Social Forestry Policy Research Articles

Bureaucratizing non-government organizations as governmental forest extension services in social forestry policy in Indonesia

ABSTRACTThe government of Indonesia is ambitiously planning for more expansion of social forestry with a target of 12.7 million ha of state land to be distributed to local communities through several permit-based social forestry schemes. To deliver the target, the central forest bureaucracy issued a new forest extension policy, which enables non-government organizations (NGOs) to get involved in government extension services. This short commentary analyses aspects related to the coordination and synergies between government agencies and NGOs to achieve their common goals in extension activities. NGOs possess strengths as an agent of community development programs with technical and organizational expertise and experience in mobilizing communities. However, given their contrasted characteristics in terms of organizational settings, goals and objectives, there are challenges facing NGOs when partnering with government institutions. They may face rigid and demanding bureaucratic procedures, and complex coordination.

Analysis of social forestry governance in Jeneberang I forest manajement unit

Social forestry is one of the Ministry of Forestry policies in alleviating poverty and creating employment for people in and around forests, and forests sustainability. Social forestry governance is one of the important things in evaluating the performance of social forestry policy implementation. This study aims to analyze 5 key elements of social forestry governance, referring to Cadman T. (2011), that is interest representation, accountability and transparency, decision-making, and implementation. The study was conducted in the KPH Jenneberang I area, Gowa Regency, South Sulawesi Province. Two groups of social forestry scheme permit holders were selected purposively as research locations. Primary and secondary data were obtained through field observations, in-depth interviews, Focus Group Discussions (FGD), and documentation studies. The study found that the implementation of social forestry policy with the target area as the main indicator of performance achievements has implications for the suboptimal quality of social forestry governance. Conflicts between the community and the government and between the community and the community are the effects of current governance. Changing the target area of social forestry licenses to target the number of social forestry business groups operating as key indicators of performance achievements, becoming one of the solutions to optimize the quality of social forestry governance.

Lessons Learned from Social Forestry Policy in Java Forest: Shaping the Way Forward for New Forest Status in ex-Perhutani Forest Area

Forest resource control in Indonesia has progressed from stringent state control towards a more community and indigenous based. Indonesia has embarked a journey in agrarian reform and social forestry to achieve a more balanced portion of forest resource control. The social forestry has manifested in the Collaborative Forest Management Program (PHBM) by Perhutani with the establishment of Forest Community Institution (LMDH) as its core. Forest for Special Purpose (KHDTK) Getas – Ngandong was chosen as the study case since it offers striking issue in social forestry program in the past and the outlook for the new forest status. This paper attempted to identify the policy learning from the past forest resource arrangement i.e., social forestry policy for the new forest status outlook. We identified the policy prior to the social forestry program and the implementation of social forestry from Perhutani. Subsequently, we identified policy learning from that past policy and tried to formulate the policy outlook for the new forest status. The data obtained through an interview to key informants complemented with observation, study literature, and document study. We found that past policy does not incorporate the local community in the forest utilization. The social forestry by Perhutani in their PHBM also showed indifferent approach which positioned the local community unequal with the Perhutani as social forestry promised. We identified fundamental changes should be done, which should prioritize social aspect before seeking out the economic and ecological restoration of the forest. We found the new forest status might hamper the implementation for the new forest policy which driven by the social forestry ideas. If only the new forest status could enable social aspect, the new manager will require tremendous support, robust institution, and plentiful resources to implement their policy.Pembelajaran dari Kebijakan Perhutani Sosial di Hutan Jawa: Menyusun Langkah Ke-depan untuk Status Hutan Baru di Kawasan Hutan eks-PerhutaniIntisariPengelolaan hutan di Indonesia yang dulunya didominasi oleh peran sentral negara saat ini telah mulai bergeser menjadi pengelolaan yang berbasis masyarakat dan adat. Program perhutanan sosial dan reforma agraria telah dijalankan untuk mendapatkankebermanfaatan hasil hutan secara lebih adil. Perhutanan sosial tersebut termanifestasikan dalam Pengelolaan Hutan Bersama Masyarakat (PHBM) dari Perhutani dengan pembentukan Lembaga Masyarakat Desa Hutan (LMDH). Kawasan Hutan dengan Tujuan Khusus (KHDTK) Getas – Ngandong memberikan suatu kasus yang menarik karena memperlihatkan adanya konteks perhutanan sosial di masa lampau dalam PHBM dan pengelolaan yang sedang dilakukan saat ini dengan adanya perubahan status dan pengelola. Artikel ini menggali pembelajaran dari kebijakan dari pengelolaan hutan di masa lalu (perhutanan sosial dalam PHBM) dan pandangan ke depan pengelolaan dengan konsep perhutanan sosial dengan status yang baru. Pengumpulan data dilaksanakan melalui wawancara kepada informan kunci yang dilengkapi dengan observasi langsung, studi literatur dan studi dokumen. Dari hasil penelitian tersebut, didapat hasil bahwa kebijakan di masa lampau tidak mengikutsertakan masyarakat sekitar dalam pengelolaan hutan. Kemudian dapat disimpulkan bahwa perhutanan sosial dari PHBM juga tidak menunjukkan adanya perubahan signifikan karena juga tidak menempatkan masyarakat sebagai mitra setara seperti yang dijanjikan konsep perhutanan sosial. Perubahan fundamental yang harus dilakukan mencakup perubahan fokus pembangunan hutan ke aspek sosial sebelum fokus ke aspek ekonomi dan ekologi hutan. Perubahan status yang baru juga terlihat dapat menghambat implementasi dari kebijakan perhutanan sosial yang baru. Apabila aspek sosial dapat diselesaikan maka selanjutnya akan masih ada banyak tantangan yang harus dihadapi pengelola baru. Pengelola baru akan membutuhkan dukungan yang besar dari segi sumber daya dan perlu membentuk institusi secara utuh untuk dapat mengimplementasikan kebijakannya.

