1,720,986 research outputs found
The fragmented land use administration in Indonesia???Analysing bureaucratic responsibilities influencing tropical rainforest transformation systems
Full text linkTropical forests in Indonesia are subject to major transformation processes from native forests to other land uses, including rubber agroforestry as well as rubber and oil palm plantation systems. Using content analysis of policy documents, this paper aims at (i) analysing the formal administrative responsibilities related to the four rainforest transformation systems and (ii) based on the informal motives of the competing bureaucracies involved generating hypotheses on their future course of action and related research. We find that based on the legal and political land use application, Indonesian tropical rainforests may fall into six categories of land use. They may be situated in both, within the forest area and land outside of the forest area in so-called title forests, even though there is a though political debate about forest area category's jurisdiction confirmation. The Ministry of Forestry, the National Land Agency, and regional governments are identified as the core bureaucracies responsible in both forest area and title forest. The Ministry of Agriculture only has responsibilities in title forests. A number of secondary bureaucracies also steering forest transformation are identified. Formal responsibilities of these bureaucracies are highly complex and fragmented regarding the tasks of forest regulation, forest administration, forest management, forest protection, issuing forest management rights, issuing land rights, regulating and administering timber product, issuing licence, and regulating the commodity. Indonesian tropical rainforest is found to potentially transform into other land uses through seven ways: (i) releasing certain area from forest area, (ii) using forest area for non-forestry purposes (e.g. palm oil plantation), (iii) maximising production forests for logging, (iv) developing community forest schemes in forest area, (v) developing plantation and agroforestry in title forest (vi) taking advantage from waste land, and (vii) steering back to native forest. The intersection of responsibilities in steering rainforest transformation has created contestation between the bureaucracies involved. We conclude that the main conflict of interests runs between the core bureaucracies in this transformation, i.e. the Ministry of Forestry, the National Land Agency, and regional governments. The authors conclude with hypotheses on future actions of such bureaucracies in light of national and international influences on rainforest transformation systems. The central hypothesis contends that both core and secondary bureaucracies have conflicting interests over all four types of tropical rainforest transformation due to the areas of overlapping responsibility
The regime complex for tropical rainforest transformation: Analysing the relevance of multiple global and regional land use regimes in Indonesia
No full textIncreasingly, international agreements, treaties, and conventions address tropical deforestation and specific causes of rainforest transformation. Such international regimes may aim to conserve natural forests or to support the exploitation of lands for a particular purpose, e.g. agricultural commodities. This paper's goal is to map the international regime complex for rainforest transformation by identifying those global and regional regimes that are relevant for tropical rainforest transformation systems in Indonesia. The relevance of international regimes for rainforest transformation is assessed based on a novel methodology using two criteria: First, international' regimes may be relevant in Indonesia because the core problem they address exists in Indonesia (problem dimension). Second, specific international regimes may be made relevant by the actions of specific actors and their coalitions in pursuit of their interests (actor dimension). To achieve the study's goals we used (I) content analysis of international policy documents and treaty texts, (2) expert interviews with key informants in Indonesia, and (3) own field observations in current Indonesian land use politics. The results indicate that regimes dealing with biological diversity, climate change, trade in endangered species, wetland management, international tropical trade, illegal logging, Southeast Asian (ASEAN) forest and environment, the Asia Pacific free trade, and the southeast Asian rubber trade regime are relevant in both the problem and actor dimensions. The regimes concerned with desertification and international forestry research are relevant only in the actor dimension. In contrast, the following regimes are relevant only in the problem dimension: indigenous rights, forest certification, palm oil certification, agroforestry certification, and international rubber trade. We discuss our results considering global and regional regimes relevant to Indonesian rainforest transformation systems. We conclude that regimes relevant solely due to the engagement of domestic actors and not in respect of the problem dimension are unlikely to maintain their relevance in the long term. In the short term, however, they have the potential for creating substantial political benefits for the actors using them. In contrast, regimes with high problem relevance but low actor backing are unlikely to even enter the political agenda, and therefore will have only limited impact. This suggests that future research should consider that, whilst relevance in the problem dimension is necessary to establish regime influence, it alone does not suffice. We can expect global and regional regimes to have an influence only when powerful actors back them in their agenda setting, domestic policy formulation and actual implementation. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.DFG [PAK 813]; Eva Mayr-Stihl Foundation; Indonesian Governmen
Blocking, attracting, imposing, and aligning: The utility of ASEAN forest and environmental regime policies for strong member states
No full textInternational institutions, including ???global regimes??? and ???regional regimes???, address an increasing number of environmental issues. While in the past much attention was given to global regimes, a plethora of regional institutions and organizations (regional regimes) and their environmental policies have recently gained more momentum in political practice and attention in scholarship. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is one such regime, and is actively developing its own policies relating to (e.g.) forests and the environment. These policies necessarily have to be useful for the regime???s member states; however, we further argue, that within the member states the regime???s policies especially have to be useful for specific member states??? bureaucracies, because it is they who actually develop the policies on behalf of the member states. Further, this paper aims to analyse the utility of ASEAN???s forest and environmental policy for specific member states and their responsible bureaucracies. Our analytical framework builds on regional regime theory, bureaucratic politics, and concepts of actor???s utility and interests. It differentiates the utility of the regional regime policies into several functions: (i) blocking unpleasant international initiatives, (ii) attracting international political or financial support, (iii) imposing rules on other member states, and (iv) aligning the interests of member states against external political opponents. Our results indicate that ASEAN???s environmental and forest policies serve all four functions. For instance, through ASEAN structures, Indonesia is blocking strict CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) regulation of ramin wood to maintain existing ramin protections and business, and the ASEAN Biodiversity Centre is found to be