Bernadinus Steni is the Executive Director of Kaleka. He is a lawyer who has been working for 20 years to support indigenous peoples’ and farmers’ rights to land and promote better policies for sustainable jurisdictions. Kaleka has been working on a jurisdictional approach in several districts, particularly Seruyan of Central Kalimantan Province and Fakfak of West Papua Province. Steni has expertise in policies on land tenure, forestry, the environment, institutional governance, spatial planning, sustainability, and safeguards. Steni has experience in drafting national policies, including national safeguards for REDD+, local regulations to recognize Indigenous peoples' rights, especially in West Papua Province, supporting government policies in Seruyan to enable independent smallholder farmers certified by RSPO, facilitating thousands of farmers to have their land rights recognized by the government. Publish several articles on land and forestry law, Indigenous peoples, human rights, and environmental issues, including free prior informed consent (2005), the legal framework of the Indigenous peoples’ rights in Indonesia (2008), and legal debate related to the Indigenous peoples’ rights in Indonesia (2008), using human rights indicators to monitor REDD+ (2011), REDD+ safeguards in Indonesia (2012), Principles Criteria and Indicators for National REDD+ Safeguards in Indonesia – PRISAI (2013), land governance assessment framework (2013) and Land tenure assessment in Central Kalimantan (2014), analysis on regional autonomy law (2016), Indigenous peoples as a legal subject (2017), nutmeg and women’s role in Fakfak (2019).