Lesson Learned from Social Forestry Practice in a Forest and Climate Change Project in Kalimantan, Indonesia

Social forestry is considered as one element to support the practices of sustainable forest management in private and state forests in Indonesia. Currently, the government is promoting the five schemes of social forestry: Village Forest, Community Forest, Community-Based Plantation Forest, Customary Forest, and Partnership. An explorative study of a forest and climate change project in Kalimantan was conducted for 5 years and the experiences should be shared to learn about the strengths, threats, and strategies related to social forestry implementation. After the government has issued the new social forestry policy in 2016, nine villages were facilitated by the project and has obtained the Village Forest Licence. Most villagers preferred to participate in the Village Forest Scheme because the concept was simple and perceived by the people as easily managed. Village boundary agreement, community participation, intensive community empowerment by government or NGO were the important components for having social forestry licence from the Minister. Participatory land use planning was necessary to support the practice of sustainable social forestry, as well as local champion, villagers and local government commitment.

Responsibilization and social forestry in Indonesia

The current expansion of social forestry in Indonesia represents an unprecedented transfer of forest management responsibilities to user-groups across the archipelago. The Indonesian state aims to formalize co-management across 12.7 Mha of forest area to enhance community well-being and environmental as well as economic outcomes for the Indonesian public. Contemporary social forestry in Indonesia thus represents a form of natural resource responsibilization. Analyzing Indonesian social forestry as a process of responsibilization provides insight into how social forestry is performed, whether the alignment between community well-being and societal benefits is valid, and existing tensions that occur through the responsibilization of communities for forest management. Using responsibilization theory to examine social forestry policy, this research first identifies the activities that create social forestry in Indonesia and responsibilize new actors for forest management. The transfer of specific control rights to user-groups occurs through a constellation of administrative actors, bureaucratic activities, and virtual platforms. These activities reify user-groups and seek to unite community well-being objectives with environmental and economic benefits to the larger Indonesian public. However, the responsibilization of user-groups for forest management results in three important tensions. First, well-being and well-doing objectives are not always aligned and result in important trade-offs concerning community empowerment. Second, social forestry initiatives are seemingly optional, but they lack free-entry and formal channels for challenging state decisions. Third, at present there is an asymmetry between resources dedicated to approving social forestry permits versus capacity building, monitoring, and evaluating management outcomes. These three tensions provide insights for social forestry in one of the world's most significant tropical forest countries, and they point to promising future work in advancing scholarship on natural resource management and responsibilization.

