Large-scale illegal logging and associated trade in illegally sourced wood products are recognized as pervasive drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in many developing countries. To address the problems, the European Union (EU) adopted the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan in 2003 with the Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs) and the EU Timber Regulation (EUTR) as key components. Following the introduction of these initiatives, concerns have been raised about the potential of timber producers to avoid the new legality requirements. Based on interviews with timber actors in Ghana and Indonesia, this paper explores the practices of timber producers, identifying various strategies they undertake to circumvent timber legality requirements. It also explores their motivations for doing so. The study found that timber legality verification presents challenges to timber producers in Ghana and Indonesia. They therefore engage in a number of practices to avoid timber legality. These practices entail a range of actions that bypass EU market legality requirements and/or domestic laws. Motivations included instrumental, normative and contextual factors, such as the costs associated with complying with the legality requirements, and the perception that the new regulations are overly burdensome. Moreover, for many operators, there is the feeling that timber legality as it is unfolding in the countries is an imposition that fails to take into account local realities; as such, evading legality becomes a legitimate response. Through their focus on legal formalisation and strengthened enforcement, the VPA and EUTR implicitly stipulate an instrumental perspective to compliance. The paper, therefore, contends that, for the FLEGT Action Plan to achieve its objective of addressing illegal logging and, ultimately, deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, FLEGT policy makers and implementers must also pay attention to the normative and contextual factors of compliance.

Deforestation and forest degradation are complex and dynamic processes that vary from place to place. They are driven by multiple causes. Local communities are, to some extent, driving and also affected by some of these processes. Can their knowledge aid and add to place-specific assessment and monitoring of Deforestation and forest Degradation (DD) drivers? Our research was conducted in seven villages across three provinces of Indonesia (Papua, West Kalimantan and Central Java). Household surveys and focus group discussions were used to investigate how local community knowledge of DD drivers contributes to place-specific assessment and monitoring of DD drivers. We analyzed the link between drivers and local livelihoods to see how attempts to address deforestation and forest degradation might affect local communities and how this link might influence their participation in climate change mitigation measures such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and Measuring, Reporting and Verifying (MRV) activities. We found that local knowledge is fundamental to capturing the variety of drivers particularly in countries like Indonesia where forest and socio-economic conditions are diverse. Better understanding of drivers and their importance for local livelihoods will not only contribute to a more locally appropriate design of REDD+ and monitoring systems but will also foster local participation.

This paper presents an assessment of the outcomes of research carried out under the Sustainable Wetlands Adaptation and Mitigation Programme (SWAMP). SWAMP aimed to inform national and international climate policy and practice by developing tools and methods to quantify greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, carbon stocks and flux in tropical wetlands due to land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF). This assessment modelled SWAMP's intended outcomes as a theory of change (ToC) and used qualitative methods to test the ToC and to evaluate whether and how the outcomes were achieved. It found that SWAMP research has helped raise academic and policy interest in wetlands, mangroves and peat forests as carbon reservoirs, and that SWAMP's recommendations informed policy discourse and supported the development of technical guidance and strategies of sustainable wetland management. However, the research had a weak effect on international and Indonesian climate change policies compared to other factors. The Paris Agreement and Indonesia's nationally determined contribution (NDC) do not include the quantification of carbon stocks from mangroves, which are not all located in the forest areas. Knowledge translation was achieved through a variety of mechanisms, with direct engagement identified as particularly important. The outcome evaluation approach proved useful as a way of conceptualising and organising the analysis of research impact on development outcomes.

This research paper identifies fiscal policy gaps that occur in Indonesia’s renewable energy (RE) sector and analyses its political economy. Primary data from 37 stakeholders and secondary data from fiscal policies from Indonesia’s 2007–2017 taken from Ministry of Finance (MOF) and Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (MEMR) regulation databases. The fiscal policy data were analysed using a cluster approach and meta-synthesis method. The results show that Indonesia has experienced multi-faceted principal-agent problems between PT PLN, the agent with sole authority to manage electricity transmissions, and various principals, namely the Ministry of State Owned Enterprises (MSOE), the MEMR, the Ministry of Industry (MOI) as the intermediary between domestic and foreign RE industries, and the MOF. While changing the MEMR’s feed-in-tariff (FiT) policies sends an uncertain policy signal, the MOF’s fiscal incentive policies other than FiT to promote RE development in Indonesia remain sub-optimal; the fiscal policies required to incentivise a large volume of small- and medium-scale investment in RE are absent. Differentiated tax rates and tax-break periods for national and foreign companies on the micro, small and medium scales could significantly accelerate the development of RE by both domestic and foreign companies, supporting Indonesia in achieving its sustainable development goals and emission reduction targets under its nationally determined contribution.

