State Forest Land Management after Deforestation

Abstract

"Global annual rate of deforestation is 13 million ha. Deforestation is mostly located in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. Logging concessions exploit pristine forests in one particular region and then move to another region. Boom-and-bust of logging concessions, with complex credit network, left behind deforested and degraded land, communities with less livelihood opportunities and deeply weakened local institutions. Then wood supply shortage causes the decline of wood-based industries and finally creates massive unemployment in wood industries itself. In Indonesia current statistic shows that at least 60 million ha of State forest are unmanaged.

"This land degradation is not the result of a 'tragedy of the commons' but the result of a brutal destruction of former local institutions by the concession systems on state land, which created open access. Based on a large body of field research, scholars criticized this 'tragedy of the commons' theory. They showed that such tragedy outcome is much more unlikely to happen where resources users are able to communicate and develop agreements about the use of the resources and where local users got the opportunity to build their own institutions related to the resources use.

"Some government in Asia already attempted to improve the forest management on State land by providing more rights to local people. Chinese and Philippines governments allocated right to manage land to communities to plant trees. In result, the reforestation in China and community forestry in Philippines produces some success stories. By contrast in Indonesia, the government is implementing large national reforestation program without giving rights to manage to local communities. Evidence of failures of this program, which targets 3 millions ha during 2003-2007 in the form of social movement, is already observed.

"We tested the following hypothesis, based on the current knowledge about renewable resource management: Indonesian government would give more chance to its own reforestation program by allocating long term rights (and duties) to local communities to manage deforested lands. This right allocation would have multiplier effects: it would benefit the communities, reduce social conflict, fulfill future wood demand, and by consequence also secure future employment in wood industries.

"At the national level, we figured out scenarios and policy interventions which would be feasible under the current existing system (Structure-Institution-Actors). Our first results indicate that about up to 12 million permanent jobs could be created by giving more rights to local communities. At the local level, we observed that approaches to revitalized village and district institutions such as developed in our 'Leveling the Playing Field' (LPF) project are feasible. This European Union funded approach aims to improved stakeholders' coordination through facilitating communication, learning, institution building; thus, building on previous research about common pool resources management we expect to find the way to create better conditions for forest management. Such approach can be used to rebuild local institutions after they were affected by irresponsible logging concessions."