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Brokering Authority: Translating knowledge, policy and practice in forestry institutions in Indonesia
A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of Yale University
in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
By Steve Rhee
Dissertation Director: Professor Michael R. Dove
December 2006
© 2007 by Suk Bae Rhee
All rights reserved.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to thank the members of my doctoral committee,
Michael Dove, Carol Carpenter and Arun Agrawal, for their unending support of my doctoral
research and for their mentoring and contributions to my personal and intellectual growth.
Several faculty members at Yale have also supported my intellectual development
during my graduate research. Within the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, I
would like to thank Bill Burch, John Wargo, Mark Ashton, and Lisa Curran for their support
and guidance in different phases of my graduate work. I would like to express special thanks
to Amity Doolittle for her years of advising, friendship, and intellectual feedback. Thank you
also to Elisabeth Barsa, Ann Prokop and Charles Waskiewicz for their tireless administrative
support. In other departments at Yale, I would like to thank Jim Scott, Eric Worby, Deborah
Davis, and Helen Siu for their support at different stages of the dissertation process.
Multiple individuals and institutions in Indonesia were instrumental in my
dissertation research. I am especially grateful to CIFOR and particularly Lini Wollenberg,
Bruce Campbell, Bev Sitole, Yemi Katerere and David Kaimowitz for their encouragement
and intellectual guidance. I would especially like to thank Lini Wollenberg for inviting me to
CIFOR to collaborate with and be part of her research team, as well as for her guidance and
support. I owe many thanks to Bruce Campbell, Bev Sitole, Yemi Katerere and David
Kaimowitz for their personal and intellectual support and helping me feel part of CIFOR. I
am also grateful for the time and effort on the part of many other friends at CIFOR, most
notably Dina Hubudin, Moira Moeliono, Godwin Limberg, Ramses Iwan, Made Sudana,
Asung Uluk, Njau Anau, Tony Djogo, Koen Kusters, William Sunderlin, Chris Barr, Trish
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Shanley, Kristof Obizinski, Citlali Lopez, Yani Saloh, Widya Prajanthi and Petrus Gunarso. I
would also like to extend a very special thanks to the administrative staff of CIFOR.
I am also deeply indebted to the villagers and government officials in Malinau,
especially the villagers of Long Loreh and the family of Merang Lian, for their hospitality,
untiring patience with my questions, and willingness to allow me to participate in their lives.
I would also like to thank Bernard Sellato and Lars Kaskija for providing me their
unpublished research reports on Malinau and different Dayak groups.
I would also like to thank the Ministry of Forestry, Indonesian Institute of Sciences
(LIPI), the international donor and NGO community and Indonesian NGO community for
facilitating and assisting in this research. I would especially like to thank Reed Merrill, Tim
Brown, Tim Nolan, Yvan Biot and Hiroshi Nakata.
Deep appreciation goes to my family and friends. Many thanks to my mother, Joe
Rhoden, and Chris Haney for their unending love and laughter. I would also like to thank Eva
Garen and others in the Dove Carpenter Doctoral Lab for their intellectual and personal
support.
This research would not have been possible without the generous financial support of
many organizations throughout the course of my research. My Master’s and pre-dissertation
field research was generously funded by the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Prize from the Yale
Institute of Biospheric Studies (2001), the Charles Kao Fund at Yale (2001), the Yale Center
for International and Area Studies (2001), the Council on Southeast Asian Studies at Yale
(2001, 2000, and 1999), the Tropical Resources Institute at the Yale School of Forestry &
Environmental Studies (2001 and 1999), the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale (2001,
2000, and 1999), and the Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Program (2000).
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My dissertation field research was generously funded by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral
Dissertation Research Abroad Program, US Education Department (2002-3); the
International Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Social Science Research Council (2002-
3); the Program in Science and Technology Studies, National Science Foundation (Award
Number 0220408, 2002-3); the Teresa Heinz Scholars for Environmental Research, The
Teresa and John III Heinz Foundation (2002-3); and the Science to Achieve Results (STAR)
Fellowship, US Environmental Protection Agency, 2003-6 (Award Number U-91610501-1).
Further, my graduate studies would not have been possible without the generous
support of Yale. During my Master’s study I received a Full Fellowship for a Master's degree
from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (1998-2000). In my doctoral
studies, Yale provided me a Fellowship for Ph.D. study from the Graduate School of Arts
and Sciences (2000-2004).
Any errors in this dissertation are entirely my own.
xi
Abstract
Brokering Authority: Translating Knowledge, Policy and Practice in Forestry Institutions in Indonesia
Steve Rhee
2007
This dissertation examines the nexus of research, policy and practice from village to
global levels regarding forest management and local communities’ control over forest
resources and improved local livelihoods in Indonesia. I investigate how problems and
solutions are articulated; how these articulations are transformed in practice; how practice is
translated into knowledge or policy; and how particular interpretations of practices become
authoritative. In doing so, I examine the culture of and relationships between forestry
institutions in Indonesia, highlighting the role of brokers of authority -- individuals and/or
organizations that skillfully translate social reality into an “order” that not only resonates
with the different logics, interests, and expectations of relevant institutions, but also recruits
support for their interpretation to become authoritative. The Center for International Forestry
Research (CIFOR) and the Donor Forum on Forestry in Indonesia (DFF) are the key
interlocutors studied, and CIFOR’s applied research activities in Indonesian Borneo and the
landscape of international aid-related forestry institutions are the contexts within which they
are examined.
With respect to CIFOR, I investigate in one analytical frame (1) project plans and
intentions, (2) the context within which activities take place and the relationships between the
different actors, and (3) how the difference between plan and outcome is addressed to a
broader public. I show that although activities do not proceed as planned, CIFOR’s reporting
and publishing of unintended outcomes incorporates this unraveling into an authoritative
narrative of prescriptions for CIFOR’s interpretive community. Essential to legitimizing and
mobilizing support for these prescriptions and CFIOR more generally is their articulation
through the vehicle of self-critical reflection.
I also examine the tension between order and disjuncture in the landscape of aid-
related forestry institutions in Indonesia. I analyze how the order or narrative of reform
agreeable to both donors and the Indonesian government was crafted and maintained by the
DFF in its brokering role, while no actual progress was made on agreed upon commitments.
Moreover, I investigate the structural dynamics that explain this lack of progress and the
ineffectiveness of aid in Indonesia. In doing so, I reveal the disconnect between knowledge,
policy and practice, as well as how these disjunctures are maintained.
TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………v List of Tables………………………………………………………………………………….v Acronyms and Glossary………………………………………………………………………vi Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………...ix Preface………………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………8 Dissertation Topic……………………………………………………………………………..8 Context and Setting of the Dissertation……………………………………………………...18
Indonesia’s Relevance…………………………………………………………………...18 The landscape of international aid-related forestry institutions …………………………19 CIFOR and CIFOR in Malinau…………………………………………………………..20 CIFOR as linked to and as part of the landscape of aid-related forestry institutions……27
Significance of the dissertation………………………………………………………………31 Summary of dissertation chapters……………………………………………………………36 Chapter 2: Theoretical Considerations and Research Methodology……………………42 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..42 Analytical Tools and Theoretical Considerations……………………………………………42 Poststructural political ecology and powerful institutions……………………………….44 Studies of science and scientific communities…………………………………………...47 Articulations, collaborations and local transformations of interventions………………..51 Institutional ethnographies that integrate structural-discursive and actor-oriented approaches………………………………………………………………..54 Research Methodology………………………………………………………………………61 Overview of Methods……………………………………………………………………61 Rationale of Methods…………………………………………………………………….65 My Positionality………………………………………………………………………….66 Methodological, theoretical and moral implications of “studying up”…………………..70 Reflexivity, the politics of representation, and the call to “study up”……………….71 Issues related to “studying up”………………………………………………………73 Audiences…………………………………………………………………………….74 Chapter 3: The Research Context: The forest and institutional landscapes in the context of Indonesia’s political-economic transitions…………………………………….80 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………80 Indonesia: From centralization towards decentralization………………………………..80 A difficult transition to decentralization: the legacy of the New Order’s Institutions…………………………………………………………………………...82 The New Order’s “development” ideology and the marginalization of forest dependent people…………………………………………………………….84 Territorialization initiatives of the New Order………………………………86
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Decentralization in process: Uncertainty and Ambiguity……………………………89 Broader political economic context of forestry and international forestry aid…………..93 Political economic drivers of deforestation………………………………………….93 Summary of international donors, activities and trends……………………………...98 Malinau and Decentralization…………………………………………………………..106 Brief description of people and place………………………………………………107 Decentralization processes in Indonesia related to forestry and community management………………………………………………………………………...115 CIFOR in Malinau: institutional arrangements and plans……………………………...120 Formal institutional relationships…………………………………………………..120 CIFOR activities in Malinau, particularly Adaptive Collaborative Management….126 Chapter 4: Locating CIFOR locally: Relationships and perceptions of villagers, district government and CIFOR in Malinau……………………………………………………..132 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..132 Decentralization processes and dynamics of village-government relations……………132 Villagers’ perceptions of their relations with district government…………………132 Patron-client………………………………………………………………...132 Social structures in which relationships are embedded…………………….134 District government’s relationship with and perceptions of villagers……………...139 Unconcerned with villagers’ aspirations……………………………………139 Government knows better…………………………………………………..140 Visions of development: revenue, infrastructure, and payment for environmental services……………………………………………………...142 Summary of background, context and village-government relationships………….145 Perceptions and relationships between CIFOR, villagers and local government………147 District government’s perceptions and relationship with CIFOR: fragile, tenuous and constrained………………………………………………………………….147 District government does not use CIFOR’s research……………………….148 District government is heterogeneous, which affects the relationship with CIFOR…………………………………………………………………149 Role of CIFOR is fragile and constrained…………………………………..151 CIFOR is not a powerful actor, not integral and has different priorities…………………………………………………………….151 Example of constraining: Mapping and evolution of district government’s perceptions…………………………………………..154 Constraining and destabilizing continue to be factors……………...158 District government constrains but maintains engagement………...160 Summary of district government perceptions and relationship with CIFOR………………………………………………………………………166 Villagers’ perceptions and relationship with CIFOR: a key interlocutor of whom much is expected but who has been unable to deliver……………………………...169 CIFOR as interlocutor: Bridge, information source, confidant, advocate….169 Villagers’ disappointment with CIFOR: lack of tangible benefits…………175 Expectations unmet: Unfounded assumptions and unsupportive institutional environment………………………………………………………………...177
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Case study of articulation and alienation: Setulang, Setarap, Sentaban and CIFOR…………………………………...187 Summary of analysis of perceptions and relationships regarding CIFOR………….195 Chapter 5: Locating CIFOR globally: How CIFOR attempts to have global influence and address its role in Malinau…………………………………………………………..199 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..199 CIFOR writes about the politics of relationships and critically reflects on its role…….200 CIFOR writes about power relations in Malinau…………………………………...200 CIFOR writes self-critical reflections of experience in Malinau…………………...201 CIFOR writes about political role of research and the institutions in Malinau…………………………………………………………………..201 CIFOR writes about intra-institutional issues………………………………207 CIFOR advocates and articulates changes based on and legitimized by Malinau field experience and through the vehicle of self critique………………………………...209 Analysis of how CIFOR’s articulation of change works……………………………….222 CIFOR’s position and leverage in the international community…………………...223 CIFOR’s use and refashioning of mainstream discourse: boundary objects……….224 CIFOR’s long-term presence in Malinau: The cachet of “being there”……………226 Summary of Analysis and Conclusion……………………………………………...227 Preface to Chapter 6 and Chapter 7……………………………………………………..230 Chapter 6: Forestry and The Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI): Crafting and maintaining the master metaphor of forestry reform in Indonesia……………………233 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..233 The CGI and forestry as a CGI agenda item……………………………………………234 The CGI and its importance………………………………………………………...234 Forestry as a top tier issue at the CGI……………………………………………....238 Analysis of CGI statements and their evolution………………………………………..241 Coalescing the master metaphor: The “Removing the Constraints” seminar………241 The master metaphor materializes and evolves…………………………………….246 The platform of the master metaphor……………………………………….246 An analysis of the evolution of the master metaphor………………………250 Donors and the lack of progress…………………………………….250 GOI and the lack of progress……………………………………….258 Overall analysis of donor and government statements……………..265 Evaluations and assessments: An analysis of the 1998 IMF forestry conditionalities, the relationship to the CGI experience and institutional amnesia……...……………….267 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...273
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Chapter 7: The Donor Forum on Forestry’s role as broker: Institutional relationships, incentives and logics that explain the disjuncture in Indonesian forestry reform…….274 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..274 Perceptions of the DFF by the “usual suspects”………………………………………..283 The “usual suspects” perception of the DFF………………………………………..283 The “usual suspects” perceptions of the CGI and their relationship with their respective donor agencies…………………………………………………………..288 A case of dual identities…………………………………………………….288 Institutional incentives of donors…………………………………………...292 The “usual suspects” perceptions of their relationship with MOF…………………296 Perceptions of the DFF by central government agencies……………………………….301 The Ministry of Forestry’s perceptions of DFF…………………………………….301 MOF’s negative perception of the international aid agenda………………………..306 Other central government agencies’ perceptions of the DFF………………………307 Perceptions of the DFF by the diplomatic corps………………………………………..311 Donors’ skeptical and cautious engagement with forestry issues…………………..311 Institutional arrangements that work against a concerted effort by donors………...315 Perceptions of DFF by Indonesian NGOs……………………………………………...318 Summary of analysis and conclusions………………………………………………….324 Chapter 8: CIFOR researchers’ experiences practicing science……………………….328 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..328 Description and analysis of CIFOR researchers’ experiences………………………….329 Impact-oriented science…………………………………………………………….329 Evolution of the idea of “impact-oriented science” at CIFOR……………..329 Researchers’ experiences and thoughts on implementing “impact-oriented science”……………………………………………………………………..334 Nature, timing and timeframes of research…………………………334 Simplification and translation: media, donors and credibility……...336 Audiences…………………………………………………...336 Communication: simplification and credibility…………….340 Priority Setting……………………………………………………………………...347 Donor-driven………………………………………………………………..349 Natural and social sciences…………………………………………………354 Programme strategies and their implications……………………………….358 Partnerships and capacity building…………………………………………………362 Theory of partnerships and capacity building in CIFOR…………………...362 Reality of partnerships and capacity building………………………………363 Perceptions of tradeoffs and institutional incentives……………………….368 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...372 Chapter 9: Summary and Conclusions…………………………………………………..374 Summary………………………………………………………………………………..374 Conclusions……………………………………………………………………………..381 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….392
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List of Figures Figure 1: Map of Indonesia in the context of Southeast Asia…………………………………9 Figure 2: Map of the Malinau District in Borneo……………………………………………10 Figure 3: Map of the District of Malinau in East Kalimantan, Indonesia……………………11 Figure 4: Map of Ethnic Groups in Malinau………………………………………………..111 List of Tables Table 1: Indonesia’s Membership in International Conservation Treaties……………..……99 Table 2: Indonesia’s MOUs/Agreements to Curb Illegal Logging…………………………100 Table 3: Summary of Funding for Donor Projects in the Forestry Sector………………….105
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PREFACE
FORGING LINKS
This dissertation is an ethnography of forestry institutions in Indonesia. I analyze the
relationship between local and global dynamics of international conservation and
development interventions and the role of research in these interventions. My interest in this
topic stems from and has evolved with my professional and academic experiences.
