In policy discussions of sensitive and complex issues, particularly in the field of forestry and natural resources, interests play an integral role, but are often a challenging component to contextualize, understand, and study. For various reasons related to factors of influence and authority, actors often do not want their interests uncovered by either competitors or even by non-partisan researchers. Nevertheless, identifying such interests continue to be a critical task for the research community, particularly if we are to better understand the broader effects, effectiveness, or shortcomings of policy. In this short policy brief, we provide a practical guide for researchers to capture and incorporate actor interests as part of their empirical evidence through the interview process. Following an empirical-analytical approach, we first distinguish interests of two different types, the formal and informal. Thereafter, our guide lays out an approach consisting of four distinct phases, namely: i) deciding on the interview format, ii) creating situational settings for the interview, iii) preparing interview guides; and iv) triangulating the interview. In each phase, we underline the importance of a culture of generosity and positivity directed toward the interviewees, comfortably engaging them to describe factors and scenarios in rich detail, while also encouraging respondents to express their values and feelings toward both the area of study and other actors across policy networks.

Actor interests are always a sensitive issue in policies related to the environment, which are often purposefully hidden by actors, and commonly overlooked by research;
We develop a practical guide based on a set of principles for researchers to use when approaching interviews, which will help to more effectively understand and contextualize actor interests, and can ensure more robust findings about policies related to the environment and natural resources;
This guide lays out four distinct phases for approaching the complex and sensitive issue of actor interests for data collection using interviews, namely through the way researchers i) structure interview formats, ii) set up situational settings, iii) approach the preparation and delivery of guiding questions, and iv) triangulate the interview.

NGOs take many shapes and forms, operating at various governing scales and levels. As a categorical form, NGOs often emerged as benevolent philanthropists or as antagonistic actors. Relative to governments, NGOs are envisioned to fill a void of unmet public services, exposing shortcomings, or in extreme cases, gain notoriety by applying aggressive campaigns in confrontational ways. However, more recent manifestations of NGOs are maneuvering political strategies in more elegant and reflexive ways that do not always match their more classical categorizations. Notwithstanding the proliferation of literature indicating the evolving role of NGOs, the theorizing of existing definitions and the usage of NGO as a category in the scientific literature remain anachronistic, recalling a particular imaginary of a rather simplistic idea. Indeed, as a category of analysis, the academic literature and associated political commentary refer to NGOs in normative terms that invoke benevolent, independent, and non-profit agents striving for common goals to foster societal betterment. We argue that such normative definitions of NGOs no longer reflect the empirics, and indeed obscure the overall role that such actors perform. By more closely examining NGO activities and the strategies they employ to achieve political goals, we argue that NGOs, like other interest groups, are highly political actors that pursue self-interests in ways that we might not otherwise recognize.

Introduction:
As political-economic forces at every scale and locus are transforming nature and society, struggles are mounting over access to natural resources. Wide-ranging and deepening inequality (e.g. Hickel 2017) suggests that questions of access are germane to critical social science today, possibly even more than in previous decades. Resource access struggles are part and parcel of unequal exchanges and outcomes, failure to recognize claims, lack of participation in decision making, and market processes. Access theory, not least Ribot and Peluso’s (2003) A Theory of Access, presents concepts of power, control, benefits and burdens for analyzing access, which continue to gain pertinence today. Access theory and analysis have continually proven to be a versatile way to understand some of the most elusive obstacles to effective natural resources governance such as elite control over resources, exploitative market relations, and policies that eschew rights.

This special issue was triggered by the 15 year anniversary of the publication of A Theory of Access and encompasses a literature review of A Theory of Access followed by eight articles with conceptual and empirical advances in access theory. It concludes with a postscript by Jesse Ribot and Nancy Peluso, reflecting on this special issue and A Theory of Access 15 years after its publication. In this introduction, we introduce access theory and the contributions of each article to new ways of theorizing and applying the concept of access.

Community-based forest monitoring is seen as a way both to improve community engagement and participation in national environmental payment schemes and climate mitigation priorities and to implement reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and foster conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries (REDD+). There is a strong assumption among community-based monitoring advocates that community monitoring is a desirable approach. However, it is unclear why community members would want to participate in their own surveillance or be involved in a program likely to limit livelihood uses of forest areas and possibly even sanction them based on the data provided. This paper explores these issues by examining three communities involved in Peru’s Conditional Direct Transfer Program, in which indigenous communities are compensated for protecting communal forests through various mechanisms, including forest monitoring. The case studies focus specifically on communities that received smartphones and were trained in their use for monitoring. The results affirm the importance that benefits outweigh the costs of local participation to sustain motivation. They also point to key factors supporting the legitimacy of the program, specifically to overcome historical tensions between the state and indigenous communities. These include the nature of engagement by program implementers and the importance of building trust over time.