The research investigates actors' power on Jeneberang watershed management. By using bureaucratic politics framing, we found that central government actors' patron much more drives the power. It is also found that dominant information and national budget incentives are used to segregate a dual coalition, such as watershed-based coalition under Ministry of Environment and Forestry (KLHK) patron and dam - river basin management coalition under the Ministry of Public Works and Public Housing (PUPR). The provincial government is trapped in these two major coalitions; they can not disburse these two strong patrons. These strong dual fragmentation coalitions also lead to the issue of comprehensive uncoordinated on managing a watershed landscape.

Rural development advocates are increasingly favouring policies that recognise community land rights in Indonesia, suggesting that recognition will protect forests and support livelihoods. In this article, we examine the effects of recognition by asking who benefits, and to what extent recognition impacts on livelihoods. Our case study focuses on an iconic site, the Kajang community of South Sulawesi, because advocates often point to that community as a model case. Based on over three years of field research on tenure and conflict among the Kajang, we highlight the discrepancy between the effects of recognition and existing livelihood realities. We show that communal territory in Kajang is a site of contestation, entangled in conflict over who can claim cultivation rights. We thus argue that representation of Kajang as harmonious forest communities governed by communal tenure is misleading. As advocates continue to promote similar policies elsewhere, we show that this kind of misrepresentation serves to further obscure the lingering land insecurity of rural Indonesians.

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.

A Theory of Access (Ribot and Peluso 2003) was published 15 years ago. With almost 1600 publications citing it, the paper is instrumental in expanding scholarly thinking beyond property by exploring notions of power. We reviewed all available literature that cited A Theory of Access to understand its influence on academic literature. We first analyse literature in relation to other frameworks with similar concerns: (1) entitlements framework, (2) sustainable livelihoods approach, (3) powers of exclusion; and subsequently move to a review of how it has been engaged in broader theoretical and conceptual debates in the social sciences: (4) gender, (5) materiality, (6) property and authority, and (7) power. The analysis shows most of the literature interacts with A Theory of Access superficially. Substantial attempts to address A Theory of Access were varied and often used it to develop other social theory rather than to modify A Theory of Access.

Recent land management policies around the world have experienced a broader political push to resolve forest and land tenure conflict through agrarian reform policy. As a result, conservation bureaucracies are responding with both formal and informal interventions to acknowledge the role of people in forests. In this methods paper, we provide a closer examination of the ways that conservation bureaucracies apply their political capacity in negotiating forest and land tenure conflicts. Our proposed method measures both the capacity and actions of conservation bureaucracies, combining formal dimensions (such as of legal status, budget availability, and the type of organization unit) with informal dimensions (including ways of gaining authority, donors and funding, and trust). The framing is rooted in theories of bureaucratic politics, and while culled from rich empirical experiences from Indonesia, the proposed method is also applicable in examining bureaucratic politics in other natural resource governance contexts.
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We develop a method rooted in bureaucratic politics to measure the capacities of conservation agencies to manage forest land tenure conflict

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The proposed typology guides forest and land use policy researchers to incorporate emergent governance issues such as land tenure reform into their assessments of changing conservation bureaucracies

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The can be adapted for examination of bureaucratic capacities and actions in other contested natural resource contexts

