Can Forest Management Units Facilitate Adaptive Co-Management Reform in Indonesia?

HIGHLIGHTS This paper examined the capacity of Forest Management Units (FMUs) to create the space for adaptive co-management using the Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) framework. The analyses show that FMUs in Indonesia lack authority and the ability and acceptance to facilitate a reform space for adaptive co-management at the site-management level. FMUs need the authority to make independent decisions at the site-management level to accommodate the interests of place-based actors in the reform process. FMUs are not able to sustain and evolve partnership agreements without trust (acceptance) from placed-based actors. FMUs need the ability and authority to win place-based actors' trust to engage them in discourse on the future direction of collaborative forest management, protection, and use. SUMMARY A multi-jurisdictional governance system, polycentric power regimes, and overlapping rights complicate policy responses for addressing forest governance problems in Indonesia. Confronting issues that have existed for centuries as part of Indonesia's socio-cultural and political reality cannot easily be solved at the macro-scale. However, we argue that they can be tackled at the micro-scale. Adaptive co-management could offer a means of finding collaborative solutions to these problems, and we believe this approach will be effective when the problems are defined locally in a specific area with a limited number of stakeholders. This paper examines the capacity of Forest Management Units (FMUs), as the lowest level operational structure of forest management in Indonesia, to facilitate reform for adaptive co-management approaches. We examined this through an analytical framework derived from the Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation approach. This paper identifies the importance of stakeholders' acceptance to enable FMUs to coordinate adaptive co-management.