Hegemony through inclusion: Sustainability certification and agrarian governance in Indonesia's palm oil frontier
Sustainability certification has become a central instrument of governance across commodity frontiers, yet its persistence under conditions of uneven implementation, unresolved conflict, and limited transformation remains analytically underexplained. Existing scholarship documents these limitations but largely assumes that legitimacy derives from performance, leaving the endurance of governance insufficiently theorized. This article addresses that gap by conceptualizing certification as hegemony through inclusion . It treats inclusion not as a normative objective or outcome, but as a political rationality that stabilizes legitimacy by redistributing responsibility, moralizing inequality, and deferring transformation through future-oriented commitments. Empirically, the analysis draws on a documentary corpus spanning foundational legal frameworks and contemporary certification-based governance in Indonesia's palm oil sector. Documents—laws, certification standards, corporate disclosures, and civil society reports—are analyzed as relational sites through which authority, responsibility, and legitimate futures are configured. The findings identify five mechanisms—auditability, scalar disjunction, responsibility shifting, moralization of dispossession, and anticipatory discipline—through which inclusion operates as an infrastructure of rule. These mechanisms do not resolve inequality or conflict; they recast them as auditable gaps, distributed obligations, and deferred trajectories. The article contributes by explaining governance endurance as an effect of how incompleteness is organized, shifting analysis from policy effectiveness to the political conditions under which legitimacy persists despite acknowledged limitations.