The roughest contours of my dissertation topic were shaped by two formative work
experiences. From 1993 to 1996 I served as science teacher and teacher trainer with the
Peace Corps in Nepal. I was fresh out of college with an undergraduate degree in
anthropology and was naïve and earnest enough to think that “helping people” was
straightforward. My Peace Corps experience was illuminating in several ways. I had my first
glimpse of the “elusiveness” of sustainable development: During my first year, I taught
math, science and English in a rural Nepalese school in the western Terai. During my second
year, I was a teacher trainer at a district Secondary Education Development Unit (SEDU),
where science teachers throughout the district would come for two-month trainings on the
curriculum content and teaching methods that were more student-oriented and participatory,
and less passive learning and rote memory focused.
The sustainability element of my Peace Corps service was supposed to be during this
period of training teachers – the metaphor being “give a man a fish; you have fed him for
today. Teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime.” In hindsight, given that I
myself had never been a teacher (the assumption was my Western education had sufficiently
prepared me), it was altogether dubious what I could offer. There were incentives for
teachers to attend (e.g., per diem and added credentials), but few if any to use the training
1
materials in their own schools. Granted, there were always one or two individuals who were
deeply committed to teaching and absorbed and improved upon what the trainers offered. By
and large, however, teachers in Nepal were part of an education system that did not integrate
or reward using the materials taught in teacher trainings, and indeed there were strong
disincentives to using them. To return to the fishing metaphor, I might have been teaching a
man how to fish, but he lived in desert, which is to say that the teacher trainings ignored the
broader educational system and problems therein.
In addition to these direct experiences of grappling with issues of sustainable
development, by virtue of living in Nepal, a country heavily dependent on international aid, I
observed lots of “development debris” littered throughout the country: rusted village water
pumps due to the unavailability or costliness of replacement parts, empty school buildings
because there were no teachers, putrid school latrines because of a lack of maintenance, and
libraries of unopened books behind locked cabinets because the principal did not want the
books damaged.
Due to my Peace Corps training I spoke fluent Nepali and spent the vast majority of
my time living and working with people in rural settings. It was at that time unclear to me
how international development workers based in Kathmandu could do or know much,
particularly given that most did not speak Nepali and rarely seemed to leave Kathmandu.
The situation became somewhat clearer once I started working for an international
NGO. In Indonesia for one year (1997-1998) I worked for CARE International Indonesia as a
program advisor – writing proposals and donor reports, preparing training manuals for
projects and conducting project evaluations. This was quite an ambivalent experience for me.
On the one hand, I found the work extremely satisfying – I learned a lot, and I felt I was
2
contributing to a good cause. On the other hand, I was astonished that someone, such as
myself, with no field experience in Indonesia and a minimal understanding of the country at
the time was allowed to handle the aforementioned tasks. Perhaps even more astonishing was
the limited amount of verifiable and verified data that was required in donor reports and
proposals. I drew upon in-house expertise of CARE staff and consulted various government
and aid-related publications, but there seemed to be little demand for or interest in rigorous,
groundtruthed studies to inform reports and proposals.
This period was an extremely busy one for CARE – in 1997-98 Indonesia was
experiencing multiple crises: the economic crisis related to the devaluation of the rupiah, the
related political instability resulting in the fall of the 32-year Suharto regime, and the El Nino
related drought. These multiple crises were a boon for CARE, which had focused on
community development in water, environment and health sectors and whose original
mandate in Indonesia and elsewhere was disaster relief. These multiple crises meant both
increased international attention to and financial resources available for NGOs such as
CARE. Indeed, donors regularly came to CARE to request that CARE submit proposals for
various funds made available because of these crises, e.g., distribution of rice throughout
Indonesia donated from the US due to perceived shortage. This was a period of frenzied
proposal writing, during which expediency trumped fact-checking, which donors seemed to
encourage as well. Submitting proposals during the “window of opportunity” took
precedence over everything else. Indeed, I recall asking the CARE Country Director – a
seasoned development practitioner with over 30 years of experience -- whether CARE had
the capacity to implement all of the projects we were submitting proposals for. She admitted
that CARE did not, but that Indonesia was in the international aid limelight and thus CARE
3
had to take advantage of it now before the international community moved its attention
elsewhere.
My village level experience in Peace Corps juxtaposed to my experience in
international NGO institutional culture piqued my interest in examining the relationship
between field and institutional realities, which is what I explored in Master’s work at Yale
(1998-2000). My motivation for exploring these issues was to learn to be a better
practitioner; I never planned on being an academic. Before starting the Master’s degree, I
assumed that reconciling these two realities would be feasible and just required better
management skills.
During Master’s studies, through work with the individuals who are on this
dissertation committee – Michael Dove, Carol Carpenter and Arun Agrawal – as well as
others at Yale, I was quickly disabused of this. In addition to becoming aware of the
complexities of the relationship between field and institutional realities, I also realized that
being a better practitioner would require a deeper and broader understanding of the issues
raised in my Master’s work, and thus I pursued those issues in the doctoral program.
As a Master’s student, I was fortunate enough to establish an institutional relationship
with CIFOR in 1999 to collaborate with Dr. Eva Wollenberg and her team in Malinau, East
Kaimantan (Indonesian Borneo) on the then recently initiated Adaptive Collaborative
Management (ACM) project, which was a “participatory action research” initiative focused
on empowering local communities and improving their negotiating skills. During the summer
of 1999, I conducted fieldwork for my Master’s degree project in Indonesia, collaborating
with CIFOR and also examining the broader landscape of institutions. Through CIFOR and
Yale’s network, I was able to build upon the contacts I had established during my previous
4
work in Indonesia with CARE International as a program advisor. Collaborating with CIFOR
proved productive and informative for multiple reasons, and one issue in particular became a
central concern of my dissertation research, viz., the role of science and research in
international conservation and development interventions, which I examine and elaborate
upon in this dissertation.
Since the summer of fieldwork in 1999, I have maintained my institutional affiliation
with CIFOR and continued to collaborate with Dr. Wollenberg and her team, as well as
others at CIFOR, including Dr. Bruce Campbell and Dr. Yemi Katerere. Over the years, my
research project has expanded in breath and depth, building upon my previous research and
maintaining my commitment to fieldwork in the ethnographic and anthropological traditions.
My primary affiliation with CIFOR has been through Dr. Wollenberg to collaborate
with the ACM team in Malinau, East Kalimantan. This affiliation was articulated through a
boilerplate CIFOR “internship agreement” with a proposal of my research appended to it.
According to this agreement, Dr. Wollenberg was formally my advisor at CIFOR and
institutionally accountable for me at CIFOR, although the reality was a much more relaxed
and fluid relationship1. CIFOR did not provide me monetary compensation to conduct my
research, but did provide me with logistical assistance and office space, which was equally as
important. Even more importantly, CIFOR researchers and staff helped me feel that I was
part of the institution, and in particular Dr. Wollenberg treated me as one of the ACM team
members. And, indeed, I very much felt that I was a part of the institution from a personal
and professional standpoint. Further, I shared interests with and learned immensely from
CIFOR researchers and their ongoing projects.
1 In mid-2004 this official role shifted to Dr. Yemi Katerere since my research concerns at that time resonated closely with his interests. I maintained a close relationship with the ACM team, however.
5
With respect to research agendas, although there was overlap in research interests and
collaboration between CIFOR and myself, I maintained my own research project and was not
an integral component of any CIFOR research project. My research agenda evolved over
time, and CIFOR was flexible and generous in accommodating the evolution in research
emphases. In addition to collaborating with CIFOR on ACM in Malinau as well as other
initiatives, I also spent extended periods carrying out components of my research that were
independent of the shared research interests with CIFOR, e.g., research regarding the
international donor community and government agencies involved in forestry issues in
Indonesia. CIFOR was flexible and understanding in my fluid engagement with the
institution.
In addition to this affiliation with CIFOR, viz., as a graduate student conducting
collaborative research with CIFOR, my relationship with CIFOR also included at times
working on CIFOR initiatives that were tangential to my primary research project, but
informative and rewarding nonetheless. For example, on several occasions I assisted CIFOR
researchers to develop proposals -- usually under tight deadline -- on topics beyond the
immediate scope of my research project. Working on these initiatives that were priorities for
CIFOR not only helped me build rapport and social capital with CIFOR researchers and staff,
but often proved the most productive way to learn about the institution. As Mosse (2005: 12)
observes, it is “virtually impossible to sustain long-term participant observation in the
absence of making a practical contribution….being a member of the community and having a
certain status” (Mosse 2005: 12).
