been progressively dismantled through the combined pressures of technocratic governance, land commodification, and shifts toward individualism. Empirically, the main drivers identified are state land certification (including Sertifikat Hak Milik, SHM) and village modernization campaigns, which reconfigure communal tenure and everyday governance practices. Once embedded in sacred cosmologies and collective decision-making, ri’i rituals are now rarely practiced and are increasingly treated as incompatible with contemporary development paradigms. Drawing on political ecology and postcolonial theory, the study analyzes how land certification and settlement reorganization render customary relations legible to administrative and market logics, fragmenting nua and sa’o stewardship and weakening sanction regimes that once made restraint socially binding. The findings show that disenchantment is not merely a top-down imposition but also a result of negotiations, ambivalences, and internal tensions within the community. The article further examines how technical sustainability interventions—particularly the Hutan Bambu Lestari (HBL) model developed by Yayasan Bambu Lestari (YBL)—can function as partial substitutes: they support harvest scheduling and monitoring through administrative markers, yet do not automatically rebuild the moral and relational authority through which ri’i historically governed extraction. By foregrounding local narratives and governance practices, this article calls for recognizing ri’i as a legitimate and culturally rooted form of ecological governance and proposes policy responses that move beyond generic “hybrid models” toward actionable measures that repair communal tenure authority, deliberative practice, and sanction legitimacy

Agency (philosophy) · Commons · Corporate governance · Disenchantment · Ecological modernization · Modernity · Modernization theory · Political ecology · Politics · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management · Land Rights and Reforms