instrumental in blocking ambitious claims towards biodiversity from international actors. In addition, Malaysia and Singapore have imposed an ASEAN wildfire haze pollution agreement onto other member states in order to protect their directly affected interests in air quality and air traffic. ASEAN is also attracting to its members various international environmental funds in areas including climate change, community-based forestry, and sustainable peatland management. Last, member states under ASEAN actively align their positions in international climate negotiations as well as global forest deliberations to enhance their influence. We conclude that policies developed within regional regimes such as ASEAN are aligned with the interests of stronger member states, and their bureaucracies in particular. It remains unclear, however, how powerful these actors need to be in order to make this customization of regime policies valid for them. The results suggest that not only a potential hegemon, but also second or third powers may have this option. At the same time, member states??? activities do not seem to be conducted by states as unitary actors; instead, issue-specific actions are based on the interests of issue-relevant bureaucracies, which are in charge of representing a given member state in a given field of a regime???s policy
Is Indonesia utilising its international partners? The driving forces behind Forest Management Units
No full textInternational forest regimes have been influencing the development of Indonesia's forest policy, and have complemented its domestic policy initiatives. Indonesian political entities utilise the regimes to pursue bureaucratic benefits and national interests. Forest Management Units (FMUs) comprise our heuristic model. We identified international and domestic actors and institutions that underlie the concept of FMUs and how FMUs are implemented along with the actors' interests. We built our framework and propositions based on bureaucratic politics theory and the theorem on pathways of influence. We used observations, content analysis, and expert interviews to distinguish among actors and institutions, as well as various actors' interests in FMU development. We found that the German government, via the German company Deutsche Gesellschaft f??r Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH (GIZ), is the most powerful actor behind FMUs. International actors have dual motivations for supporting FMUs: (i) formally, they want to find the clearest, most efficient way to invest their international cooperation funds in tropical countries and to counter global deforestation; and (ii) informally, they want to counter the influence of Indonesian palm oil plantations. In addition, international interests could be contrary to domestic interests in terms of utilising FMUs. There is a strong, converging concern shared by international and domestic actors, whereby domestic actors use the formal goals of international regimes to pursue domestic interests. Domestic bureaucracies use FMU programmes to relocate power back to the central bureaucracies by preparing instruments that are formally in line with international regimes, but informal in that these instruments are dominated by domestic bureaucracies. For example, the instruments include reinforcing state forest areas, promoting forest benefits, centralising the budget, capacity building, and centralising information
The empirical visibility of land use conflicts: From latent to manifest conflict through law enforcement in a national park in Indonesia
No full textThe rich literatures about land use conflicts make a valuable contribution by empirically describing the substance of local land use conflicts and through this making those cases accessible for research from multiple science disciplines. Those studies, however, often are descriptive in nature, and have a rather vague theoretical conceptualisation of conflict. We propose a conceptual model of conflicts that is based on political theory and the interests of political actors. It stresses that land use conflicts will rarely be solved, but are merely settled by policy and eventually its enforcement. Throughout the policy process, however, the conflict of interests will remain, while the empirical visibility of land use conflicts will vary.\ud
\ud
This article aims to construct a framework for analysing the empirical visibility of land use conflicts, and to apply it for analysing the empirical visibility of the dispute between the Tallasa community and the national park bureaucracy in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. To test this methodology, we conducted observations and interviews. Since 2004, we have been involved both directly and indirectly with the conflict mediation process for the dispute involving the Tallasa community. The results show that the conflict between people-livelihood interests and conservation interests remains the same over forty years but regulations and visibility changed. The national park did not provide a final resolution, but instead supported both conflicting interests. In latent position, policy for enforcing existing formal regulations did not change implementation and visibility in practice. We also find that policy for enforcing a new formal regulation triggered more conflict visibility. Due to the short period of visibility, the development of regulation during the latent period remains open. We conclude that conflict visibility in political discourse and media has an impact on reformulating formal regulation
From governance to government: The strengthened role of state bureaucracies in forest and agricultural certification
Full text linkPrivate institutions for third-party (eco-)labelling of food and wood products has been a lively field of empirical research, peaking in the conception of certification as a ???non-state market-driven governance system,??? which is gaining rule-making authority domestically and internationally as a private governance institution and a transnational regime. Recent findings, however, suggest that state actors also play a decisive role in private certification governance. Questions relating to who within the state, however, so far remain unaddressed. Very recent empirical trends in the fields of timber and palm oil certification in Indonesia suggest that it is distinct public bureaucracies who start reclaiming certification authority through state-led mandatory schemes, challenging the private and transnational certification institutions in support of government-driven international certification regimes. Against this background, the objective of this paper is to substantiate the trend from transnational private to international state-driven governance by analyzing the role of distinct state bureaucracies in the emergence, diffusion, and reshaping of private natural resource governance systems. To achieve these objectives, we develop our propositions by combining insights from political certification studies, regime theory, as well as bureaucratic politics theory. Methodologically, we employ a qualitative case study design on recent developments in forest, timber, and palm oil certification systems in Argentina and Indonesia. Our results substantiate the observation that distinct state actors play a key role in private governance systems and, in the case of Indonesia, even re-claim labelling authority from private institutions by attempting to outcompete them through employing their exclusive regulatory power. The results further indicate a strong, self-interested support from domestic state bureaucracies to state-driven international rather than to transnational certification regimes, supporting the temporary governance hypothesis. We discuss and conclude on our results in light of literatures on private governance, policy sectors as well as international relations theory on the emergence of international and transnational regimes
- …