Mosse’s observation loomed prominently not only in my relationship with CIFOR,
but also with other forestry-related institutions as well. To gain the access and depth
6
necessary to complete my dissertation research successfully, I looked for ways to embed
myself in the practitioner community through activities that they perceived as practical
contributions, e.g., providing training materials to the Ministry of Forestry regarding policy
analysis, participating in an assessment of the Donor Forum on Forestry, and helping to write
an assessment of Indonesia’s tropical forests and biodiversity. In addition to being vital to my
dissertation research, these experiences proved professionally beneficial and productive. I
gained not only a better understanding the logic of the practitioner community by directly
practicing it, but also additional credibility and legitimacy by working with that community’s
members on their priorities. In this regard, I was both an insider and outsider to the
practitioner community concerned with Indonesia’s forests, and although I attempt a
dispassionate, academic analysis in this dissertation, “[t]here is no position from which I can
analyse the circuitry of project and policy processes…which does not place me within it as a
member of the communities I describe” (Mosse 2005: 11). Thus, my analysis is an
“interested interpretation,” whose “objectivity…cannot be that derived from standing above
the fray or of suppressing subjectivity, but rather that which comes from maximizing the
capacity of actors to object to what is said about them (to raise concerns, insert questions and
interpretations) (Latour 2000)” (Mosse 2005: 14). And thus, the task of this dissertation, of
knowledge production and circulation generally, is “forging links between different
knowledges that are possible from different locations” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 39 cited in
Mosse 2005). It is in this spirit of forging links between different knowledges that I write and
present this ethnography of forestry institutions in Indonesia.
7
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
I. Dissertation Topic
Capitalizing on opportunities made possible through de facto decentralization in
Indonesia starting in mid-2000, village leaders of several forest dependent Dayak1
communities in Malinau, East Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) (see Figures 1, 2 and 3) used
maps of village territories to sell felling rights to entrepreneurial timber companies. These
agreements created unprecedented benefits for these villages. For several villages, three years
of fees generated through these timber companies averaged USD 1,0002 per household
compared to USD 1,500 annually per village from large-scale timber companies that had
operated under the previous centralized regime (Wollenberg et al. [In press]).
At the same time, these agreements created and exacerbated inter- and intra-village
conflicts. Unclear territorial rights to forests preceding and during the transition toward
decentralization, as well as an ambiguous institutional environment, led to increased
boundary disputes between villages, as well as intra-village jealousies and accusations
(Wollenberg et al. [In press]). Indeed, village heads often negotiated unofficial benefits for
themselves with these entrepreneurial timber companies (Wollenberg et al. [In press]).
1 "Dayak" is an umbrella term referring to the indigenous, upland, and forest dependent groups of Borneo. At least six villages in the Malinau watershed used maps to justify claims to forests and negotiate with these timber concessionaires (Limberg [forthcoming]). 2 The quantity paid was Rp. 8.2 million or USD 965, using an exchange rate of 8,500.
8
Figure 1: Map of Indonesia in the context of Southeast Asia
Source: CIA World Factbook (http://sportsforum.ws/sd/factbook/geos/id.html)
9
Figure 2: Map of the Malinau District in Borneo
Source: Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming a]
10
Figure 3: Map of the District of Malinau in East Kalimantan, Indonesia
Source: Barr et al. 2001
11
In several cases, the maps of village territories used to broker deals with these timber
companies were made in collaboration with the Center for International Forestry Research
(CIFOR) as part of one of its applied research initiatives. This initiative attempts to empower
communities to increase their control and access over forest resources and to help
communities resolve conflicts. Started just prior to decentralization in 1999, mapping was
initiated by CIFOR at the request of the 27 villages in the Malinau watershed.
Representatives from each of the villages were trained in mapping technologies so that
villages could use the maps as bargaining tools and in the resolution of boundary disputes.
For CIFOR, mapping was intended to diminish conflicts between actors caused by competing
claims to land and rich natural resources, empower local villagers and lead to improved
livelihoods and healthier forests (Rocheleau 1995, Sirait et al. 1994; cf. Fox 1998, Peluso
1995). These expectations were only partially met, and many unintended effects resulted.
As the mapping exercise progressed in 1999 and 2000, de facto decentralization
ensued and the district government of Malinau3 began issuing licenses for small-scale timber
concessionaires with short time horizons, provided that the villages claiming the forest areas
agreed. A key justification for villages’ claims to forested areas was the maps created with
the facilitation of CIFOR. Although CIFOR had made explicit that these maps were not legal
or authoritative, villagers used and were allowed to use them as tools of legitimizing claims
anyway. Permits and justifications for these timber concessions were approved by the
district government.
How would CIFOR address the unintended effects of its mapping exercise? Would
these unintended effects be ignored? Would they be explained away and the mapping
3 In late 1999 the Malinau district was formed out of a division of the much larger Bulungan district and accordingly a new district government was formed. Please see Chapter 3 for a detailed discussion of this.
12
exercise considered a “success”? Or would the mapping exercise be considered a “failure”?
CIFOR did none of the above, but instead wrote an article about the mapping in Malinau,
critically reflecting on their experience as facilitators and relationships with villagers and
other local actors, as well as articulating a set of recommendations or suggestions for others
who plan to conduct similar exercises (Anau et al 2003). CIFOR published the article and
also circulated it through various information clearinghouses such as Participatory Avenues.4
Instead of “success” or “failure,” CIFOR used its mapping experience as “data,” and it
became “science” and “lessons learned.” In doing so, CIFOR attempted to translate its
experience into authoritative knowledge and practitioner policy. CIFOR attempted to do this
in part by leveraging its position as an international research institute, but equally as
importantly by connecting to and articulating with the concerns of the broader community of
international conservation and development institutions interested in forests, the
empowerment of forest dependent people and “tools” to achieve that empowerment such as
community mapping.
CIFOR’s mapping exercise in Malinau and the way in which CIFOR addressed that
experience raise a series of issues that are the central concerns of this dissertation, viz., the
connections between (1) institutional logics and relationships, (2) the making and
maintaining of authoritative interpretations, and (3) the translation between knowledge,
practice and policy. CIFOR’s authority locally was limited and fragile – the use of the maps
(and thus the meaning of the maps) by both villagers and the district government was out of
the control of CIFOR. However, at the international level, CIFOR attempted to make itself
and its experience authoritative through the idiom of science and forging links with its
4 www.iapad.org
13
community of conservation and development practitioners, or its “interpretive community”
(Mosse 2004).
The authority of CIFOR and its knowledge was not a given, but rather had to be
made. Thus, examining how certain interpretations become authoritative -- or not -- also
requires an understanding of the broader landscape of institutions that CIFOR shares
concerns and interests with. CIFOR and its applied research initiative in Malinau are
indicative of the nexus of international, national and local concerns over sustainable forest
management and forest-dependent people's livelihoods in Indonesia and elsewhere. Since the
late 1990s international agencies in Indonesia have funded and implemented forestry sector
projects aimed at sustainable use by multiple stakeholders through grants totaling
approximately USD 300 million (Rhee et al. 2004). The Indonesian government has also
articulated similar concerns and priorities. The Ministry of Forestry’s (MOF’s) five priorities
to reform the forestry sector include “strengthening the process of forest sector
decentralization,” and the Ministry considers “social forestry” as one of the cross-cutting
issues in the sector (Ministry of Forestry Statement December 2003). Thus both the
government and international community agree upon a “master metaphor” (Mosse 2004) of
forest reform, which includes decentralized forest governance and local community
management.
Even though there is a significant community or landscape of institutions, including
CIFOR, that shares an authoritative interpretation of and interest in forestry reform in
Indonesia, the reality dramatically differs from this “master metaphor” (Mosse 2004) of
reform. Indonesia loses more than 2.4 million hectares per year – the highest rate in the
world. From 1985 to 2000 Indonesia lost 25 million hectares of forest – the size of the
14
United Kingdom’s land area (Barber and Schweithelm 2000). Given the persistence of both
the narrative of forest reform and the reality of deforestation, examining how policy and
practice are reconciled, and how the disjuncture is maintained, is vital to this study.
Thesis of Dissertation
This dissertation examines the nexus of research, policy and practice from village to
global levels with respect to forest management generally and local communities’ control
over forest resources and improved local livelihoods in Indonesia specifically. I investigate
how problems and solutions related to forest management and community forestry -- broadly
defined -- in Indonesia are articulated; how these articulations are operationalized and
transformed in practice; how practice is translated into knowledge or policy; and how
particular interpretations of practices become authoritative. This study investigates how
knowledge is produced, circulated and becomes authoritative, as well as how knowledge is
put into practice and the effects of that knowledge for forest dependent communities. In
short, I examine the institutional culture of and relationships between forestry institutions in
Indonesia, particularly those with an interest in decentralized forest governance and
community forestry.
In doing so, I demonstrate that the disconnect or “disjuncture” between knowledge,
policy and practice is reconciled by brokers of authority – individuals and/or organizations
that skillfully translate the “disjuncture” into an “order” that not only resonates with the
logics and expectations of relevant institutions, but also recruits support for their
interpretation to become authoritative (Mosse 2005). I examine how and why certain
individuals and institutions become brokers and how (un)successful brokering is carried out,
or in other words the social processes by which “order” is created and maintained out of the
15
“disjuncture” between knowledge, policy and practice and between institutions through
“translations” across institutional realities and languages (Mosse 2005).
The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and its applied research
initiatives in Malinau, East Kalimantan are focal points through which these issues are
examined, i.e., an intensive case study and a window through which I study the relationships
of other forestry institutions in Indonesia, e.g., the international donor community involved in
forestry and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry. This study attempts not only to focus on
and link CIFOR and CIFOR’s activities in Malinau to the broader landscape of aid-related
forestry institutions in Indonesia, but also to examine this institutional landscape equally as
deeply.
Research Questions
Through an institutional ethnography5 of CIFOR and the broader landscape of
international-aid related forestry institutions6 in Indonesia, I aim to address the following
questions:
How are research concerns selected and how is knowledge about those concerns
produced within CIFOR and then disseminated?
5 I follow Eyben’s (2003:4) use of “ethnography,” which is informed by Comaroff and Comaroff: “Comaroff and Comaroff define ethnography as the study of meaningful practice produced in the interplay of subject and object, of the contingent and contextual. ‘Even macro-historical processes…have their feet on the ground and are therefore suitable cases for treatment’ (Comaraoff and Comaroff 1992, cited in Eyben 2003). Ethnography in this sense revalidates the importance of ‘being there’ in a particular place and time. It validates individual agency, that is the difference each one of us can make, even as a member of a donor community.” 6 I use the term “institutions” in two different, yet related ways, articulated clearly by Hobley (1996: 12): “Institutions can be considered to be (i) regulatory arrangements such as customs or sets of rules, values or practices accepted by members of a particular group and which tend to lead to repetition of patterns of behavior; and (ii) organizational arrangements which include ordered groups of people such as a family, farm, private firm, non-profit or governmental agency (Gibbs, 1986, quoted in Fox, 1991: 60; Uphoff, 1986, 1992). In forestry there are several important levels of interpretation of what constitutes an institution, which will be discussed here in the light of decentralization policies: namely, property rights institutions; the formal institutions – covert and overt; and the non-formal institutions for resource management (extant or new).”
16
What are the effects of CIFOR’s knowledge production for forest dependent communities
in the context of a rapidly changing political landscape in Indonesia?
How do global, national and local institutions’ ideas of forest management and improved
local livelihood articulate with each other, e.g., international forestry institutions and
government agencies in Indonesia?
How do institutional structure and culture influence the framings of forest management
problems and solutions?
How do actors translate these framings into practice, and how does practice inform these
framings?
How do certain knowledges, policies and practices become authoritative? What processes
of translation, interpretation and articulation are entailed, and how do they engage
broader political-economic and institutional dynamics?
