Assessment of Village and Community Forest Sustainability: Evidence from the Local Level

Abstract

The implementation of social forestry, particularly at the local level, must ensure ecological, economic, and social sustainability. The sustainability level assessment from various Social Forestry of Perhutanan Sosial (PS) schemes is crucial to recognize, evaluate, and improve its implementation at the local level. Therefore, this study aims to assess the sustainability level and identify the lever indicators of the sustainability of Village Forest or Hutan Desa (HD) and Community Forest or Hutan Kemasyarakatan (HKm) management as the two largest schemes of PS. The Rapid Appraisal for Village and Community Forest (RapVCF) with Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) approach was developed to assess the sustainability of the three HD and HKm cases. The results revealed that HKm SB had the highest sustainability value compared to the three HD and two other HKm. HKm SB is considered relatively sustainable, with a sustainability value above 50 in ecological, economic, and social dimensions. In general, economic and social dimensions have a lower sustainability value compared to the ecological dimension. Some indicators play a pivotal role to the sustainability level of HD and HKm, namely conditions and changes in forest cover, the manageable area, market coverage, income for forest management, claims/mastery of working areas, and benefit distribution mechanisms. Evaluation and improvement of these indicators must be prioritized to increase the sustainability level of HD and HKm.