Ideas and Institutions in Social Forestry Policy

For the past decade, Indonesia’s forestry community has witnessed grow-ing opposition to the incumbent state-centered forest management sys-tem. The belief in the state as the sole legitimate resource developer and custodian has been condemned as the root cause of many contemporary forest-related problems (e.g., deforestation, forest-related social conflicts), particularly in the Outer Islands.1 In response to the ailing centralized system, many have proposed the community forestry alternative.2 This alternative is usually regarded as a better way to deal with the Outer Islands’ social and ecological complexities as well as the perceived unjust distribution of forestgenerated economic benefits. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academics, international agencies, and other policy advocates have actively tried to influence such reform, albeit with varying degrees of success.3 Incremental policy changes that have taken place for the last several years were primarily aimed at providing the legal means for greater local participation in forest management. Only recently have substantial reforms occurred, even with the basic tenet of a state-centralized management control remaining unaltered.