The answers to these questions required an ethnographic focus on how knowledge is
produced, used and transformed at local, regional, national and international levels, as well as
attention to the relationship between local level natural resource uses with regional, national
and global political economy. This translated into more than 24 months (August 2002-
August 2004) of multisited fieldwork in Indonesia using a suite of methods: participant
observation, interviews, document analysis in various contexts ranging from villages to
Ministry offices. My intermittent work as a practitioner in Indonesia since 1996 also assisted
my understanding of important institutional, cultural and political economic dynamics. Since
1999 and particularly during the continuous 24 month period, I conducted research with and
on CIFOR and its applied research initiatives in Malinau, East Kalimantan. In addition to
serving as an intensive case study, CIFOR also provided me an entry point to study other aid-
17
related forestry institutions in Indonesia. The formal institutional collaboration I had with
CIFOR not only allowed me to understand CIFOR, but also to build relationships with other
institutions and examine their relationships, logics and practices.
II. Context and Setting of the Dissertation
A. Indonesia’s Relevance
Indonesia is renowned for the importance of its forest resources as well as the rate of
its loss, and thus commands significant international attention. Indonesia’s forests are not
only among the most biologically diverse in the world, but also contribute significantly to the
national economy. Indonesia’s wood-based industry is ranked third in overall non-gas and
oil export value, after electronics and textiles. Further, approximately 40 million Indonesians
depend directly on forest resources (timber, rattan, firewood, etc.) and millions of others reap
indirect benefits (World Bank 2001, Bennett and Walton 2003). Until the fall of the 32-year
New Order regime in May 1998, these forest dependent communities were marginalized by a
highly centralized state, characterized by authoritarian rule and aggressive exploitation of the
nation’s natural resources.
The significance of Indonesia’s forest resources is matched only by its destruction. In
2003, the rate of deforestation in Indonesia was the highest in the world, conservatively
estimated at 2.4 million ha/year7. This figure represents a dramatic increase from previous
years, which was already shocking for the international community.
Indonesia has also undergone immense social, economic and political changes, which
began in 1997 and continue to the present. During the Asian financial crisis that started in
1997, Indonesia saw the rupiah lose 80% of its value and the flight of working capital.
7 It is important to note that there is not consensus on this figure since data remain unreliable. Estimates range from the World Bank’s 2.4 million hectares/year to the Ministry of Forestry’s 3.6 million hectares/year.
18
Further, with the call for political reform by various segments of society after the fall of
Suharto in 1998 and the enactment of a set of decentralization laws in 1999, the central
government’s control over regional affairs, including natural resource extraction, was
reduced, while the authority of the provincial and, particularly, district governments was
vastly increased. The implementation of decentralization laws has been ad hoc, in many
cases resulting in regionalized or localized systems of corruption, collusion and nepotism.
B. The landscape of international aid-related forestry institutions
As I discuss in detail in Chapter 3, the global response to Indonesia’s multifaceted
forestry crisis has been substantial. The community of bilateral and multilateral donors has
taken a particular interest in Indonesia’s forests and forest dependent communities. Since
1999, Indonesia’s donors, collectively known as the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI),
have placed the forestry crisis and forestry reform onto the agenda of the annual meetings
between the Indonesian government and its donors. That forestry has been on the agenda is
significant considering that normally only five items are discussed and pledged to; forestry
was in effect raised to the highest levels of diplomatic discussion. Moreover, in 2000 the CGI
with GOI’s agreement established the Donor Forum on Forestry (DFF) to assist GOI in
carrying out agreed upon commitments and to monitor progress (World Bank 2001).
International assistance to the forestry sector in Indonesia for the most recent six year
period totals approximately USD 300 million, mostly in the form of grants. By and large, this
funding has been used to implement or support forestry sector projects aimed at sustainable
use by multiple stakeholders, which is in accordance with global priorities of decentralized
forest governance and community forestry broadly defined (Fairhead and Leach 2003) .
International aid has been provided to the Indonesian forestry sector since the 1970s, and
19
thus the international aid community has been involved in forestry issues in Indonesia for
quite some time, although since 1999 this involvement has intensified and been more
coordinated.
The multilateral and bilateral donor community through the CGI and DFF has
formally committed to coordinating and collaborating with each other and GOI, as well as
acting as a focal point for other institutions to engage in the Indonesian forestry sector at an
international level. Part of this dissertation examines the CGI and DFF’s involvement in
Indonesia’s forestry crisis and forestry reform. More specifically, I analyze their incentives,
logics and practices of these institutions to illuminate how a “master metaphor” (Moose
2004) of forest reform was fashioned and maintained by the donor community and
government, and how this master metaphor evolved to incorporate the concomitant lack of
progress on agreed upon commitments. The in-depth examination of this landscape of aid-
related forestry institutions also illuminates the broader political-economic and institutional
dynamics at play and is a useful complement to the intensive case study of CIFOR and its
activities in Malinau.
C. CIFOR and CIFOR in Malinau
CIFOR and its applied research initiatives in Malinau provide an extremely robust
case study to ground and localize the broader political-economic dynamics discussed earlier.
In this section, I review the history and mission of CIFOR and provide a sense of the
institution's priorities and lens through which it justifies those priorities, viz., as an applied
research institute that influences policy decisions regarding tropical forest management and
the livelihoods of forest dependent people. CIFOR is one of 15 research institutions
supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), which
20
is an “alliance of countries, international and regional organizations, and private foundations”
that mobilizes science “to reduce poverty, foster human well being, promote agricultural
growth and protect the environment” (www.cgiar.org/who/index.html). The “CGIAR” refers
to the consortium of donors that fund the “CGIAR Centers,” which is a loose network of
applied research institutions that are headquartered around the world and whose interests
cover a broad spectrum of natural resource issues.
The CGIAR was established in 1971 by multilateral institutions, led by the World Bank
and co-sponsored by the FAO and UNDP, as a means to consolidate and spread the
international agricultural research that had been conducted in response to concern in the
1950s, 1960s and early 1970s that many developing countries would succumb to famine
(www.cgiar.org/who/history/index.html). Until the late 1980s CGIAR Centers primarily
focused on increasing productivity of food crops through the promotion of capital and
technology intensive agriculture, and the genetic manipulation and breeding of crops to
create High Yield Varieties (Baum 1986). Past CGIAR activities such as the controversial
Green Revolution developed and managed by, inter alia, the International Rice Research
Institute (IRRI) often de-legitimized long-standing, local knowledge and techniques of
resource management through a myopic focus on the modernization of agriculture and
technological fixes that ignored broader political economic relations and existing social
systems of production (Dove 1993; Dove and Kammen 1997; Lansing 1991; Yapa 1993,
1996).
CIFOR, however, divorces itself from these past activities, making explicit the ways in
which it differs from its colleague institutions. This is perhaps best exemplified in the claim
that CIFOR will not
21
"engage in development of high-yielding varieties of trees through genetic engineering,
or through more conventional tree-improvement programmes. Contentious issues of
Plant Variety Rights and Intellectual Property Rights are thus likely to be less relevant to
CIFOR than to other CGIAR Centers" (CIFOR 1996: 67).
Based in Indonesia with regional offices in Brazil, Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe,
CIFOR was created in 1993 to conduct applied research on tropical forests. Unlike
organizations that have explicit development agendas, such the World Bank and USAID, and
international non-governmental organizations, such as CARE and OxFam, CIFOR does not
carry out direct development interventions, but rather conducts applied research. According
to its charter, CIFOR's mission
"is to contribute to the sustained well-being of people in developing countries,
particularly in the tropics, through collaborative strategic and applied research and
related activities in forest systems and forestry, and by promoting the transfer of
appropriate new technologies and the adoption of new methods of social organization,
for national development" (CIFOR 1996: 18).
In 2004 CIFOR consisted of a total of 170 staff, 47 of which were internationally
recruited staff (senior scientists and management) and research fellows. It is governed by an
international board of trustees with 15 members from 12 countries. The disciplinary
backgrounds of CIFOR’s research staff include both the natural and social sciences, with
approximately two-thirds having natural science backgrounds in 20048. CIFOR is structured
into three research programmes: (1) Forest Governance, (2) Forests and Livelihoods, and (3)
8 This, however, is not to imply that two-thirds of CIFOR’s research is natural science in orientation or that the disciplinary backgrounds of research staff predicate what they currently conduct research on.
22
Environmental Services and Sustainable Use of Forests9. CIFOR research staff in these three
programmes work in over 30 countries and have links to more than 300 researchers in 50
international, regional and national organizations.
With respect to CIFOR’s annual budget, for 2004 grants totaled USD 14,951,000, of
which USD 7,479,000 was restricted funding and USD 7,472,000 unrestricted funding10
(CIFOR 2004). The top donors were the Netherlands (11%), the United Kingdom (11%) and
the World Bank (10%), European Commission (8%), Norway (7%), Sweden (6%), Germany
(5%), USA (5%), Japan (5%), and Canada (4%) (CIFOR 2004). Precisely because of
CIFOR's position as one of the seminal global knowledge organizations on tropical forests,
understanding how and why certain research concerns are selected and implemented has deep
implications for forestry institutions and forest-dependent people in Indonesia and elsewhere.
In its early years, CIFOR's assumed modus operandi was that “good research would
sell itself,” or in other words that scientifically rigorous research would contribute to methods
and (inter)national policies that would improve the well being of both forest-dependent
communities and tropical forests. In the last five years, CIFOR has focused much more on
increasing the impact or influence of its research. This change was related to an increased
demand from external actors, e.g., donors and NGOs, for CIFOR to demonstrate impact, as
well as a general decrease in funds for environmental issues and a perceived financial crisis
at CIFOR. As I examine in this dissertation, particularly Chapter 8, CIFOR’s emphasis on
“research with impact” or “impact-oriented science” has translated into CIFOR’s being more
explicitly politically engaged relative to its early years. That said, CIFOR does not engage in
9 Please see Chapter 8 for a detailed description and analysis of these programmes. 10 “Restricted funding” refers to funding that has been allocated for a particular project and/or activity. CIFOR depends on CGIAR funding for approximately 85% of its budget.
23
the politics of natural resource use directly in the same ways that an advocacy organization
such as Greenpeace does, which is unsurprising in part given CIFOR’s funding dependency
on multilateral and bilateral agencies and its idealized role as an impartial research
organization. Further, CIFOR works with national governments of host countries, e.g.,
Indonesia; indeed, much of what CIFOR attempts to effect is at the level of national policy.
Hence, CIFOR may be limited in public discourse with respect to identifying and exposing
certain actors as responsible for destructive policies and practices. In essence, maintaining
an apolitical, research stance may allow CIFOR to work in nations whose governments
would be inhospitable to more politically oriented organizations. This is explicitly stated in
the Strategic Plan in the section entitled "CIFOR's Comparative Advantage." Two
statements are revealing in this regard: "When capital investments in research capacity are
required, this will be the domain of bilateral and multilateral aid agencies." And "determining
'what' research is needed is mainly the task of societies in the tropics. CIFOR's role will lie
more in assisting the accomplishment of this research through effective partnerships"
(CIFOR 1996: 32).
As part of the host country agreement with the Government of Indonesia (GOI), in
1996 CIFOR was provided privileged access to a large forested area in the then Bulungan
District, East Kalimantan (now Malinau District) to conduct long-term applied research on
forest related-issues. The forested area, first known as the Bulungan Research Forest and
then renamed as the Malinau Research forest in 2003 due to the division of the Bulungan
District, is approximately 302,900 hectares and is adjacent to Kayan Mentarang National
Park. While CIFOR has privileged access to this region of forest – indeed, it is recognized
24
through Ministerial Decree – it is not exclusive access; government approved actors,
including forest concessionaires, may operate there.
