Evaluating policy coherence: A case study of peatland forests on the Kampar Peninsula landscape, Indonesia

Abstract

Conflicting policies relating to the management of multi-sectoral, multi-level and multi-actor forest uses often result in ineffective policy implementation. Methods for assessing policy coherence, however, are limited and often require an extensive evidence base which is not always available. In Indonesia, this has often led to conflicts between government agencies and other forest stakeholders. Businesses, NGOs and local communities struggle to comply with all of the conflicting or overlapping regulations that relate to the use of forested landscapes. Even if they succeed, the cost of implementation can be excessive. Improved methods for assessing policy coherence could assist governments and other stakeholders to navigate policy complexity and to avoid the potentially high costs of policies that are antagonistic to one another. We propose an audit of policy coherence at the landscape scale as a way of addressing this problem. We test this idea with an experimental policy audit on the Kampar Peninsula, a peat landscape in Pelalawan district, Riau Province, Indonesia. Indonesia has participated in the UN global peat initiative since 2015 and has created a peat protection policy to control the exploitation of peat with regulation No 57/2016. This regulation and the various instruments devolved from it has been a source of confusion and conflict among stakeholders. We applied commonly accepted performance auditing standards to assess the coherence, effectiveness and efficiency of regulations from other sectors and in different jurisdictions with the new peat regulation No 57/2016 and its derivatives. To aid our audit assessment, we overlaid radar and Landsat images to depict delineations of peat protection and cultivation zones according to different legislation. Our audit revealed incoherent mapping of peat protection zones on the Kampar Peninsula, which has led to ineffective and inefficient implementation of policies. We then propose three alternative protection and cultivation scenarios to that proposed by the government. Our results show that any of these alternative scenarios would provide a policy that is not only more coherent, but that also would result in more effective and efficient policy implementation. This policy audit method should have wide potential application for auditing best practice and policy effectiveness in complex landscapes across the globe and should have immediate application in helping to resolve the current issues on the Kampar Peninsular.