Toward improved impact evaluation of community forest management in Indonesia

Abstract

Many tropical countries continue to devolve forest management to forest‐dwelling communities. The assumption is that local knowledge of forests and community engagement in forest management will attain multiple social and environmental co‐benefits, such as poverty alleviation and reduced deforestation and fires. Evidence for this, however, is scant, commonly hampered by data availability and a lack of technical capacity for implementing statistically robust impact evaluations. Based on a practice‐based review of policy implementation, impact evaluation of case studies and examples of counterfactual analyses from Indonesia, we demonstrate that it is increasingly feasible to determine the conditions under which community forest management will most likely achieve its social and environmental objectives. Adapting community forest management implementation based on feedback from accurate impact evaluation could lead to positive outcomes for people and environment in Indonesia, and across the tropical realm.

Forest loss in Indonesian New Guinea: trends, drivers, and outlook

“…It is in the context of such efforts combined with increased recognition of customary lands that many authors propose and promote some form of “social forestry” (for example, sago, candlenut and nutmeg production) as an alternative to industrial-scale oil palm, pulpwood and food estates (e.g., Fatem 2019; Ungirwalu et al 2019). Nonetheless, such government controlled social forestry programs have had mixed success (Fisher et al 2019); different land use contexts required different investment strategies to ensure social and environmental benefits (Meijaard et al 2020). Whatever the outcome, social forestry appears to be the model of choice by the provincial governments of Papua and West Papua (see Manokwari Declaration) for engaging with customary communities on their terms (Fatem 2019).…”

Adaptation and evolution of institutions and governance in community‐based conservation

“…Cassidy (2021) and Nelson, Mupeta‐Muyamwa, Muyengwa, Sulle, and Kaelo (2021) go further to argue that there has been a trend toward governments recentralizing control over wildlife in Africa, against the core tenet of CBC, although there may still be examples of strong community institutions enduring under the right conditions. Strong state policy yielding varied outcomes is also illustrated through a rapid move to decentralized forest management in Indonesia (Meijaard et al, 2021), where some communities could secure forest and livelihood gains, but many could not.…”

“…Borgerhoff Mulder et al (2021) describe a similar lack of supporting vertical links in a REDD+ pilot project in Pemba, Tanzania, where the higher‐level institution meant to verify and secure payments for carbon sequestration failed to deliver benefits to participating community forest associations. Evaluating the rapid effort to shift forest management from the Indonesian state to communities, Meijaard et al (2021) identify significant barriers faced by many communities to embrace the policy changes and both conserve and capitalize on forest resources, while external NGO partners were seen as necessary to fund and facilitate more effective transition to community forest governance.…”

“…The lack of rigorous impact evaluation of CBC interventions has hindered adaptive management and evidence‐based design (Brooks et al, 2006; Hajjar et al, 2016). Multiple contributions to the issue articulate the challenges to evaluation facing communities and implementing partners, such as high cost, limited capacity, and the mismatch between time‐bounded interventions and long‐term timescales of many social and ecological outcomes (Borgerhoff Mulder et al, 2021; Meijaard et al, 2021; Romulo, Gilmore, Endress, & Kennedy, 2021). While these challenges will likely persist, there is increasing recognition of the importance of impact evaluation within conservation, as well as tools to support its use (Cheng et al, 2020).…”

“…Controlled and counterfactual‐based evaluation is critical for measuring the impacts of CBC. While Meijaard et al (2021) report that only a small fraction of research implements a counterfactual design to evaluate impacts of Indonesian social forestry, their practice‐based review highlights robust findings from these few studies, such as teasing apart context‐dependent factors affecting environmental (e.g., avoided deforestation) versus social outcomes (e.g., forest income). In a control‐treatment design, Salerno et al (2021) are able to infer positive effects of CBC on community governance.…”