With decentralization, district-level governments – previously rubber stamps of the
central government – gained a broad range of decision-making authority, and thus in 2002
CIFOR initiated and signed an MOU with the district government. The official agreements
between CIFOR, GOI and the Malinau district government signify, at least in public
discourse, a recognition and willingness to engage in collaborative research on a host of
forest-related issues and to apply research results. As I discuss in Chapter 4, most of
CIFOR’s prescriptions and recommendations have not been adopted by district government
whether in policy or practices.
The Malinau District of East Kalimantan and CIFOR’s applied research initiatives
there are indicative of the aforementioned broader political economic dynamics and related
issues in the forestry sector, as well as being representative of international concern over
Indonesia’s forests. Ad hoc decentralization processes, valuable forests (from both
commercial and conservation perspectives), opportunistic logging, and social conflict are all
at play and interrelated in Malinau. CIFOR has brought international attention to Malinau
since 1996, when CIFOR started its research in the area. Under the general mandate to
improve the sustainability of forest and to help alleviate poverty, CIFOR has conducted a
broad suite of activities in Malinau funded by various donors and led by various CIFOR
scientists with different disciplinary backgrounds that taken as a collective embrace a multi-
disciplinary or integrated approach and that have evolved through time (Sayer and Campbell
25
2004; Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming b]. Most of CIFOR’s activities have focused on the
Malinau watershed (approximately 500,000 ha) of the district11.
CIFOR’s Adaptive Collaborative Management (ACM)12 initiative in Malinau is of
particular interest in this dissertation13. The reasons are its direct focus on empowering forest
dependent communities “to increase their access and control over forest benefits and
decisions” (Wollenberg et al. 2004: 21) and
“to help communities create systems for settling differences among themselves (e.g.
boundaries, effective representation) and to negotiate with external parties to reach
agreements that were more just for communities” (Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming b]:
5).
In doing so, it attempts to address one of the central concerns of Indonesia’s forest “crisis”
and “reform,” as well as one of the central concerns of this dissertation, viz., the relationship
between forests and forest dependent people. As I discuss in detail in Chapter 4, ACM in
Malinau focuses on the 27 villages in the Malinau watershed, with certain villages being sites
of more intense activities than others. The ACM team employs an “action research” approach
in which they act as researchers, facilitators and information resources. Initiated in 1997,
ACM activities have included the following (Wollenberg et al. 2004):
11 The Malinau watershed falls outside of and is adjacent to the official Malinau Research Forest recognized in the original GOI decree. CIFOR, the district government and the central government are aware of this and find it unproblematic. In Chapter 3, I explain the reasons that account for the fact that most of CIFOR’s activities occur outside of the official Malinau Research Forest. 12 As I explain in Chapter 5, the ACM research initiative in Malinau is affiliated with a larger program at CIFOR referred to by the same name (ACM), yet differs from many of the initiatives in the larger program, although concepts and methods were shared and synergies developed (Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming b]). Unlike the larger program, ACM in Malinau did not attempt “to test ACM approaches to understand their effectiveness” and “did not develop indicators and monitoring systems with different stakeholders, nor promote collaborative management per se” (Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming b:5). 13 At CIFOR I was mostly closely affiliated with this initiative and have worked with this team since 1999, when I began my collaboration with CIFOR.
26
• Village surveys and monitoring to understand local concerns and conditions
• Participatory mapping and inter-village agreements
• Community and district government legal awareness and policy dialogue
• Community participation in district land use planning
• Community participation in village economic development and land use
The case of CIFOR and Malinau is even more intriguing and informative because of
CIFOR’s focus on research and knowledge production versus a more straightforward
development project intervention, which often puts less explicit emphasis on evidence and
scientific rigor. Moreover, CIFOR’s applied research in Malinau is linked to the broader
landscape of forestry related institutions in multiple ways. Given CIFOR’s position as an
international applied research institute, part of its mission is to provide knowledge to other
forest-related institutions. Indeed, for CIFOR not only are knowledge production and
dissemination institutional priorities, but so is the applicability of context-specific research to
other regions. Further, CIFOR’s research priorities of improved local livelihoods, local
people’s control and access to forest resources and improved forest management all articulate
with the priorities and concerns of other forestry related institutions in Indonesia, including
the Ministry of Forestry. Lastly, that CIFOR has worked in Malinau consistently for over ten
years and both during and after the Suharto regime gives it a deeper history and perhaps a
deeper understanding of relevant dynamics in Indonesia vis-à-vis other international forest
related institutions.
D. CIFOR as linked to and as part of the landscape of aid-related forestry institutions
In addition to being an intensive ethnographic case study, CIFOR and its work in
Malinau are an entry point to examine the relationships, logics and practices of other aid-
27
related forestry institutions in Indonesia. It is important not only to locate CIFOR in the
broader landscape of aid-related institutions within which it operates in Indonesia, but also to
have an equally deep understanding of the landscape itself – a landscape which CIFOR is
part of. To this end, this dissertation also examines the CGI and DFF with respect to their
interest in the forestry “crisis” and “reform” in Indonesia.
In doing so, this dissertation examines the dynamics that influence the use of
CIFOR’s research in Indonesia (or lack thereof), as well as how this broader landscape of
institutions influences, or does not influence, CIFOR, e.g., research priorities, research
products (content and format), and target audiences. This dissertation attempts to be more
than an ethnography of CIFOR, but rather an institutional ethnography about the
relationships, logics and practices that emerge out of the global concern over Indonesia’s
forests and forest dependent communities. And as part of that institutional ethnography, I pay
particular attention to CIFOR to understand the role of research and knowledge at local,
national and global levels.
Understanding the relationships, incentives and logics of aid-related forestry
institutions in Indonesia and their engagement with other actors such as national government
reveals whether and/or to what extent CIFOR influences and is influenced by (informs and is
informed by) these other institutions. An unfounded assumption is the linear knowledge-to-
policy-to-practice model, e.g., the assumption that if CIFOR makes an evidence-based
recommendation regarding forest policy and practice in Indonesia, it will be implemented by
the Indonesian authorities and supported by the larger community of aid-related forestry
institutions. As this dissertation attempts to demonstrate, this is clearly not the case, and the
extent to which CIFOR’s research recommendations will influence other institutions or
28
CIFOR itself depends greatly on whether significant institutional and inter-institutional
changes take place.
One argument I make in this dissertation is that the logic of each aid-related forestry
institution undermines their agreement to collaborate and coordinate with one another, the
lack of which, according to these same agencies, has significantly contributed to the
ineffectiveness of aid in the forestry sector14. Moreover, in the face of this ineffectiveness,
these institutions maintain a public discourse of “striving” or “trying” that is sufficient to
keep aid flowing. Evidence of this is the approximately USD 60 million/year for the past five
to seven years that Indonesia has received through bilateral and multilateral grants, while the
forestry sector continues to generate revenue of over USD 4 billion through practices that
violate the commitments made by government with respect to reform in the forestry sector.
Conversely, this dissertation also examines the reasons for the Indonesian government’s
involvement in aid-related forestry interventions, particularly considering that they
potentially threaten, or at least critique, the USD 4 billion industry.
Understanding these relationships and logics sheds light on how CIFOR engages this
broader landscape of aid-related forestry institutions. As discussed in Chapter 8, CIFOR
interacts with the aid-community and government in Indonesia, but does so in a targeted and
strategic fashion. CIFOR attends the annual CGI meetings as part of the civil society
contingent to press for certain priorities, e.g., forest industry reform related to money
laundering and the banking sector. In addition, CIFOR publishes articles in the mass media in
14 In her ethnography of the donor community in Bolivia, Eyben (2003: 2) makes an analogous comment: “by their nature, bureaucratic organizations find it difficult to learn through reflection…operating at the global level, in a world of paradox and surprise, the pressure grows to pass themselves off as infallible and therefore deprives them of the ability to learn….it may be very difficult to admit ignorance, to dismantle systematically that unscrutinized sense of being in control.”
29
Indonesia, e.g., Jakarta Post and Kompas, just prior to the annual CGI meetings to raise
awareness and the profile of forest reform during the meeting.
Further, CIFOR has worked closely with members of the DFF on certain issues. In
2004, CIFOR was commissioned by the World Bank Office in Jakarta to draft a forestry
issues and policy options paper to assist the Bank in its considering how to re-engage the
forestry sector in Indonesia (see CIFOR 2005). Also, CIFOR has worked with members of
the DFF to develop analyses related to forest finance and forest industry reform.
CIFOR, however, limits its involvement in the DFF and the annual CGI meetings
because CIFOR realizes that they are largely impotent institutions (see Chapters 6 and 7) that
by and large have been unable to effect the change CIFOR advocates. As I discuss in
Chapters 5 and 8, CIFOR places more emphasis on attempting to influence its global
“epistemic” or “interpretive” community at the level of donor metropoles, e.g., USAID in
Washington DC instead of the USAID Indonesia Mission, which from CIFOR’s purview has
greater likelihood of affecting the political-economic dynamics related to forestry and forest
dependent people in Indonesia. As I detail in Chapters 5 and 8, part of CIFOR’s explicit
communication strategy is to articulate its research findings and recommendations in ways
and in media palatable to its global interpretive community, e.g., articles in the International
Herald Tribune and Economist to influence politicians and their constituencies, as well as in-
person meetings with Ministers of Trade and Industry in Japan and the US that speak to the
interests of those actors.
Placing the practice of research and these institutional realities in one analytical frame
reveals the vital importance of brokering across different institutional realities and languages
and “translating” knowledge into policy and practice across multiple, disparate institutions
30
and individuals (Mosse 2005). It underscores the need to examine how brokers are made and
how successful brokering is carried out, as well as what and how knowledge is used or not
used in policy and practice, as well as by whom and when.
III. Significance of the dissertation
As I elaborate in the Conclusion of the dissertation, this study attempts to benefit both
academic and practitioner communities by furthering social science understanding of the
knowledge, logics and practices of local, national and international forestry institutions, as
well as providing analyses to foster more just and equitable arrangements for forest
dependent communities, who have historically been marginalized. Beyond forestry and
forestry institutions, however, this dissertation analyzes institutional dynamics that have
relevance for other international bodies in other nations, specifically, and global governance
related to the environment and development, generally.
As detailed in Chapter 2, this study contributes to theoretical debates concerned with
the culture and political economy of knowledge producing institutions, and the effects of that
knowledge at global, national and local levels. This dissertation contributes to the few
existing ethnographic studies regarding the culture, logic and practices of powerful
institutions involved in natural resource management. The majority of ethnographic studies
of powerful institutions focus on their impacts on rural communities and the broader political
economic forces that influence their agendas (for a detailed discussion see Brosius 1999a,
Cooper and Packard 1997, Dove 1999b, and Eyben 2003). Some scholars (Dove 1999b;
Brosius 1999b, 1999c; Cooper and Packard 1997) note that powerful national and
transnational institutions have traditionally been understudied from an ethnographic
perspective. As Cooper and Packard (1997: 28) note, "[i]t is not hard to deconstruct the
31
modes of discursive power. It is much harder to discover how discourse operates within
institutions." Further, Dove states that some scholars argue that studying powerful
institutions "should be at the core of the discipline [of anthropology]" (Davis 1972, Nader
1972, Scheper-Hughes 1995, cited in Dove 1999b: 239-40).
This dissertation integrates an understanding of an intervention at the village level
with an investigation of the institutional culture that gave rise to it, as well as analyzing the
interplay between village and institutional realities. In doing so, this study interrogates the
traditional and assumed boundaries between western knowledge and its non-western subjects
and between experts and those ostensibly in need of expertise. Additionally, this dissertation
examines the relationships, logics and practices of the broader landscape of aid-related
forestry institutions in Indonesia, a landscape that CIFOR is both linked to and part of. In
locating all of these dynamics in one analytic frame, this dissertation builds upon post-
structural political ecology studies of powerful conservation and development institutions
and contributes to recent ethnographies of international development institutions that
integrate structural-discursive and actor-oriented approaches (Fairhead and Leach 2003;
Mosse 2004, 2005; Rossi 2004).
