Institutional Mechanisms for REDD+ - Case Studies Working Paper

5.0 INDONESIA
5.1 COUNTRY CONTEXT
STUDY OVERVIEW:
The Indonesia case study provides an overview of emerging strategies and concepts relating to
REDD+ benefit sharing that are currently being discussed by stakeholders and policy-makers at the
national level (section 2). It also draws insights from two field visits involving contrasting benefit
sharing experiences at the community level (sections 3-5):
1. The Mantaya Sabrang community in Central Kalimantan Province is located adjacent to a
proposed REDD+ project led by a private developer seeking an Ecosystem Restoration
Concession (ERC). The ERC will give the investor long-term rights to conserve and restore
state-owned production forest and benefit from the sale of resulting environmental services.
2. A group of coffee farmers in West Lampung Province was among the first in Indonesia to
secure conditional tenure rights for community forest management in state-owned protection
forest. They participated in a pilot payment for ecosystem services scheme to reduce river
sedimentation through improved forest and land management practices.
Indonesia possesses the third-largest amount of tropical forest in the world, more than 120 million hectares,
after Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, Indonesia‘s forests are being rapidly
diminished and degraded, largely due to industrial logging, clearing for plantation crops (e.g., oil palm),
mining, and forest fires. Underlying these proximate drivers of deforestation are complex governance
challenges, including weak legal and political accountability of government institutions, a forest tenure system
that does not recognize or protect poor and indigenous forest users, a policy environment that favors
continued deforestation and conversion by large-scale commercial actors, and widespread corruption.
The political, institutional, and legal history of Indonesia‘s forests is highly complex, marked by ongoing
power struggles between various levels of government, companies, and local communities. Their struggle is
perhaps most pronounced in the context of property rights and related land use planning processes.
Approximately 70 percent of Indonesia‘s land has been designated as ―government owned‖ 150 forest estate
(kawasan hutan), which is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Forestry (MoFor). The forest estate is
further classified according to three main functions: production, protection, and conservation. In practice,
however, the official designation does not always correspond to the biophysical and socio-economic
characteristics of the landscape. For example, approximately 30 percent of the forest estate is not actually
forested. 151 Since 1999, the decentralization era has generated competition and conflict between MoFor,
provincial governments, and district governments over the authority to control, plan, and allocate rights
within the forest estate (Galudra, 2011). Amidst this confusion, large-scale logging, agricultural, and mining
companies have secured concessions (including many that are overlapping or of questionable legality) to clear
and convert a significant portion of Indonesia‘s natural forests. According to a recent study, a total of 63
150 The legal basis for asserting that the forest estate is ―government owned‖ has been contested. However, in practice the government acts as the de
facto land owner.
151 Presentation by Myrna Safitri. ―Strengthening the Legality of Indonesia‘s Forests.‖ Presented on 12 July 2011 at the International Conference on
Forest Tenure, Governance, and Enterprise in Lombok, Indonesia. http://www.rightsandresources.org/documents/files/doc_2554.pdf.
90 PRRGP INSTITUTIONAL MECHANISMS FOR REDD: CASE STUDIES – WORKING PAPER