Indigenous Institutional Parabela in Managing Customary Land Conflicts in Buton: A Conceptual Exploration of Community Resilience, Traditional Leadership, and Institutional Rhetoric

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-545-4_28How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Indigenous Institutional Theory; Parabela; Customary Land Conflict; Traditional Leadership; Institutional Rhetoric; Community Resilience

Abstract

Customary land continues to serve as a central site of contestation in Indonesia’s legally plural agrarian landscape, where state regulatory expansion frequently intersects with Indigenous governance systems. This study conceptually examines the Parabela institution in Buton, Southeast Sulawesi, through the analytical lens of Indigenous Institutional Theory (IIT) to understand how it maintains authority and manages customary land conflicts amid increasing administrative pressures. Drawing on qualitative insights, scholarly literature, and conceptual analysis, this research investigates three key dimensions of institutional persistence: community resilience, traditional leadership, and institutional rhetoric. The findings reveal that Parabela’s effectiveness is rooted in multi-layered community resilience grounded in ancestral ties, ritual obligations, and adaptive strategies that incorporate selected administrative tools. Traditional leadership emerges as a central mechanism of governance hybridity, where leaders exercise dual legitimacy genealogical and negotiated—to mediate between customary norms and state frameworks. Institutional rhetoric functions as a powerful discursive tool that reframes land conflicts as moral and cosmological struggles, strengthening internal cohesion and influencing external negotiations. This study contributes to Indigenous governance scholarship by demonstrating that institutional endurance results not from static tradition but from dynamic interactions between cultural legitimacy, adaptive leadership, and discursive power. The research highlights the importance of recognizing Indigenous institutions as substantive governance actors and argues that integrating institutions like Parabela into formal land governance processes is essential for achieving more equitable, culturally grounded, and sustainable conflict resolution in Indonesia.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Imran
AU  - Gita Susanti
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/03/13
TI  - Indigenous Institutional Parabela in Managing Customary Land Conflicts in Buton: A Conceptual Exploration of Community Resilience, Traditional Leadership, and Institutional Rhetoric
BT  - Proceedings of the World Conference on Governance and Social Sciences 2025 (WCGSS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 406
EP  - 427
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-545-4_28
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-545-4_28
ID  - 2026
ER  -