More specifically, it examines how the intrinsic “disjuncture” between knowledge,
policy and practice and between institutions is translated into an “order” or “master
metaphor” by individuals or institutions that act as brokers or interlocutors who actively
recruit support for the “order” such that it becomes authoritative, while the differences
between knowledge, policy and practice co-exist without clashing with each other (Mosse
2005). In doing so, I examine how certain individuals and/or institutions become brokers
and how and why they are able to translate adeptly across institutional realities and languages
32
to fashion and maintain authoritative interpretations that accommodate the disparate interests
of all actors involved while maintaining an appearance of integrity. On a related point, I
investigate how the brokering of authority works such that the necessary disconnect between
policy and practice is maintained to ensure that each functions accordingly, or in other words
that successful policy functions to “legitimize rather than orientate practice” (Mosse 2004:
648) and that practice functions so that interventions on the ground are “driven not by policy
but by the exigencies of organizations and the need to maintain relationships” (Mosse 2004:
651).
Similar to these recent institutional ethnographies, this dissertation provides a more
robust analysis of international conservation and development institutions, as well as of the
knowledge they produce and interventions they create. In doing so, this dissertation,
analogous to recent work by Fairhead and Leach (2003: 3), “links contemporary debates on
science, technology and society with concerns of environmental anthropology, showing how
the latter can be enriched and rejuvenated through an ethnographic approach to science and
policy.”
Further, in examining CIFOR this dissertation is one of the first ethnographies of a
CGIAR Center15, which is significant given the effects that CGIAR-related activities, such as
the controversial Green Revolution, have had for millions of farmers in developing countries
(Dove and Kammen 1997, Lansing 1991, Yapa 1993). To date, there have been no detailed
studies of the institutional culture within a CGIAR Center. Warren Baum (1986), a career
development bureaucrat and a founding figure of CGIAR, wrote an "insider's" history of the
CGIAR, but the book lacks a critical stance, reading more like a memoir:
15 Existing studies include Goodell’s work with and on the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) (1984a, 1984b, 1985), Rhoades work with and on the International Potato Institute (CIP) (1984a, 1984b; Rhodes et al. 1982), and Marglin’s history of the Green Revolution and its links to the Rockefeller Foundation (1996).
33
"Like most of those who have been associated with this remarkable enterprise, I count the
time that I have spent with the CGIAR as the most rewarding of my professional career"
(Baum 1986: xi).
Baum's book elaborates on the growth of the CGIAR since its creation in 1971 and the
benefits it has brought to developing countries by increasing productivity of food crops
through the promotion of capital and technology intensive agriculture, and the genetic
manipulation and breeding of crops to create High Yield Varieties.
Viewed from outside Baum's purview, however, the history of the CGIAR and its
activities, at least until the late 1980s, are a manifestation of the high modernist vision of
development rooted in Enlightenment ideas of progress. Many studies have examined the
effects on local communities and logic of the agricultural development schemes promoted by
the CGIAR, the most notable being Green Revolution technology developed and promoted
by the IRRI to modernize agriculture and increase production (see for example Dove and
Kammen 1997, Lansing 1991, Yapa 1993). In his study of the crucial role that Balinese water
temples play in regulating irrigation of wet rice fields, Lansing (1991) shows how the
adoption of Green Revolution technology by the Indonesian state disregarded and forced the
abandonment of the water temple system. This set into motion pest outbreaks such that new
seeds had to be developed constantly, which combined with the state mandate for continuous
cropping of Green Revolution rice "threatened both the ecology of the terraces and the social
infrastructure of production" (Lansing 1991: 117).
In his argument that the epistemology of development produces poverty, Yapa (1993)
shows how High Yield Variety (HYV) seeds, synonymous with the Green Revolution,
induce scarcity. First, since HYV seeds cannot reproduce, farmers must purchase them
34
annually. Second, the seeds can only increase yields in combination with costly inputs --
chemical fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation and fuel -- and hence taxes not only the farmer's
resources, but also the natural ones.
Dove and Kammen (1997) investigate the epistemology of the Green Revolution,
concluding that its failures are more ideological than technological. In comparing the
ideological bases of forest product gathering, swidden agriculture and the cultivation of HYV
seeds, Dove and Kammen (1997) show that the assumptions built into the Green Revolution
not only favor and bolster centralized control and already well-off farmers, but also disallows
the problematizing of the sustainability of the technology itself.
This dissertation also contributes to the anthropological and sociological studies of
science by examining the nexus of science and management, and moving from the laboratory
sciences, which have been most examined, to the field sciences and their application, which
has been least studied (Franklin 1995). The shift from laboratory to field sciences is
significant because of the great variability in contextual factors that exists in field conditions,
which is relatively absent in a laboratory. Hence an important contribution of the study is an
examination of how a science producing institution elides or addresses that variability.
This dissertation also attempts to provide practitioners with constructive theoretical
and analytical considerations of their own work, which is sometimes lacking as in the case of
social forestry (Dove 1995). This study attempts to go beyond academic critique; I engaged
practitioners throughout the process of research and write-up, which was made possible in
part through my collaboration with CIFOR. I attempted to contribute to practitioners' analysis
of their own work, thereby assisting in a small, but hopefully significant way to the
formulation of more productive means to devolve rights over natural resources to local
35
people in a just and equitable manner. More broadly, this dissertation attempts to improve an
understanding of the opportunities and constraints to integrating knowledge, policy and
practice at village, national and international levels. Although geographically situated in
Indonesia, this dissertation addresses similar issues in other countries, such as the global
trend to promote decentralized forest governance and the frequent failure to implement it
successfully (Agrawal and Ribot 1999). Further, the challenges faced by CIFOR initiatives in
Malinau are indicative of “multi-stakeholder” programs in other countries, such as Joint
Forest Management in India. Hence this dissertation not only provides analyses and
recommendations in the Indonesian context, but hopefully will prove useful in a global one.
In attempting to speak to both academic and practitioner communities, I share
Eyben’s (2003: 3) sentiment regarding her work as both practitioner and scholar of
development in Bolivia:
“Like some academic political anthropologists, I have learnt to be modernist and
post-modernist at the same time (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992)…Understanding the
ways in which poverty knowledge affects poverty policies may enhance participation
in policy processes of those who until now have been excluded…..commitment to and
action for social change do not preclude a reflexivist stance.”
IV. Summary of dissertation chapters
In Chapter 2, I review the literature that this dissertation engages with respect to
theoretical framework and analytical tools. I also discuss how this dissertation applies and
contributes to those bodies of literature. I then summarize the methods used and the
justification for those methods. I also pay particular attention to the issues I encountered in
36
attempting an institutional ethnography, viz., my positionality, and the methodological,
theoretical and moral implications of “studying up.”
In Chapter 3, I provide a detailed overview of the context within which the
dissertation research is situated. More specifically, I describe the current political-economic
situation in Indonesia, viz. the transition towards administrative and fiscal decentralization,
and the institutional legacy of the New Order regime. I then move to a discussion of the
current perceived forest crisis and attempts at curbing this crisis; I discuss the political
economic drivers of the perceived crisis and the engagement and activities of the
international aid community involved in forestry in Indonesia. To ground these national and
international level dynamics, I then discuss the Malinau District of East Kalimantan and how
decentralization has played out there. In the last section of this chapter, I discuss CIFOR’s
history and activities in the district.
In Chapter 4, I describe and examine the relationships and perceptions of villagers,
district government and CIFOR vis-à-vis each other. In doing so, I try to understand the
activities, influence and power of CIFOR, an international applied forestry research institute,
in the context of a politically contentious forest landscape, viz., in the context of Indonesia’s
ad hoc decentralization processes. Moreover, I analyze the perceived expectations and
benefits of the actors that CIFOR engages in Malinau – why they are interested in working
with CIFOR – and the extent to which these expectations are borne out. Further, I examine at
the local level of intervention the role of a publicly funded, international research
organization that should have global influence.
In Chapter 5, I examine the type of global influence that CIFOR attempts to have
based on its local level applied research in Malinau. Further, I attempt to demonstrate that
37
although CIFOR has limited influence at the local or field level, the retelling or reporting of
their local level research experience provides compelling, persuasive (policy) narratives and
prescriptions to influence, in particular ways, the global community concerned with tropical
forests and forest-dependent people. CIFOR’s field research in Malinau and CIFOR
researchers’ critical reflections on their experiences are essential legitimizing vehicles to
influence CIFOR’s “interpretive community” (Mosse 2004)16 or “epistemic community”
(Haas 1990)17 of practitioners and academics.
In Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, I move away from CIFOR to the broader landscape of
aid-related forestry institutions. I describe and analyze the relationships between, and
incentives and logics of, aid-related forestry institutions at the national level in Indonesia, as
well as the relationship and dynamics between aid-related forestry institutions and central
government agencies including, but not limited to, the Ministry of Forestry. To understand
these institutional relationships, incentives and logics, I examine the origin and evolution of
(1) forestry as an agenda item at the annual CGI meetings between the international donor
community and the Indonesian government, and (2) the Donor Forum on Forestry (DFF) and
its relationship with other forestry-related institutions.
In Chapter 6, I discuss and analyze how and why forestry was elevated to the highest
levels of diplomatic negotiations between the international donor community and the
16 Mosse (2004: 646) notes that “development projects need ‘interpretive communities’; they have to enroll a range of supporting actors with reasons ‘to participate in the established order as if its representations were reality’ (Sayer, 1994: 374, cited in Li, 1999: 374).” 17 According to Haas (1990: 55), an epistemic community “is a professional group that believes in the same cause-and-effect-relationships, truth tests to assess them, and shares common values. As well as sharing an acceptance of a common body of facts, its members share a common interpretive framework, or ‘consensual knowledge,’ from which they convert such facts, or observations, to policy-relevant conclusions…Presented with incomplete or ambiguous evidence, members of an epistemic community would draw similar interpretations and make similar policy conclusions...An epistemic community's power resource, domestically and internationally, is its authoritative claim to knowledge.”
38
government of Indonesia, viz., the annual CGI meetings, and how an agreed upon “master
metaphor” (Mosse 2004) of forest reform was fashioned by the donor community and
government. Further, I examine how this master metaphor evolved over time and was
actively refashioned by both donors and the Indonesian government, as well has how the
master metaphor incorporated the concomitant lack of progress on the agreed upon
commitments. In short, I show how the master metaphor of the Indonesian forestry sector’s
problems and solutions was created, maintained and refashioned among international donors
and the government, while the reality in the forest indicates a diametrically opposed
trajectory. My analysis demonstrates that there is a significant performative element to CGI-
related evaluations and assessments of the forestry sector reform in Indonesia, as well as calls
for reform and coordination among donor and government agencies and between donors and
the government. Indeed, assessments and evaluations, as well as their attendant
recommendations, are not instruments to achieve their ostensible goals of improved
sustainable and equitable forest management, but rather vehicles to recruit for and maintain
master metaphors.
In Chapter 7, I discuss and analyze the Donor Forum on Forestry (DFF), which was
created by the CGI in 2000 to assist GOI in carrying out its proposed actions and monitor
progress and is responsible for drafting the donor statement for the annual CGI meetings, i.e.,
the donor’s articulation of the master metaphor. I examine the DFF’s history and evolution,
relationships between members of the DFF, and how the DFF relates to other forest-related
institutions such as government agencies, international organizations, and Indonesian NGOs.
In doing so, I try to understand the institutional relationships, incentives and logics that
39
explain the disjuncture18 in Indonesian forestry reform. The DFF is an intensive case study
and a window through which to examine the broader landscape of forestry institutions. More
specifically, in light of the DFF’s crucial role in the co-production of the master metaphor for
the annual CGI meetings, I examine the DFF’s position as a “broker” or “translator” (Mosse
2005) in these institutional relationships.
