Glossary

AMDAL (Analisis Mengenai Dampak Lingkungan)

AMDAL (Analisis Mengenai Dampak Lingkungan), or the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) in English is a mandatory procedure to assess the potential impacts of a planned business or activity on the natural environment before it is implemented. In this research, the EIA becomes an analytical lens to understand the socioecological violence that is sustained by the megahydraulic regime.

Compensation

Compensation is payment offered for losses caused by the project, and a term whose Indonesian variants are not interchangeable. Ganti rugi names a loss the payer concedes is theirs to answer for. Tali asih, a token of goodwill, transfers money while conceding nothing, and santunan frames the same transfer as relief for misfortune. Which word appears on the receipt determines whether the payment is evidence of liability or evidence against it, so record the word used, not just the amount. Reported figures include roughly IDR 300 million per Wayamasapi, refused by at least one owner who valued the loss at IDR 2 billion or nothing.

Countermapping

“Critical cartography, counter-cartography or counter-mapping are terms for mapping practices that are based on the basic assumption that maps and mapping both reflect and create social power relations. The starting point is that the creation of maps, both geographical and other, can be consciously used to study power and propose new power arrangements, and thus also challenge ways of thinking and action patterns. Maps not only help us navigate but also create discursive, mental and political spaces. While the hegemonic map reproduces bird’s-eye views and Eurocentric approaches to the world, counter-cartographies can be summarily said to insist on both situated knowledge and more egalitarian spatial relations. It can therefore be about looking for visual representations beyond what Donna Haraway called “the god trick” – that is, the idea of ​​the disembodied gaze – by showing, in different ways, how the mapping was made and where it departs from. Cartographic strategies can be used to question and challenge dominant ways of understanding place and spatial relations. Such an exploration of the possibilities of representing a place also raises questions about what can actually be called a map.” - Maryam Fanni, Elof Hellström, Klara Meijer, The Makings of a Counter-Map: Collective methods for creating place and position.

Everyday refusal

I am offering the term ‘everyday refusal’, combining the notion of everyday forms of resistance, which struggle is an “indirect symbolic confrontation” (See: Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance by Scott, James C (1985), into an active political action assembled through different methods of collective organising rooted in people at the frontline of environmental struggle. In the context of grassroots communities whose landscape is being extracted, everyday experience becomes an important aspect that cannot be uprooted from the struggles themselves.

Frontierisation

Frontierisation, interpreted as the “process of creating the margins”– spatial, ideological, and political peripheries, and the making of “the wilderness” – a zone of not yet, a shifting terrain toward commodification and conquest. See “Natural Resources and Capitalist Frontiers” by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2003).

Hydrosocial relations

According to Di Tullio V and Zannini L (2025) in “Unveiling hydrosocial dynamics: discourse and power in Peña Blanca”, hydrosocial relations are “socio-natural entanglements and processes embedded within power relations. Beyond modern and rationalist conceptions of water as a resource to be exploited, water relations are conflict-ridden spaces within which struggles over power, recognition, and knowledge occur.”

Kalla’s family

Kalla’s family, an Indonesian business dynasty and the ownership behind PT Poso Energy. The Kalla Group was founded as the NV Hadji Kalla trading house in 1953 by Hadji Kalla and Hajjah Athirah in South Sulawesi. It expanded under Muhammad Jusuf Kalla from textiles into automotive distribution, construction (PT Bumi Karsa, PT Bukaka Teknik Utama), and hydropower from the 2000s. PT Poso Energy operates the PLTA Poso cascade on the Poso river, 515 MW, and is part of this group alongside PT Malea Energy in Tana Toraja. The family’s significance to this study is their role as the corporate entity marking the process of water and land enclosure in the Poso hydroecology since 2005.

Karamba

Floating net cages moored in Danau Poso, mostly for introduced species, the nila tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus), mujair tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus) ikan mas (Cyprinus carpio) –worked by lakeside households.

Lake’s Outlet

Lake Outlet, which in this research is defined as the mouth at Tentena where Danau Poso becomes the Poso river. Hydrologically it is the control point: the elevation and cross-section of the outlet sill determine how high the lake stands and how fast it drains, so whoever reshapes the outlet governs the lake without building anything in it.

Land freed

In Indonesian language, it was usually called pembebasan lahan, or freeing the land. In my perspective, the word “grabs” is the closest fit.

Local communities

The community struggle I represent in this research involves people whose living spaces are affected by violence, flooding, displacement, and other impacts. This includes fishers and wayamasapi, members of the Pamona Indigenous community, rural farmers, and communities around Lake Poso who depend on the lake, gardens, and rice fields for their livelihoods. I call them a minority because the land in this area is heavily contested. Not all people in Poso support their movements; they are often seen as anti-development or rebellious, especially in post-conflict narratives where resistance is linked to opposition to development. Their voices remain unheard by outsiders and sometimes even by locals, many of whom are civil servants or have internalised extractive ways of thinking.

