<![CDATA[Since 2025, Indonesia’s Forest Area Enforcement Task Force has retaken about 5.9 million hectares of oil palm plantations operating illegally in forest areas and has handed more than 4.1 million hectares to a state-owned enterprise for commercial management. Repossession changes who controls the land, but it leaves the drained peat, open canals, and cleared mangroves as they were. This article asks who bears the duty to restore these ecosystems once control moves and what legal design would keep the polluter-pays principle working through the transfer. It combines doctrinal analysis of Indonesian law with a functional comparison of the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Brazil, contrasting releasable peat in Central Kalimantan with non-releasable strict nature reserves in South Kalimantan. The study finds that the restoration duty fails in two ways. In Central Kalimantan, peat rules demand rewetting while enforcement instruments steer the land toward release and continued, drainage-dependent cultivation. In South Kalimantan, the command to restore is clear, yet no norm names a liable payer among those who cleared the reserves. Both failures stem from one design choice: Indonesian law attaches the duty to the person responsible for a business or activity, a figure that disappears when the state takes over. Neither the maxims for resolving conflicting norms nor the existing rules on business transfers, guarantee funds, and post-fire takeovers close the gap. The comparison shows that none of the systems examined protects a controller that keeps a damaging condition alive. The article proposes condition-anchored sequenced liability, which combines a baseline assessment at transfer, residual cost liability of the former occupier, duties and a calibrated second-tier burden for the new controller, and a ring-fenced restoration fund. It offers a template for states that seize illegally used land and then exploit it commercially.]]>
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