In Chapter 8, I return to CIFOR to discuss CIFOR managers’ and researchers’ (1)
conduct of impact oriented science, (2) establishment and implementation of research
priorities and (3) work in partnership with other institutions and capacity building. In doing
so, I examine the institutional culture and structure that frame CIFOR’s researchers and
managers’ engagement with the broader political-economic dynamics and institutional
landscape related to forestry and forest dependent people in Indonesia and elsewhere. In this
chapter, I switch vantage points to understand from an intra-institutional perspective the
logics, practices and relationships discussed in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7. I have placed this
chapter after the ones that examine the political-economic dynamics and institutional
landscape of aid because that context is necessary to make sense of CIFOR scientists’
everyday practices.
In the final chapter of my dissertation, Chapter 9, I review and synthesize the major
conclusions from each chapter, highlighting key analytical points regarding CIFOR, the
landscape of aid-related forestry institutions active in Indonesia, and the political-economic
and cultural dimensions of forest management generally and local people’s control and
access to forest resources specifically. I also review the theoretical contributions of this
18 Lewis and Mosse (2006) explain that “order can be understood as the ‘ideal worlds’ that development actors aim to bring about…[and] disjuncture comes from the gap between these ideal worlds and the social reality they have to relate to” (Lewis and Mosse 2006: 2).
40
dissertation, placing it in dialogue with contemporary debates and discussing how and where
this dissertation pushes those debates.
41
CHAPTER 2
THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
I. Introduction
In this chapter, I review the literature that this dissertation engages with respect to
theoretical framework and analytical tools. I then move to a discussion of my research
methodology, which includes a summary of the methods used and the justification for those
methods. I also pay particular attention to the issues I encountered in attempting an
institutional ethnography, viz., my positionality.
II. Analytical Tools and Theoretical Considerations
This dissertation engages several bodies of social science literature that are concerned
with the culture and political economy of knowledge producing institutions, and the effects
of that knowledge at global, national and local levels in the context of international
conservation and development. More specifically, my dissertation research speaks to a
number of social science analyses of development and environment issues that bring the local
and global into one analytical frame.
This dissertation builds upon several related bodies of social science literature:
poststructural political ecology; studies of local transformations of interventions; studies of
science and scientific communities; and recent institutional ethnographies of development
that integrate structural-discursive and actor-oriented approaches. Although drawing upon
different disciplines, my theoretical framework includes several basic tenets that most, if not
all, of this literature shares in varying degrees.
42
The first tenet of my theoretical framework is the basic political ecology idea that
natural resource issues are to a great extent a manifestation of broader political-economic
forces and hence no intervention can be considered neutral, but rather, ideologically loaded
(Blaikie 1985, Bryant 1992, Cooper and Packard 1997). One of the seminal figures in the
field, Blaikie (1985) argues that the causes of soil erosion are not proximate or place-based,
but rather due to interlinked social and political-economic relations, and hence solutions to
soil erosion lie not in ostensibly neutral interventions, but rather in fundamental changes in
those relations.
The second tenet of my theoretical orientation is the idea that knowledge (or truth) is
socially and culturally constructed through discourse1 and related practices, and that
discourse creates and maintains certain distinctions and justifies certain interventions, while
obscuring certain other realties (Foucault 1980, Peet and Watts 1996, Greenough and Tsing
1994, Williams 1980). For example, Dove (1999a) details how Indonesian plantation
officials consistently represent peasants pejoratively, thereby privileging the government's
claim over peasants' land claims. Dove (1999a: 204) suggests that
"the issues at stake in this process of privileging are not merely rhetorical: as Berry
(1988: 66 cited in Li [1999]) writes: 'Struggles over meaning are as much a part of the
process of resource allocation as are struggles over surplus or the labor process.' . . .
[power] works more subtly through the conceptual structures by means of which the
planters perceive and represent the plantation world."
The third tenet is the idea of the inextricable linkage between knowledge and power
(Foucault 1980, Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983). Give the dominance of high modernism,
1 Following Peet and Watts (1996: 14), "[a] 'discourse is an area of language use expressing a particular standpoint and related to a certain set of institutions."
43
predicated upon notions of evolutionary progress executed through scientific thinking and
technology (Scott 1998), analysts need to scrutinize the ostensible neutrality of science and
technology. Peet and Watts (1996: 13) suggest
"each society has a regime of truth, with control of the 'political economy of truth'
constituting part of the power of the great political and economic apparatuses: these
diffuse 'truth,' particularly in the modern form of 'scientific discourse,' through societies,
in a process infused with social struggles."
That said, actors do not merely impose or are imposed upon, although power relations are
uneven. In this regard, I refer to Foucault’s notion of power, defined as "an ensemble of
actions which induce others and follow from others" (Foucault 1983: 220). Power is
omnipresent, is exercised on both the ruler and the ruled, and has multiple normative
trajectories, e.g., power work both positively and negatively for historically marginalized
groups (Darier 1999). Agrawal (2005: 221) explains that “one of the prime effects of power
is how ‘certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires come to be
identified and constituted as individuals’” (Foucault 1977:98, cited in Agrawal 2005) and
that “power is not just about the ability to constrain certain kinds of actions, peoples, or
outcomes; it is as much about the possibility of producing them.”
A. Poststructural political ecology and Powerful Institutions
My dissertation research builds upon critical examinations of development and
environmental discourses that rely on particular interpretations of Foucault's ideas of
governmentality2 and the inextricable linkage between knowledge and power (Crush 1995,
2 “Governmentality” is a contested term and has been interpreted differently by different scholars. According to Ferguson (1994: 194), governmentality is “the idea that societies, economies, and government bureaucracies respond in a more or less reflexive, straightforward way to policies and plans. In this conception, the state apparatus is seen as a neutral instrument for implementing plans, while the government itself tends to appear as
44
Escobar 1995, Ferguson 1994, Mitchell 1991, Peet and Watts 1996, Sachs 1992). These
studies, referred to as poststructural political ecology, examine the discursive strategies and
processes of knowledge production by powerful institutions such as the state and the World
Bank that are essential in framing development as desirable. They argue that these
institutions create and deploy certain discourses that serve the interests of the political-
economic elite and that constitute governable subjects.
For example, in his critique of a World Bank funded livestock development program in
Lesotho, Ferguson (1994) argues that even when they fail, development projects extend the
reach of the state in society, and suggests that the logic of failure and reform, intervention
and depoliticization are integral to perpetuating the state/development apparatus. One of
Ferguson's key insights is that the strengthening of bureaucratic state power is accomplished
through the ideological effect of depoliticizing poverty and the state, and articulating
solutions to poverty as technical matters. In a similar vein, Mitchell (1991) demonstrates how
the development industry, in this case USAID, constructs Egypt as a "development object"
plagued by a food production crisis due to overpopulation, limited arable land and stagnant
peasant agricultural practices to justify technical interventions that not only elide the interests
of international development institutions themselves, but also the political-economic
inequities that create Egypt's food problem.
Analogous studies have examined the institutionalization of environmental discourses
by state and global institutions (Brosius 1999a, 1999b; Buttel 1992; Eder 1996; Escobar
a machine for providing social services and engineering economic growth.” According to Agrawal (2005) post-structuralists such as Ferguson use the term “to signify what he [Ferguson] sees as the proliferation of oppressive state power and institutions” (225). According to Agrawal (2005: 225), “Ferguson’s reading of governmentality through the lens of bureaucratization forgoes the opportunity to explore the multiple forms of conduct in a polity and ignores questions about how subjects of development come into existence and with what consequences.”
45
1996; Luke 1995). For example, in tracing the history of the Penan logging campaign in
Sarawak (Malaysian Borneo), Brosius (1999b) elucidates the process by which the discursive
elements of the logging campaign were shifted "away from the political/moral domain and
toward the domain of governmentality, managerialism, and bureaucraticization" through
collaboration between the Malaysian state and Northern environmentalists (49).
These studies, however, represent institutions monolithically, often fail on empirical
grounds, are tautological and somewhat misinterpret Foucault (Agrawal 1996, Bebbington
2000, Cooper and Packard 1997, Moore 2000). Further, they represent local communities as
merely being imposed upon and further exploited -- in focusing on the discursive power of
institutions, they lock local communities within a victim script, devoid of agency. As
Agrawal (1996) has noted, ironically, poststructural critiques end up using a notion of power
that contradicts Foucault's. Further, the essentialized representations of powerful institutions
beg many questions regarding agency within the institution and between the institution and
other social actors. Instead of starting with these traditional categories of analysis, my
dissertation research begins by documenting the complexities within an international
institution and in the interactions between the institution and other relevant actors and then
moves to analysis of these complexities.
My dissertation research draws upon poststructural critiques of powerful institutions, yet
provides the needed ethnographic "thickness" of an institution, examining the complexities
often missed in this body of literature. My analysis of CIFOR in Malinau, East Kalimantan
in Chapter 4 demonstrates empirically that an international institution, which post-structural
analyses would assume has global discursive power, not only has less local influence than
this literature would anticipate, but also that the position of these institutions locally is more
46
fragile, negotiated and constrained by other actors and broader political-economic processes
than this literature would suggest3. Moreover, I explain that in the case of CIFOR’s research
initiatives in Malinau, it is abundantly clear that the discourses CIFOR creates and deploys
neither merely serve the interests of the political-economic elite nor constitute governable
subjects.
I do, however, attempt to make the case that CIFOR does indeed have discursive
authority in framing problems and solutions, but that this authority is through their
publications at the level of CIFOR’s international “epistemic” (Haas 1992) or “interpretive”
(Mosse 2004) community, members of which could more powerfully influence the trajectory
of conservation and development in Malinau, compared to CIFOR itself (please see Chapter
5). It is through this refraction that perhaps CIFOR’s discursive formations have more
authority and influence in Malinau. CIFOR’s discursive authority, however, is not as
straightforward as that of the World Bank in Ferguson’s analysis.
My analysis of CIFOR in Malinau and the broader landscape of aid related forestry
institutions also attempts to demonstrate the productiveness of getting at the ethnographic
“thickness” of an institution. To this end, I have attempted to document and analyze the
complexities within an international institution and in the interactions between the institution
and other relevant social actors, thereby “opening up the implementation black box so as to
address the relationship between policy and event” (Moose 2004: 643).
B. Studies of Science and Scientific Communities
My dissertation work also builds on certain strands of the field broadly referred to as
science studies. Specifically, it draws upon ethnographic studies of science (Fujimura 1992,
3 In the past few years, there have been several institutional ethnographies published that focus on these institutions’ compromises and negotiations, e.g., Goldman (2005) and the necessity of compromise and collaboration, e.g., Mosse (2005). I discuss these studies in detail later in this chapter.
47
Knorr Cetina 1998, Latour and Woolgar 1986, Traweek 1988). These ethnographic accounts
of scientific communities examine in detail the practices of researchers, conceptualizing
scientific communities as cultural ones. They illuminate the cultural practices of scientists
and examine the beliefs and logics that a certain scientific community operates on to create
certain knowledges. For example, Fujimura (1992) examines interactions of scientists with
divergent interests who hopped on the "molecular biological bandwagon," thereby
constructing and coalescing around the "standardized package" of oncogene theory and
methods. She concludes that the coalescing of the oncogene epistemic community resulted
from the translatability or commensurability of the initial theory to both stabilize facts and
create new opportunities in divergent fields: "The package provided both dynamic
opportunities for divergent meanings and uses as well as stability" (Fujimura 1992: 201).
Examining the cultural aspects of scientists' work is critical to understanding how and
why certain knowledges are produced (Haraway 1991). As Scott (1998) notes in his
discussion of the dialectical relationship between metis (practical knowledge) and techne
(formal knowledge or "imperial" scientific knowledge), scientific research always draw upon
both these forms on knowledge, but rarely is metis acknowledged as playing an integral role
in this process because of its "unscientific"-ness and the hegemonic character of techne.