Mega hydropower infrastructure

Mega hydropower infrastructure, or megadams, or mega hydrodams are defined by activist George Junus Aditjondro (1998) as large dams, specifically those classified as “dams higher than 15 metres” by the International Commission of Large Dams (ICOLD) (see George Junus Aditjondro in “Large Dam Victims and Their Defenders”, 32). Conceptually, megadams refer to dams characteristic of large-scale hydroelectric projects (See: Chen, MacLeod, and Neimanis, in “Thinking with Water”, 216). In this study, the term “megadams” as applied to the Poso Energy hydroelectric infrastructure includes the damming of rivers in Sulewana and Saojo, the destruction of lake water bodies serving as natural reservoirs, and the planned construction of dams with a projected capacity of 28.5 million cubic metres in Kuku and Tampemadoro villages.

In Indonesia, the dam is also called a bendungan, which includes infrastructure for irrigation and energy. The bendungan comes from the word bendung in Indonesian, meaning “structure built to retain or hold back water in a river, along the coast, or an embankment or dike.” This infrastructure has been widely used to control nature, such as the seawall embankments in North Jakarta or Semarang, as well as hydrodam development, which also controls people. The verb bendung is membendung, meaning “obstructing” or “to hold.” In my interpretation, this reflects how the hydrodam obstructs water flow as matter and living bodies, and how the company holds it like a prisoner, abstracted into a new identity: natural resource.

Megahydraulic regime

In this research, the term ‘megahydraulic regime’ refers to the corporation, state, military, and police force that sustain megahydraulic engineering and play significant roles as political agents (see dissertation).

PLTA

PLTA, or Pembangkit Listrik Tenaga Air, translated as Hydroelectric Power Plant, will be used alongside hydrodam, hydropower infrastructure, and mega hydrodam in this research. However, PLTA here mostly refers to the Poso hydrodam infrastructure: PLTA 1, 2, and the planned 3 and 4.

Poso hydroecology

I use the term hydroecology to describe Lake Poso and the river as an integrated water ecosystem. In this research, I conceptualise water as a complex living entity. Water constitutes the environment and circulates within our bodies. Water is also “matter” that enables “interconnection, interchange, and transit between human bodies and nonhuman natures” (see “Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self” by Stacy Alaimo, 2010). The ecology of water is also an archive of collective memories.

Run-of-river

A hydropower classification for plants that generate from a river's natural flow without impounding a reservoir. The category carries regulatory and financial weight: no reservoir implies no inundation, no resettlement, minimal environmental footprint, which is what makes such plants readily fundable as renewables and defensible as green.

Socioecological violence

The ecology is defined as relationships between living organisms and their environment. Oxford English Dictionary describe the connection of ecology and social as the study of the relationship between people, social group, and their environment, and also the system of such relationships in an area of human settlement. In this research the socioecological violence used to explain the ecological degradation that is also impacting the social lives.

Spatial memory

I am addressing spatial memory, inspired by Abidin Kusno’s “Mnemonic Practices of Architecture and Urban Form in Indonesia” (2010), who uses memory to analyse the interplay between memory and space as a medium to explore “profound social and political transformation.”

Strategi pengamanan proyek

Strategi pengamanan proyek, or infrastructure project securitisation in which armed forces enter a hydropower project as a routine operational cost. The doctrine rests on the category of national vital object (obvitnas), including Poso Energy installations deemed to concern the livelihood of the many, the interests of the state, or state revenue, which, once designated, are secured by Polri with TNI assistance, formalised through agreements between the operator and the security apparatus.

Underreported case

What I stated is an underreported case due to the low coverage of the Poso Energy hydrodam issues nationally and especially locally. The corporation repeatedly presents the development as a modernization effort and portrays Indonesia's hydroelectric power industry as a source of renewable energy for the country’s energy transition.

Underwater blasting

Underwater blasting, or submarine blasting include deepening of harbours and channels, excavation of trenches for installing oil and gas pipelines and communication cables, demolition work and excavation for foundations (civil engineering). Underwater drilling is the first part of the process during which drilling is done to make bore holes in the rock to place charges or explosives for blasting. See INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF DREDGING COMPANIES.

Wayamasapi

Wayamasapi, a traditional fishing trap made by bamboo and knowledge system at the outlet of Danau Poso, where the lake becomes the Poso river. A weir of bamboo and wood built out across the current, funnelling migrating eels (Masapi in Pamona language, and Sogili is the term people use in Central Sulawesi) into traps, with a platform above where the owner keeps watch through the night. Structures are inherited, worked across generations, and read against a seasonal calendar: pantawa (December to March) for young eels of under a kilo; poili wata (April to November) for the large dark ones, four to twenty kilos, named for their likeness to drifting logs; and between them poili wentonu, when wentonu (Anguilla bicolor) and the yellow-brown beta'u (A. marmorata) appear and signal what the coming season will bring. The eels are catadromous, they run some sixty kilometres downriver to spawn in Teluk Tomini and do not return.