International Forest Policies in Indonesia: International Influences, Power Changes and Domestic Responses in REDD+, One Map and Forest Certification Politics

The political contention that considers forests to be mere economic assets to achieve state welfare has slowly changed into a more conservative view since the Ninth World Forestry Congress in Mexico in 1985 rightly acknowledged that there has been severe tropical forest destruction and environmental deterioration around the globe. Several international agreements to address specific forestry issues have been established and new forms of forest governance have been formed, and an alliance of domestic and international actors have to implement these, mostly in forest-rich countries. These attempts have sometimes met with difficulty, due to the domestic forest-related bureaucracies’ own programmes and goals. Here, various interests in domestic politics compete for international support, resulting in the acceptance, rejection of, or changes to, those forest governances. Consequently, international forest governance may be adopted in a country in a form that is different from its original concept. To gain more insight into forest politics as carried out by bureaucracies, and its consequences for forest policy processes and forest resources, this dissertation examines the question of how forest-relevant bureaucracies respond to new international forest governance. This framework contributes to a description of the bureaucratic processes involved in the implementation of selected international forest governances. For this purpose this framework will be structured as follows: 1. Theoretical framework on bureaucratic politics, domestic politics in response to international forest regimes, theory of power, and the concept of absolute and relative power gains; 2. Methodological framework for data collection and analysis of international forest issues relevant in Indonesia, the role of influential actors in specific cases, bureaucracies respond to forest policy introduced by other actors, and power dynamics of actors involved; and 3. Results, highlighting the selection of international forest governance forms by domestic bureaucracies, the effort bureaucracies make to restore their authority over forests, the international influence on forest politics, the forming of super bureaucracy and its suspension, and symbolic forest policy. The origin of this framework consists of five articles, each of which addresses specific questions in selected study cases. The publications are listed below, together with a brief description. Article 1: Wibowo, A. , & Giessen, L. (2015). Actor positions on primary and secondary international forest-related issues relevant in Indonesia. Journal of Sustainable Development, 8(3):10-27. This article identifies timber legality, climate change (including the REDD initiative) oil palm plantation and its environmental aspects, harmonisation of wood and forest certification schemes, land use change, forest and species conservation, and deforestation and decentralized forest governance as the seven most relevant forest issues in Indonesia. Article 2: Wibowo, A. , & Giessen, L. (2015). Absolute and relative power gains among state agencies in forest-related land use politics: The Ministry of Forestry and its competitors in the REDD+ Programme and the One Map Policy in Indonesia. Land Use Policy, 49, 131-141. It describes how the two forest-related policies involving many state agencies do not work well since there is no strong leading agency responsible for them. Article 3: Wibowo, A. , Sahide, M.A.K, & Giessen, L. (2015). From voluntary private to mandatory state governance in Indonesian forest certification: Reclaiming authority and legitimacy by bureaucracies. Article submitted to Global Environmental Change. This describes the strategy of the Ministry of Forestry of increasing its influence over stakeholders along the value chain of domestic timber business, by utilising its authority in Indonesia-EU FLEGT-VPA negotiation. Article 4: Pratiwi, S. , Wibowo, A. , & Giessen, L. (2015). Third-party certification of forest management in Indonesia: Analysing stakeholders’ recognition and preferences. Journal Manajemen Hutan Tropika [Journal of Tropical Forest Management], 21(2), 65–75. This unveils certification schemes preferred by industries and the criteria they use in selecting such schemes. Article 5: Wibowo, A. , Pratiwi, S. , & Giessen, L. (2015). Comparing forest certification and timber legality systems in Indonesia: Complementary or competitive? Environmental, Development and Sustainability, under revision. This compares two international and one national forest certification scheme with the timber legality verification system in Indonesia that uses the Forest Certification Assessment Guide (FCAG), and concludes that those schemes are in competition and that each of them tries to delegitimise the others. These five publications answer the central question of how forest-relevant bureaucracies respond to new international forest governance. To address this central question, four questions that are more specific are formulated, namely: (i) What policy instruments are international forest governances trying to apply to domestic forest policy? ; (ii) Who are the important domestic and non-domestic actors involved in the policy processes concerning specific forest issues? ; (iii) How do the main forest-related bureaucracies respond to forest policy introduced by other bureaucracies? ; and (iv) What are political factors influence the acceptance of new forest-related policies? We used non-participant observations, expert interviews, and content analyses of policy documents in most of our works. Specifically, online survey was used to identify stakeholders’ perception on forest certification schemes working in Indonesia and Forest Certification Assessment Guide (FCAG) to compare the standard of forest sustainability certification and timber legality verification. We applied theory of actor-centred power, theory of power, concept of absolute and relative power gains, and domestic response to foreign agenda in all publications. The results show that, first, forest-related bureaucracies are more responsive to issues with high economic benefit, and pay less attention to those with low economic benefit. They are also more involved with topics that become issues of international concern, such as timber legality, climate change and REDD+, and oil palm plantation and its environmental aspects. Second, domestic bureaucracies in charge of economic tasks are more involved in the forestry business than those in charge of environmental tasks. In addition to the Ministry of Forestry, the Ministry of Trade and the Ministry of Industry are the two ministries most involved in domestic forest governance. Other state agencies that influence domestic forest policy are UKP4 (Presidential Delivery Unit for Development Monitoring and Oversight, Unit Kerja Presiden Bidang Pengawasan dan Pengendalian Pembangunan), REDD+ Agency, BAPPENAS (National Development Planning Agency, Badan Perencanaan Pembangunan Nasional), DNPI (National Council on Climate Change, Dewan Nasional Perubahan Iklim). Third, domestic bureaucracies form alliances with central power in the states (the president) to be involved in or/and to shape domestic forest policies, and to cooperate with international actors to gain public legitimacy for the way in which they run their programmes. Fourth, the three main cases examined in this dissertation, namely REDD+, one map policy and forest certification, are likely to be symbolic only. Symbolic policy is defined as sense of a non-policy, which formulates goals and instruments but is not assigned with clear responsibilities in terms of implementing agencies, sufficient staff, budget resources and necessary information. This conclusion is based on the fact that REDD+ policy, as well as timber legality verification, are based on weak legal constructions, have no single and strong leading agency responsible for ensuring continuity, and have only weak long-term agendas with no stand-alone budgets or discrete staff. Weak legal construction means that the policy can be changed, postponed or discontinued by other powerful actors, and having no leading agency means that there is an absence of an actor with the power to direct and implement the policy or of an authority that would penalize anyone acting against it.