Inequitable land distribution and unsustainable land use have long been a characteristic of postcolonial Indonesia society. In recent years, a broad rhetorical consensus has arisen amongst various state and non-state actors, suggesting that the development of information systems to produce and compile standardized biophysical, social scientific and administrative data about the country’s vast landscapes and the people living on them can be a means to resolve such intertwined environmental and economic problems. In this paper, based on semi-structured interviews and document analysis, I explore how the lack of clarity of what constitutes “truthful” and “accurate” data about land gives rise to agonistic struggles between various state and non-state actors to either perpetuate existing or redefine different visions of state-society relations and economic development trajectories in the country’s rural areas. By centering theories from science and technology studies and anthropology of bureaucracy, I contend that the process of compiling “good” data is influenced by a combination of diverse cultures and incentives within and between bureaucratic institutions, competing political-economic interests and heterogenous expert knowledge frameworks. Therefore, exploring the social life of information systems and the quantitative and scientistic epistemologies that underpin them, makes visible how their inherent reductionist, uncertain and normative character can either reinforce or undermine dominant practices of allocating land and regulating land use. In this regard, their institutionalization becomes sites of contestation to define, articulate and enact legitimate rural subjectivities as well as visions of political order that will not necessarily reduce bureaucratic fragmentation.
