Hybrid Legal Ordering and Rural Access to Justice: Bounded Proceduralisation of Mawah Disputes in Aceh

Abstract

Rural commercial relationships often operate across state law, religious norms and customary institutions. Their accessibility and social legitimacy can make them effective, but informality may also conceal evidential weakness, unequal bargaining power and inconsistent remedies. This article examines that tension through mawah, an Acehnese profit-sharing partnership for livestock, rice fields and plantations, and through the Village Council for Deliberation (Majelis Duduk Setikar Kampung, MDSK) in Alue Lhok, Aceh Tamiang. Drawing on a normative–empirical case study involving eight purposively selected participants, the article identifies three recurrent disputes—unverified livestock losses, unauthorised sale of rubber yields and contested reductions in rice shares—and shows that their common cause is not oral contracting alone but an absence of agreed information, verification and accountability rules. The article argues that neither legal centralisation nor uncritical reliance on customary reconciliation offers an adequate response. It develops a model of bounded proceduralisation instead: selective formalization of minimum safeguards while preserving the normative identity, language and relational function of the customary forum. The proposed five-stage model combines pre-contract recording, complaint and fact verification, tiered deliberation, restorative settlement, and registration with monitoring and referral. Its contribution is twofold. It explains how legal pluralism can be organised as an accountable process rather than merely recognised as a social fact, and it specifies safeguards—impartiality, informed consent, a basic evidential record, written outcomes and access to formal remedies—through which community justice may advance rural access to justice without becoming a miniature court.