The European Union introduced Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Action Plan, with Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPA) and the EU Timber Regulation (EUTR) as the key components. The VPA and EUTR have been conceived as complementary tools to establish a “level playing field.” This paper analyses how a level playing field has been conceptualized, approached, and experienced in practice. It focuses on the adoption and implementation of EUTR and VPA in Europe, Indonesia, and Ghana. Our research highlights inequities in the practice of “leveling” and outcomes from a presumed level field. Stakeholder engagement excluded some factions of the private sector, notably SME operators, favoring select NGOs in general. New systems also favor larger operators who possess more capacity to deal with legality requirements. This leads small operators to perceive of a so-called level playing field as one in which they are disadvantaged, indicating multiple injustices against already vulnerable groups.

Studies on power dynamics have helped to develop a better understanding of the role of actors and interests influencing community forestry initiatives. This article introduces a sequential power analysis as a framework for expanding research on power dynamics to better understand the various stages that shape benefit sharing outcomes in community forestry. The research is based on the increasingly popular “partnership” scheme in Indonesia, but the framework is introduced as a method for potential application in other community forestry contexts. The framework is based on three parts. It first historicizes the actors in what we term the “power background.” Thereafter we examine the arrival of a partnership scheme described as “power delivery”. Third, we highlight a process of “power adjustment,” which serves to explain the way actors achieve benefit sharing outcomes. Our research draws from a diverse set of partnership schemes from four sites across five different comparative variables. We find that the framing of power delivery allows us to identify the key actors that serve as the messengers of partnership schemes (the prophets) promoting the terms of project implementation. In the latter stages however, power adjustment determines the outcomes, which are contingent upon benefit-sharing arrangements (profits). Not only does our sequential power analysis help to enrich studies of power dynamics in community forestry, we also show that the current implementation of the partnership scheme in Indonesia is unlikely to result in more equitable outcomes, but rather serves to strengthen the position of existing powerful actors.

Governments around the world are promoting social forests as part of their stated commitments for sustainability and social justice. Since 2014, social forest policy in Indonesia has undergone rapid expansion, increasing by a factor of five, from 653,311 ha to around 3,369,583 ha in 2019. This paper examines the processes through which social forest policy is implemented to consider who benefits (access) and who loses (exclusion) within different policy stages. We identify these stages to include initial formulation, formal handover, and policy implementation, and map them onto an access-exclusion framework to analyze how power is contested and who benefits. Applying the framework to three case studies from Sulawesi demonstrates that at the initial stage, processes that generate social forestry are defined by access and exclusion related to the collection and control of information. Through processes that define the formal handover stage, key actors contest rules and establish the contours of legitimacy governing social forestry. Finally, during implementation, access and exclusion occur through the management and use of resources. By analyzing access and exclusion dynamics across temporal dimensions that structure social forestry policy, we at once demystify what social forestry entails while providing a clearer picture about the boom of its expansion in Indonesia since 2014, showing how a highly anticipated policy filled with populist ideals goes bust from below.

We extend the Actor-Centred Power framework to consider dimensions beyond the life of community natural resource management partnership initiatives by examining social forestry partnership projects in Indonesia. We do this by examining how power constellations realign across the temporal phases that operationalize project partnerships. We propose a sequential power analysis framework that examines power in three parts. The framework first proposes a method for historicizing actors into their power background. Second, we present mode for examining the arrival of a partnership scheme, which we call the power delivery phase. Third, we highlight approaches for examining the way power relations are adjusted, whether reinforced or reconfigured, by introducing an approach for examining programmatic outcomes of social forestry partnership schemes. This article thus provides broadly applicable but targeted guide for the researchers collecting data and seeking to make sense of power relations on community forest partnership schemes in various contexts. This framework is particularly useful for analysing equity and justice dimensions by highlighting who benefits and who loses.

This paper outlines a land and power framework for assessing whether a new voluntary conservation area policy is a return to the classical bureaucratic status quo or anticipates the opportunity to establish new bureaucratic norms. The application of this conceptual framework produces two possibilities. The first possibility is that outcomes are tied to the conventional bureaucratic models of conservation with management regimes that remain unchanged. The second possibility is the anticipation of new management forms, in which goals are not to fulfill the bureaucratic process, but rather, produce adaptive outcomes reflective of the interests of diverse actors engaged in site-specific voluntary conservation initiatives.
• The land and power framework methodology is rooted in an interest-based power framework.

• The framework analyses the land and power inputs for both conservation bureaucracies or actors participating in multi-stakeholder arrangements struggling to achieve their interests and establish their agendas.

• The framework proposes a conceptual framework to assess two possible process outcomes, namely that management regimes will either be tied to the conventional bureaucracy or that actors anticipate new bureaucratic norms that achieve outcomes accommodating their broader interests.

