Decentralization of Forest Administration in Indonesia, Implications ...

Forests and Decentralization in Indonesia: an Overview
se, the spirit of the law was clearly aimed at devolving wide-ranging administrative
powers to district governments, and it certainly did not include forestry in the list
of sectors where the central government would continue to hold principal authority.
Moreover, the regional autonomy law was introduced just after a series of forestry
sector reforms were adopted in late-1998 and early-1999, which gave district
governments and local communities a greater role in forest management. Within
this context, district officials suddenly found that it was politically feasible to assert
far-reaching administrative authority over forest resources located within their
jurisdictions, and many moved aggressively to do so.
In most forested regions of Indonesia, district officials initially used their
expanded authority to issue large numbers of small-scale timber extraction and forest
conversion permits, and to impose new types of fees and royalties on log harvesting
(Barr et al. 2001; McCarthy 2001a, 2001b). District governments also took steps
to carry out their own land-use spatial plans, and to formulate district development
strategies which, in many cases, have been based heavily on the exploitation and
conversion of forests (Potter and Badcock 2002; Casson 2001a, 2001b). At the same
time, forest-dependent communities took advantage of the political space created
by Indonesia’s regional autonomy law to (re)assert claims over land and forest
resources from which they had been displaced or excluded during the New Order
period. Collectively, these actions reflected a widespread feeling that after 32 years of
centralized control in the forestry sector, the time had now come for district and local
actors to get their rightful share of the benefits associated with forest resources.
However much enthusiasm Indonesia’s decentralization process has generated
among stakeholders at the district and local levels, it has never had the united
and unqualified support of the national government. From the beginning of the
decentralization process, the MoF has frequently acted as something of an institutional
counterweight to the Ministry of Regional Autonomy (and later, the Ministry of
Home Affairs), which have held primary responsibility for implementing regional
autonomy on behalf of the central government. Since mid-2002, in particular, the
MoF has adopted legal-regulatory measures designed explicitly to rescind much of
the authority over forest administration that had earlier been transferred to district
governments. Ministry officials have generally argued that such steps are necessary
to curtail – in their words – the ‘excesses’ of decentralization, which they claim have
had highly damaging effects on the country’s forest resources. Whatever the merit
of such arguments, their efforts have led to a political pendulum swing back towards
Jakarta over the last couple of years in what can only be characterized as a process
of recentralization.
How this ongoing struggle over administrative authority in the forestry sector
will ultimately play out is of considerable significance due to the important role
that Indonesia’s forests play in supporting rural livelihoods, generating economic
revenues, and providing environmental services. With between 90 and 100 million
ha currently under forest cover, Indonesia has the world’s third largest area of tropical
forest, surpassed only by those of Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo
(GFW/FWI 2002; MoF, cited in Holmes 2001). The forests of Kalimantan and Papua,
in particular, have very high levels of floral and faunal endemism and rank among the