SDG 10 calls for reducing inequalities within and among countries. This chapter evaluates the potential effects of addressing SDG 10 from an environmental justice perspective, which comprises three interrelated dimensions: representative, recognition and distributive justice. We find considerable synergies and complementarities between the SDG 10 targets and goals of environmental justice. However, the disjuncture between SDG 10 and environmental goals within the SDGs may undermine efforts to promote environmental justice. Trade is not included in SDG 10; this is an important gap as markets for forest products can drive forest resource extraction, exacerbating inequalities among actors within global production networks. If SDG 10 addresses structural inequalities, it is also likely to support distributive, representational and recognition justice for forest-dependent populations. However, the myopic translation of its aspirational targets into easily measurable indicators may dampen the potential effects of addressing SDG10 in advancing environmental justice. Addressing ‘migration’ related targets and indicators is likely to elevate the importance of these issues in forestry policy and research, while also prompting a re-thinking of some of the underlying assumptions informing existing research in forestry.

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The Government of Indonesia has committed to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. However, the country suffers from one of the most significant illegal logging and illegal land clearing conditions in the world. Brazil was in a similar condition to Indonesia when it implemented an aggressive and strategic forest law enforcement policy which enable it to significantly reduce deforestation. Indonesia does not have such a strategic approach to forest law enforcement. It should consider the features of Brazil’s strategy in order to improve its forest law enforcement activities in order to be able to deliver on the reduction of forest emissions that it has pledged in Nationally Determined Contributions statement to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Indonesia’s efforts, and those of other countries, would be enhanced by research on the reasons at the root of the unsuccessful forest law enforcement policies and activities over the two decades since the spotlight was put on illegal logging at the first Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade conference held in Bali in 2001.

Through the discourse of indigeneity, rural communities around the world are joining a global network of rural justice seekers. By articulating grievances collectively, they demand state recognition while seeking support from NGOs and international development organisations. In Indonesia, the manifestation of indigenous ‘adat’ politics is no longer confined to the national struggle for the recognition of land rights, but instead, has proliferated into many localised short term ‘adat projects’. This introduction to the TAPJA special issue on adat demonstrates that both the rural poor and local elites can be the initiators or recipients of these adat projects but, at the current juncture, the latter are better positioned to benefit from such projects. The special issue shows that in Indonesia, where adat is often firmly entrenched in the state, the promotion of indigeneity claims can work in contradictory ways. Findings from across the special issue show that adat projects tend to reinforce the power of the state, rather than challenging it.

The capital city of Indonesia, Jakarta, faces chronic flooding which has been and will continue to be exacerbated by climate change processes, including sea level rise and increased rainfall. In response to these threats, the government has devised a megaproject solution to flooding which will simultaneously address the problem while enhancing Jakarta’s status as a ‘world city’, improving the economy of the metropolitan region and the country as a whole. However, the so-called Great Garuda project has a number of major flaws. We describe how this project fails to address the root causes of flooding in Jakarta as well as the primary drivers of vulnerability to flooding. We further show how the Great Garuda project is a channel through which politically connected economic elites of the Suharto regime, now marginalized by democratization and decentralization reforms, can reconstitute ‘growth coalitions’ to benefit from state resources and privileged access to development contracts and concessions. Lastly, we apply and expand on the concept of maladaptation to demonstrate how the project could leave the city and its residents more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change than they currently are.

Global concern has sought to connect resilience with the field of disaster risk reduction, which was prominent in the Hyogo Framework for Action (2005–2015) and updated in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015–2030). However, defining disaster risk reduction and resilience as policy goals geared towards reducing vulnerability and minimizing risk requires a closer examination. This research examines operationalization of resilience in programs and budgets of development plans in Indonesian cities. This paper investigates the documentation of planning policies in the Indonesian context, examining National to local level efforts. The research specifically analyzes case studies at two cities, Semarang and Tegal, and highlights how these sites have accommodated the term resilience to address flooding. The scope of the research focuses on flooding as it is the most commonly experienced hazard across Indonesia. Content analysis is applied to assess identified planning documents. The content analysis is further verified through focus group discussions among key stakeholders. Findings indicate that there are fourteen areas of plans/programs in terms of reduced exposure to hazards, lessened vulnerability of people and property, improved management of land and the environment, and improved preparedness to address flooding in the two selected cities. The elaboration of resilience-related programmes provides important lessons, namely that operationalizing resilience should be integrative and comprehensive, and require both short-term actionable initiative(s) and long-term transformative frameworks.