Policy options of the effective implementation of community forestry in Indonesia

Abstract

One of the most important results of the Indonesian political reform 1998 was the strengthened demand for democratization of natural resource management. The paradigm of Indonesian forest management shifted from state-based forest management to community-based-multipurpose forest management or community forestry. Besides supporting the Community-Owned Forests (Rutan Rakyat) located in the private lands, Indonesian government also introducing three schemes to implement community forestry in the state forestlands, namely: HTI Plasma (Partnership Forest Plantation), HKm (Community Forests), and HTR (People Forest Plantation). There are two main objectives of the development of those schemes that are: first, to increase sense of belonging of the rural community towards forest resources in order to minimizing illegal logging and forestland encroachment ; and second, to alleviate poverty of the rural community by giving them more access and opportunity to utilize forest resources sustainably. However, many evidences showed that the implementation of those schemes has not been as effective as expected. They have not performed convincingly in reducing deforestation, neither poverty reduction. The number of forestland has been given for community forestry tends to increase from year to year, but simultaneously illegal logging spiraled upward. As results, more than million hectares of Indonesian forest deforested every year. At the same time, the community forestry schemes gave only very low impact in improving social welfare, since millions of people within and surrounding forests are still living under poverty situation. Those ironical situations clearly appointed for the ineffective implementation of community forestry in Indonesia. This paper focused on identifying constraints of community forestry practices and discussed the policy options to ensure that those three schemes of community forestry would be implemented effectively.