| dc.description.abstract | An exploration of how intellectual labor produce nature and the relationship between them has been argued for. Using the case of Indonesian forest fires in light of recent climate change policy developments such as the Paris Agreement and the establishment of Indonesia’s Peat Restoration Agency, this thesis attempts to answer the following research question: How do the laboring acts of experts, through documents, produce nature in practice? The production of nature thesis is an approach that posits the metabolic relationship between society and nature. Derived from Marx’s views on nature, the production of nature assumes that humans enter into relationships with nature through acts of labor, such as farming or mining. The production of nature by intellectual labor, it is argued, is mediated through documents. One form of the production of nature is the socioecological fix, an extension of Harvey’s (2001) spatial fix, where fixed capital is deployed in order to avoid or defer crises, which in this case are those of a socioecological nature i.e. forest fires. Since the fix is a form of produced nature, it is therefore also metabolic; they carry with them certain ideologies and hegemonic properties. The deployment of socioecological fixes through intellectual labor, in this context, is mediated through these policy documents: Peat Restoration Agency Strategic Plan 2016-2020; Grand Design for Prevention of Forest, Plantation, and Land Fires 2017-2019; Nationally Determined Contribution; and ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution. The documents were analyzed with practice-oriented document analysis as used by Asdal (2015) in order to identify certain issues that the documents have created. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with relevant participants to fill in informational gaps. The results demonstrate that the documents transformed the issue of forest fires into the issue of emission targets, technocratic superiority, and lack of indigenous involvement. This means that the laser focus on emission targets ushers in technocratic policies and managerialism that omit the involvement of indigenous groups, instead of a rights-based approach that strengthens indigenous institutions. | eng |