Participatory planning

Getting local communities involved in forest management involves more than just getting them to sit around a table with other stakeholders to discuss policies. Studies have demonstrated for any management project to see sustainable success, several conditions should be fulfilled across the negotiation, implementation and feedback phases.

Negotiation

For negotiations to be fruitful, many conditions have to be fulfilled across all stakeholders, such as maintaining the balance of power, establishing efficient channels for communication and valuing the inputs of local communities.

Too often, authorities and leaders tend to neglect one or more of these conditions, leading to suboptimal outcomes in the planning process. For example, imperfect information on either sides can result in miscommunication or a feeling of being neglected, which is often the case for marginalised forest communities with little experience in formal planning environments. This can easily snowball into a loss of balance of power biased against the locals, leading to a form of superficial participation instead of any meaningful collaboration.

Most studies agree in one way or another that communication is key to securing strong linking social capital between authorities and locals, which creates a stepping stone for future plans. Keeping communications open also prevents conversations from being overly one-sided in favour of one stakeholder at the expense of others.

Planning and implementation

Once negotiations have kickstarted, stakeholders can start assessing various designs for multi-stakeholder management schemes to identify feasible ones for testing and implementation. The core of this stage will involve identifying a set of common priorities among locals and authorities to locate areas where compromise is acceptable and alternatives need to be planned out.

Regardless of the scale and nature of the scheme proposed, having a robust system to self-evaluate management schemes is essential to identify areas of improvement and configure existing plans to better suit the needs of local communities, companies and authorities accordingly. Ideally, such a system should involve a set of practical, yet easy-to-use metrics to assess system performance under tight resource constraints to quickly identify and plug loopholes.

Reflections and feedback mechanisms

Multi-stakeholder management can be seen as analogous to a long-term social game. Given the large span of Indonesia’s forests and the frequent interactions between stakeholders across various levels, conflict might arise and cheaters might surface over time. This poses a problem over long periods, where locals and authorities start to take any success seen for granted and halt further feedback and communication. Examples of cheating could include defaulting on compensations and encroaching beyond one’s allocated land – all of which are typical of forest conflict in Indonesia.

To safeguard the success of any management scheme, checks and feedback mechanisms should be set up to maintain communication channels, identify lapses in system performance and resolve conflict quickly – preferably before misunderstandings are bred and tensions escalate into undesirable consequences. In Indonesia’s case, it is typical to consult third-party mediators as an unbiased role to help resolve conflict and establish good long-term relationships (Kesatuan Pengelolann Hutan).

Finally, because remnants of corruption and bribery are known to be rife in the forest industry, these feedback mechanisms become even more essential to identify defaulters quickly. Here, strong legislative measures should be enforced in parallel with good social capital (both within and outside communities) to reduce the incentive to cheat and promote sustainable long-term cooperation.