Decentralization of Forest Administration in Indonesia, Implications ...

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The Impacts of Decentralization on Tenure and Livelihoods
Although local communities have often obtained an increased share of the benefits from
forest exploitation under decentralization, partnerships between communities and outside
investors generally have not distributes these benefits equitably among the poorest
community members. Rather, the profits from district timber and forest conversion permits
have largely gone to entrepreneurs, elites and government officers. More generally, a
lack of effective law enforcement and control over the activities of timber, mining, and
plantation companies has often led to environment degradation, which eventually affects
the people who most depend on forests for their livelihoods. Some community members
have received a small share of the profits from HPHH and IPPK permits. However, there
has often been a lack of transparency in the distribution of thse benefits within villages,
and marginalized groups, including women and ethnic minorities, have frequently not
received an equitable share (Yasmi et al. 2005). In villages surveyed in Malinau (East
Kalimantan), community members perceived IPPK fee payments as either not being
fairly distributed or having not been received at all (Palmer 2004).
Job creation in forested regions is another positive outcome that successful
decentralization might have offered. However, it is not clear that this has been the case on
any large scale in Indonesia’s forestry sector. In Manokwari, for instance, decentralization
has opened a limited space for job creation, although one might question its sustainability.
Since they lack skills, the jobs are limited to guiding logging teams and/or loading and
unloading timber, which are poorly paid (Tokede et al. 2005). In one research study in
Malinau, none of the local villagers was offered jobs with the companies engaged in
harvesting timber under IPPK permits, apparently because villagers in those locations had
no previous experience working in logging operations. Instead, all the IPPK workers were
contracted from outside the area (Palmer 2004).
Finally, even the money that has been received by local communities under timber
harvesting agreements with outside companies or investors has not always been used
to support lasting improvements in community welfare. In Manokwari, for instance,
members of surveyed communities considered the compensation from timber harvesting
to be a windfall, and they eventually used the money mainly for consumption goods
(Tokede et al. 2005).
6.7 Trends?
Indonesia’s ostensible transition is indicative of the international community’s global
push for decentralized governance, although for the most part decentralized governance
has not been implemented successfully (Agrawal and Ribot 1999). Agrawal and Ribot
(1999) suggest that the success of any decentralization program requires the following
three interconnected steps:
• the management of political relationships at the level of the central state so that some
powerful actors at that level become committed to pursuing decentralization;
• the creation of institutional mechanisms at the level of the locality that prevent elite
actors at that level from cornering the increased flow of benefits directed toward lower
levels of governance and administration; and
• the management of flows of information and creation of capacities so that the new
information is used appropriately to produce goods and services for people.