Decentralization of Forest Administration in Indonesia, Implications ...

Christopher Barr, Ida Aju Resosudarmo, John McCarthy, and Ahmad Dermawan 15
services that those resources may provide, either currently or in the future. As such,
relatively little consideration seems to have been given to the types of institutional
arrangements and intra-governmental coordination that will be necessary to manage
forests either in critical watersheds or in national parks in a decentralized manner.
At the same time, it is becoming increasingly apparent that commercial timber
resources in many parts of Indonesia (most notably the lowland forests of Sumatra
and Kalimantan) are quickly becoming exhausted. This means that the country’s
national, provincial, and district governments are engaged in a struggle over a rapidly
diminishing resource base. Again, there is little indication that stakeholders at any
level are contemplating how best to manage degraded forest landscapes once timber
rents no longer exist, beyond converting these areas to plantations or other types of
land use.
1.5 Organization of the Book
This book provides a historical analysis of the processes of decentralization and
recentralization that have occurred in Indonesia’s forestry sector since the late-1990s.
The study is organized into seven chapters. Following this introduction, Chapter 2
sketches the sectoral context for the current reforms by tracing forestry development
and the changing structure of forest administration from Indonesia’s independence
in 1945 to the fall of Soeharto’s New Order regime in 1998. Chapter 3 examines
the origins and scope of Indonesia’s decentralization laws, in order to describe the
legal-regulatory framework within which decentralization has been implemented
(and, to some extent, retracted) both at the macro-level and specifically within the
forestry sector. Chapter 4 analyses the decentralization of Indonesia’s fiscal system
and describes the effects of the country’s new fiscal balancing arrangements on
revenue flows from the forestry sector. Chapter 5 describes the emergence of districtlevel
timber regimes following the adoption of Indonesia’s decentralization laws, and
subsequent efforts by the national government to reassert administrative control over
key aspects of the nation’s commercial forestry sector. Chapter 6 examines the real
and anticipated effects of decentralization on land tenure and livelihood security for
communities living in and around forested areas. Chapter 7 summarizes the study’s
major findings and summarizes options for possible interventions to strengthen the
forestry reform efforts currently underway in Indonesia.
It should be noted that this book has relied heavily on primary research
conducted by numerous scientists both at the Center for International Forestry
Research (CIFOR) and its many Indonesian and international partner institutions
since 2000. CIFOR has published much of this research separately in a series of case
studies on ‘Decentralization and Forests in Indonesia’. As of July 2006, these include
district-level case studies from seven provinces: Riau, Jambi, West Kalimantan,
Central Kalimantan, East Kalimantan, South Sulawesi, and West Papua (see Figure
1). These case studies are referenced at relevant points in the following chapters,
and the full citations are provided in the bibliography. However, this book does not
attempt to provide an exhaustive synthesis of the findings of the decentralization case
studies, each of which provides a rich description of the dynamics occurring within