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Timber legality trade restrictions and verification are a bundle of contemporary mechanisms triggered by global concerns about forest degradation and deforestation. The European Union Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade initiative is a significant effort to not only screen out illegal timber and wood products from the EU, but also support trading partner countries to improve their legality definitions and verification processes. But by using bilateral agreements (Voluntary Partnership Agreements) as a key mechanism, the EU legitimises trade partner nation-states as the authority to decide what is legal. We engage in a theoretical debate about the complexities of the meaning of legality, and then analyse empirical data collected from interviews in Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam and Europe with policy, civil society and industry actors to understand how different actors understand legality. We find hegemonic notions of Westphalian statehood at the core of ‘global’ notions of legality and often contrast with local understandings of legality. Non-state actors understand these hegemonic notions of legality as imposed upon them and part of a colonial legacy. Further, notions of legality that fail to conform with hegemonic understandings are readily framed by nation-states as immoral or criminal. We emphasise the importance of understanding these framings to elucidate the embedded assumptions about what comprises legality within assemblages of global actors.

This article aims to observe the dynamics of policy implementation involving various stakeholders in the effort of conserving one of the National Parks in Indonesia, particularly Merapi Mountain National Park (Taman Nasional Gunung Merapi – TNGM). Following the Zoning Policy implemented in the TNGM area, there is a zone that should have been protected from mining activities, namely the reconstruction and mitigation zone. However, in its implementation, the conservation collaboration agreement of one of the areas in the zone, namely the Kali Putih Area, is instead used by some parties to engage in sand mining activities. The principal-agent theory is, thus, employed in this study to examine the extent of the relationship of every party in the zoning policy implementation process of an area designated as a Reconstruction and Mitigation Zone. The qualitative approach is used to gain direct insights pertaining to the implementation of efforts conducted by several relevant parties in conserving the Kali Putih Area in TNGM’s Reconstruction and Mitigation Zone. Study results ultimately show that moral hazard in the principal-agent theory should not only be understood as deviant behaviors enacted by the agent, but the moral hazard performed by the agent may also in􏱌luence the principal’s decision making process. This research is expected to provide an outlook to the government, which functions as the principal in a policy, to make several considerations prior to entering into any collaborative agreement or making any decision, so that the implementation process of policies can align with what has been previously planned.

Payments for forest environmental services (PFES) is a major breakthrough policy in the Vietnamese forestry sector because it contributes 25% of the total investments in the forestry sector and serves as the first market-based instrument employed to protect forests. However, there is little empirical evidence of its effectiveness. Is the policy meeting the core objectives of improving forest cover and forest quality and is it also achieving its claims of supporting local livelihoods? This paper analyses the environmental, social, and economic impacts of PFES in Son La province, the longest standing implementation of a PFES scheme in Vietnam. Our study uses a sampling method that incorporates pre- matching and a before-after-control-intervention approach. Data was collected from government statistics, remote sensing analysis, focus group discussions involving 236 people, surveys with a total of 240 households, and key informant interviews with 45 people. Our findings show that additionality of PFES in Son La is controversial and depends on who collects the data and what data is used to evaluate the impacts of PFES. Data collection is also politicized to serve central, provincial and district government interests. Evidence shows that PFES has provided little additional income to individual villagers to protect forests in Son La. However, total PFES revenue paid to communities generates significant income for village communities. Moreover, not all villagers can receive continuous payments from PFES, meaning that PFES has not become a stable source of income, rendering the permanence of PFES limited. Improving monitoring and evaluation policies coupled with transparent, inclusive, independent mechanisms are essential to providing a more accurate reflection of impacts from PFES in Vietnam.

The Europe Union (E.U.) has agreed to grant the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) license to Indonesia as the first country in the world to receive it. FLEGT VPA (Voluntary Partnership Agreement) is a bilateral agreement between the European Union (E.U.) and wood exporting countries, to improve forest governance sector and ensure that timber and wood products imported into the E.U. are produced by the laws and regulation of partner countries. The Indonesian government has obliged to implement Article 12 relating to social safeguards. Indonesia has to periodically monitor to see the extent to which the VPA has an environmental and social impact that affect the lives and welfare of vulnerable and marginalised groups. The purpose of this study is to analyse how the effect of implementation of the Sistem Verifikasi Legalitas Kayu (SVLK) as part of VPA in the small and medium forestry industry sector. Methodology survey with focus group discussions, structured interviews, and semistructured interviews to find out the response and opinion of SME’s owner and employee addressed the effect of SVLK in East Java and Central Java, Indonesia. The theory of change (ToC) was used to consider the implications of SVLK implementation on the sustainable livelihood of small and medium enterprises (SME’s). The results of this study showed that SVLK had a more significant impact on livelihoods, as follows. First, the vulnerable and marginalised groups need to be supported by stakeholders to encourage readiness in faces of SVLK impact. Second, SVLK is susceptible to the effects and at risk of losing livelihoods for women and disabled groups in a short time. This group includes vulnerable groups of aspects of adaptability and sensitivity to the effect. Third, SME’s worker groups who do not have a labour organisation are sensitive to the impact on the workplace company. This group is classified as a group that is quite vulnerable if the effect lasts long enough and on a large scale of impact.

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.