87 Case Study3 Using Analysis and Advocacy to Bring About Policy Change in Indonesia

Document begins: 87 Case Study3 Using Analysis and Advocacy to Bring About Policy Change in Indonesia1 At the start of the WWF-Macroeconomics Program Office's (MPO) Economic Change, Poverty and Environment (ECPE) project in Indonesia in 2001, WWF-Indonesia was seeking to expand local natural resource management efforts that were part of existing integrated conservation and development programmes (ICDPs) in the Nusa Tenggara region. For example problems in protected forests had been growing as more and more people were migrating to the margins of protected forests and engaging in agriculture within the protected area. Small experimental community forestry projects seemed insignificant in the face of the tide of encroachments and land clearance by people in search of small plot of land and livelihood. A detailed analysis revealed that localised efforts at land use planning were unlikely to succeed within the existing policy and institutional framework for forest management at the national level. Despite decentralisation of protected forest management to the district level, community participation was being actively restricted by the national government regulations. At the same time, district governments with little experience in forest management, had begun relying on forests to finance their budgets. Reliance on forests for their revenue, when combined ...