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The policy of 12.7 million ha land allocation for Social Forestry has been released since 2014. Social forestry policy places communities as the main actors in forest management. This policy is expected to be a solution to the problems of forest degradation, poverty, and land tenure conflicts. This paper aims to: (1) determine criteria and indicators priority in land allocation policy for social forestry, and (2) analyze the effectiveness of land allocation policy for social forestry. This study uses Pairwise Comparison-AHP and scoring approaches. The results show that the environmental aspect is the top priority in land allocation policy for social forestry, followed by economic and institutional aspects. From environmental aspect, the main priority is to overcome estate forest encroachment issues, while from economic, the priorty of this policy is as a source of income for the communities who live in/ around the forest. The priority of institutional aspects is finding the way of how social forestry can create market network for social forestry commercial products. In terms of social aspects, social forestry is prioritized to overcome tenure conflicts between communities and government. Based on effectiveness index, social forestry land allocation policy is categorized quite effective with the value of 10.79.

The politics, economies, and ecologies of Indonesia’s third generation of social forestry: An introduction to the special section

Although Indonesia is experiencing one of the most complex transformations of social forestry policy in the world, there is a need to step back and more closely examine the politics, ecologies, and economies that provide context for its implementation. This introduction offers a synthesis of the collection of special section submissions in Forest and Society. We begin by navigating the current social forestry moment by presenting a heuristic for identifying the discourses underpinning the rapid expansion in support of social forestry schemes. These perspectives are fragmented across four continuously contested discourses: community-first, legal-first, conservation-first, and development-first. We then contextualize the historical developments that brought social forestry into its current form by laying out a genealogy of its antecedents across three distinct generations. These three generations of social forestry are roughly aligned with the overall political changes that have taken place in Indonesia, each of which engaged in their own mechanisms for defining and administering social forestry. The first generation roughly follows the period of New Order rule; a second generation began as the regime unraveled, resulting in a period of reform and restructuring of the political system. At this time, new legal frameworks were introduced, followed by the development of new implementation mechanisms. We argue that social forestry has entered a third distinct period that is characterized by the expanding interests of numerous stakeholders to formalize permitting schemes. This third generation presents new possibilities for redefining land management on Indonesia’s vast national forests. The contributions to this special issue shed new light on the overall implications of these changes. We divide the findings across submissions, covering broad topical engagement on the economies, ecologies, and politics at different governing scales. From these findings we suggest a course for future research, and identify key policy challenges for the future of social forestry and for Indonesia.

Focusing on facilitation: Issues and challenges of capacity development in Indonesia’s social forestry reforms

As the Indonesian government sets a target to allocate 12.7 million ha of state forest land for social forestry in 2019, one of the most crucial [and overlooked] issues is the extent of capacity, knowledge, skills, and engagement of social forestry facilitators and the extension workers that support the government in meeting their targets on social forestry. In this short paper, I seek to reorient the discussion towards the main issues and challenges of social forestry capacity development in Indonesia. On the one hand, there are some promising achievements made by the government in the wake of social forestry policy design and implementation, particularly in their ability to expand the scope of targeted areas for social forestry designation, as well as the increase in the numbers of community business group established. On the other hand, however, there are some challenges that are evident. Coordination within the ministry remains a major barrier, and extends to coordination problems across and between sub-national governments. Furthermore, engagement with the private sectors and involvement of NGOs remains lacking. And finally, the distribution of social forestry facilitators and extension workers across the numerous social forestry sites in Indonesia, as well as the overall capacity development needs among facilitators continues to be a major hindrance in meeting targets. I conclude by highlighting that more attention needs to be devoted to the role and capacity of facilitators, and furthermore, that the government needs to address these challenges through various institutional reforms and methods on social forestry training, as well as developing more rigorous training modules for community facilitators.

Mainstreaming community-based forest management in West Sumatra: Social forestry arguments, support, and implementation

Although social forestry in Indonesia is envisioned as a policy for recognizing local practices to forest management, research is still limited. This research describes conditions of social forestry policy in West Sumatra Province as a form of mainstreaming community-based forest management. This paper provides the context of social forestry arguments, its support, and subsequent implementation. The research approach is qualitative, using a case study method. Data collection was conducted through unstructured interviews, field observations, and document studies. The analysis used categorization and coding, historical analysis, document analysis, and descriptive policy analysis. The findings revealed that the arguments for social forestry schemes were based on the persistence of state forest conflicts, forest degradation and deforestation threats, as well as human resource limitations of forestry officers. The Provincial government then initiated stakeholder support, mainly from non-governmental organizations. Social forestry implementation at the site in West Sumatra thus focused on providing development assistance programs after granting management rights to local people, as well as initiating similar schemes in other villages. Our discussions considered challenges that should be addressed, including the approach to granting management rights to secure a management area, the process of developing participatory institutions, synchronizing provincial government policies to overcome forest degradation and deforestation, and initiating activities for strengthening community solidarity and agency.

A reflection of Social Forestry in 2019: Towards inclusive and collaborative government approaches

In this policy forum, we seek to engage in a discussion related to the acceleration of social forestry approaches, foremost led by the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MOEF), and supported by civil society actors. This article thus points to three key areas of reflection being raised among forums at different governing scales at the end of 2018. The first is a reflection of the national level issues discussed in a forum convened by MOEF in partnership with the media organization Tempo Magazine. The second is part of a reflection on a forum conducted by the Lampung province, which was convened by a coalition of NGOs. Finally, the third forum for reflection involved a public consultation about a study on the impacts of social forestry in South Sulawesi. These three forums highlighted that there is a sharp increase in formal social forestry designations by bureaucratically requiring regions to submit proposals, which are then followed up by verification of sites. This has resulted in a large increase in the number of social forestry permits and has also had the consequence of opening up bureaucratic access (in this case by MOEF) to civil society organizations in more inclusive and collaborative ways. However, on the other hand, we also found that amidst these discussions, there was also a strong element of recentralization emerging in the forestry sector related to permits, in which decision-making powers were being redirected to the central government. Another finding that emerged involves the weakening of capacity among communities themselves to benefit from social forestry designations. Therefore, although there are indications of positive engagement by government towards the principles of collaboration, concerns also emerge about the ways community engagement is unfolding. Overall, this highlights important considerations for improving social forestry policy and implementation for the future.

Implementation of Social Forestry Policy Around The Meranti Sungai Merah Protection Forest Area

One of the concrete efforts made by the Indonesian government is through social forestry policy as a trigger for land conflicts. One area that has implemented a pattern of social forestry is a forest area located in the management area of the Regional Technical Implementation Unit(UPTD) KPHRegion I Meranti located in Musi Banyuasin Regency. Only 3 social forestry scheme permits have been issued. So the aims of this study was to find out and analyze the process of implementing social forestry policy and analyze the factors that influence. The study was conducted in Pangkalan Bulian and Lubuk Bintialo Villages, Batang Hari Leko District, Musi Banyuasin Regency, South Sumatra Province. Used descriptive method combined (mixed methods) from two different approaches namely quantitative or qualitative approaches. Funding and staff resources (human resources) are still lacking. The process of collective action between actors is running well with the existence of a committed PPS Working Group. Technical rules are clear with the existence of SOPs that are derived from the rules of government and local government.Communication goes well between communities (Forest farmer groups and cooperative members) - local government and facilitators, but not so well between government structures (village heads and apparatus and local government.The Social forestry policy in Musi Banyuasin District, South Sumatra has been effectively implemented from the perspective of policy accuracy in resolving forestry problems and environmental accuracy in accepting policies.

Assessing the new social forestry project in Indonesia: recognition, livelihood and conservation?

Indonesia is undergoing major policy changes, seeking to expand social forestry designations from less than 1% (1.1 million hectares) to over 10% (12.7 million hectares) of the Forest Estate. Expanding designations is at once a landmark reform and a call for caution, raising questions about policy intentions, and practical concerns about legal, technical, and implementation mechanisms. Social forestry literature highlights three key tenets, namely efforts that: confer rights to local communities, support livelihoods, and achieve conservation outcomes. This paper examines social forestry implementation from a cross-section of sites in South Sulawesi by reflecting on sustained action research between 2012–2016. The approach critically juxtaposes social forestry policy intent with implementation at three different sites. Findings indicate social forestry implementation suffers from historically problematic state enclosures and flawed land administration processes, entrenched politicaleconomic interests among local actors, and lack of institutional engagement beyond the permitting process. Shortcuts to addressing entrenched conflict will only heighten tensions or further marginalize the most vulnerable, without guarantees to conservation outcomes.