One shortcoming of most ethnographies of scientific communities is that they do not
emphasize where scientific communities are situated within the broader cultural and
political-economic landscape. They do not examine how these communities and their
knowledge production engage and are engaged by actors outside these communities
(Franklin 1995). Other studies, however, have examined the political economy of science
and scientific communities, which is often elided by virtue of science's privileged position as
48
somehow separate from politics (Dove 1994, Taylor 1997, Taylor and Buttel 1992, Zerner
1996). For example, Taylor and Buttel (1992) reveal the political-economic agendas that lay
behind the dominant discourse of global environmental science, which gains its universal
credibility through claims of neutrality and truth. Through a social constructivist lens, Taylor
and Buttel (1992) show how the choice of topics researched and methodologies employed
privilege the agendas of political economic elite in developed countries through the
naturalizing process of science, and also how the "the current globalization of environmental
discourse. . . steers attention away from the differentiated politics and economics of socio-
environmental change" (413). As exemplified in Taylor and Buttel's article (1992), there is
often a mutually reinforcing relationship between scientific findings and agendas with
agendas of powerful institutions, indeed Scott (1998) has shown that this is a manifestation
of high modernism. Yet, as Taylor (1997) demonstrates in his discussion of the falling out
between USAID and MIT in the context of a modeling project of nomads in the Sahel, it is
equally as critical to examine the disconnect between science and development institutions to
understand more fully the political economic location of science and scientific communities.
This dissertation draws upon both of these strands of science studies to examine CIFOR
as a cultural community and also to understand the institution's political-economic and
cultural articulation with the larger world within which it is embedded. Further, I examine
Indonesia’s perceived “forest crisis” and attempts at “forest reform” as a "standardized
package" to understand how CIFOR scientists and others at related forestry institutions
define, legitimize, transform and deploy this “standardized package” (Fujimura 1992) or
“master metaphor” (Mosse 2004).
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This dissertation contributes to previous studies by focusing on a field science instead of
a laboratory science. The shift from laboratory to field sciences is significant because of the
great variability that exists in field conditions, which is relatively absent in laboratories.
Thompson et. al.'s (1988) detailed critique of the generally accepted theory of Himalayan
environmental degradation -- that inappropriate agricultural practices fueled by population
pressure cause upland deforestation and soil erosion in Nepal -- elaborates not only the
multiple types of variability to be addressed in this study, but also the institutional incentives
that create and fuel them, which are also an important point of investigation for the proposed
research. Specifically, Thompson et al. (1988) demonstrate that the uncertainty in defining
the "problem" of degradation was an integral component of the problem itself, and that this
uncertainty, pervading everything from defining variables to determining causal
relationships, was very much a product of institutional dynamics: Each institution conducted
research on degradation based on particular framings of problems and solutions that served
respective institutional incentives and interventions (see Guthman (1997) for overall
historiography of environmental degradation in Nepal). They also argue that due to the
remarkable biophysical, ecological and socio-cultural heterogeneity of the Himalaya, broad
generalizations regarding problems and solutions are impossible, and that institutions need to
embrace uncertainty, instead of obfuscating it, and move to "tinkering" with local or
"embedded" realities, instead of grand interventions (Thompson et al. 1988). This
dissertation investigates how forestry institutions in Indonesia, particularly CIFOR, address
these issues of variability, uncertainty and institutional incentives analyzed in Thompson et
al.'s study, while also providing an understanding of the institutional culture, e.g., informal
interactions and negotiations, that influence their articulations.
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C. Articulations, Collaborations and Local Transformations of Interventions
Substantial portions of this dissertation resonate closely with and draw strongly upon
social science studies of development and environmental interventions that focus on the local
transformations of these interventions (see for example Tsing (1999a,1999b, 2000a, 2000b);
Moore (2000); Li (1999a, 2000); and Jasanoff (2004)). These studies focus on how
articulations or collaborations between actors are created and maintained. While recognizing
uneven power relations, this literature examines the localized practices or the "cultural
micropolitics" (Moore 2000) through which an intervention works. In doing so, they
demonstrate that interventions engender contestations, negotiations, compromises, and
articulations of social actors' disparate interests. They also show that strategic maneuverings
are not merely reactionary, but rather, are predicated upon "sedenterized histories" and
"embedded cultural practices" (Moore 2000). These studies emphasize that interventions are
co-produced at the local level by the intervening institution and local actors, thereby shifting
the identities of people and the meanings of places, as well as transforming the intervention
itself (Forbes 1999, Li 1999a, Pigg 1992, Tsing 2000b).
Studies of environmental interventions suggest that an intervention can create
possibilities for local people to shift power relations by representing themselves as, for
example, primitive environmentalists or through the creation of "tradition" (Brosius 1997,
Brosius et al. 1998, Conklin 1997, Li 2000, Tsing 1999a, Zerner 1994). For example, Tsing
(1999a) shows how the existence of a "green" international development project creates a
"field of attraction" that provides local Meratus Dayak the conceptual space to tap into the
globally circulating discourse of the "ecologically noble savage" (Redford 1990) as a means
to assert territorial claims. In addition to articulating themselves as noble natives, local
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people may also appropriate state discourses to assert political agency: for example, Dove
(1998) shows how Kenyah Dayak in East Kalimantan deploy the state discourse of legal
formality or "officialese" to assert land rights.
A series of articles by Tsing (1999b, 2000a, 2000b) calls for a move away from the
determinism of some political ecology analyses of environmental and development
interventions and towards a more empirically-based study of interventions. To this end, this
dissertation begins with an examination of CIFOR's research in East Kalimantan, as well as
relationships between other aid-related forestry institutions in Indonesia. Following Tsing
(1999b, 2000a, 2000b), instead of structural categories as analytical starting points, I examine
the articulations4 and collaborations made possible through, for example, CIFOR's research
and from there trace out their effects on identities, power relations, and control and access to
natural resources.
In a similar vein but with a focus more on the institution, Goldman’s (2005: 43) recent
ethnography concerning the World Bank’s articulation of a “green neoliberalism” framework
for intervention highlights the “fragile hegemony” of a powerful institution such as the
World Bank, and the necessity of these institutions to maintain “a mastery of popular and
elite consent that inculcates a moral and social authority worldwide.” Indeed, Goldman
(2005: 45) argues that this is perhaps why “the institution currently spends more on public
relations than it does research.” Notable about Goldman’s ethnography of the World Bank is
his emphasis on the “explanation of processes by which…hegemony and counterhegemony
are constituted, producing the whole spectrum of political and cultural closures and
4 Articulation here is used in Stuart Hall's sense as noted in Tsing (1999b): it is "the form that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions" (17), and that successful articulation is "the process through which mobilization can occur: the enunciating of the situation in a new or renewed form through the bringing of interlocutors into the heart of one's own self-conception (18).
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opportunities” (25), which exposes a “fragile” and “vulnerable” dominance and a “terrain of
the conjunctural” (41, 24).
Retaining a focus on interrelations, Agrawal’s (2005:2-3) recent work on “explaining
why, when, how and in what measure people come to develop an environmentally oriented
subject position” – in his case northern India – provides a dynamic and robust understanding
of the effects of inextricable linkages between politics, institutions and identities. He refers to
his analytical framework as “environmentality,” which “refers to the knowledges, politics,
institutions and subjectivities that come to be linked together with the emergence of the
environment as a domain that requires regulation and protection” (Agrawal 2005:226)5. A
key insight from Agrawal (2005: 226) for my dissertation is that “the working out of
environmental politics implies concurrent changes in” knowledges, politics, institutions and
identities.
The field of science and technology studies (S&TS) has also recently emphasized
articulation, collaboration and co-production6 as productive analytical tools in the studying
the relationship between scientific knowledge and political power (Jasanoff 2004). The editor
of a collection of S&TS essays that employ these analytical tools notes that “through studies
of emerging knowledges, research practices and political institutions, the authors demonstrate
that the idiom of co-production importantly extends the vocabulary of the traditional social
5 Agrawal (2005: 8, italics in original) notes that “environmentality” is a “union of environment and governmentality,” but his use of governmentality differs dramatically from that of poststructuralists such as Ferguson (see Agrawal 2005: 225-229). Agrawal, as well as other recent scholars of environmental politics, interpret Foucault’s notion of governmentality to mean “a type of power which both acts on and through the agency and subjectivity of individuals as ethically free and rational subjects” (Shore and Wright 1997: 8, cited in Moose 2005: 6). 6 One lead S&TS scholar defines co-production in that field as follows: “co-production is shorthand for the proposition that the ways in which we know and represent the world (both nature and society) are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live in it” and is “a way of interpreting and accounting for complex phenomena so as to avoid the strategic deletions and omissions of most other approaches in the social sciences” (Jasanoff 2004: 2-3).
53
sciences, offering fresh analytic perspectives on the nexus of science, power and culture”
(Jasanoff 2004:i)
In striving to do just this, my analysis of CIFOR in Malinau attempts to provide another
example of the productiveness of this approach with respect to understanding the policies,
practices and effects of conservation, development and research interventions. More
specifically, my analysis attempts to integrate an understanding of CIFOR interventions at
the village and district levels with an investigation of the interplay between village, district
government and CIFOR’s institutional realities. In doing so, I attempt to interrogate the
traditional and assumed boundaries between western knowledge and its non-western subjects
and between experts and those ostensibly in need of expertise. My analysis also builds upon
this literature not only by examining how the differences between plan and practice are
reflected in CIFOR’s logic and practices, but also how CIFOR then addresses and represents
these differences to the broader epistemic or interpretive community of which it is a part.
D. Institutional Ethnographies that integrate structural-discursive and actor-oriented
approaches
My dissertation also draws upon and contributes to recent analyses of international
conservation and development that investigate the relevant institutions ethnographically and
take as the starting point of analysis the difference or disjuncture between policy (or theory)
and practice or between plans and outcomes (Lewis and Mosse 2006; Mosse 2004, 2005;
Rossi 2004; Quarles van Ufford 2004). These studies attempt to integrate structural-
discursive approaches7 (e.g., Ferguson 1994) and actor-oriented approaches8 (e.g., Latour
7 “Structural-discursive approaches” (Rossi 2004: 560) refer to those views that presume that “behind a fiction of order we find a reality of disjuncture, this dualism being aspect of policy” (Rossi 2004: 560). These approaches tend to be strongly influenced by Foucault, particularly his later work on ethnics and
54
and Woolgar 1986) into one framework to more productively understand the “order and
disjuncture”9 that are inherent in conservation and development policy and practice, as well
as how they inform each other (Rossi 2004). To this end, they “attend to specific practices
and negotiations between different actors and between actors and knowledge formations”
(Rossi 2004: 560)10. These studies are “distinctly uncomfortable with monolithic notions of
dominance, resistance, hegemonic relations and the implication of false consciousness among
the developed (or the developers)” (Mosse 2004: 644-5). Building on the aforementioned
work of scholars who emphasize co-production and governmentality11 (e.g. Li 1999a), these
studies emphasize that “governance brought by development schemes cannot be imposed,”
but rather requires “collaboration and compromise” (Mosse 2004: 645).
A seminal article and book by Mosse (2004 and 2005, respectively) illustrate this
approach and provide deep insights into the organizational or institutional aspects of global-
local analyses, which by and large continue to lack sufficient attention to the ethnographic
details of the organizations involved. Through an analysis of a DFID rural development
project that Mosse himself worked on as a consultant for over 12 years, Mosse (2004: 641)
governmentality, and attend more closely to “specific practices and negotiations between different actors and between actors and knowledge formations” (Rossi 2004: 560). 8 Actor-oriented approaches place emphasis “on intersubjectivity, on processes of knowledge production and reproduction, and on the epistemic nature of strategic action” (Rossi 2004: 560). 9 Lewis and Mosse (2006) explain that “order can be understood as the ‘ideal worlds’ that development actors aim to bring about…[and] disjuncture comes from the gap between these ideal worlds and the social reality they have to relate to” (Lewis and Mosse 2006: 2). 10 The focus on practice is absolutely critical to these institutional ethnographers. Indeed, some insist that “disjuncture comes first” (van den Berg and Quarles van Ufford 2005, cited in Lewis and Mosse 2006: 3). For the ethnographer this means “setting aside self-representations of bureaucratic rationality in order to uncover more of the inner workings of development agencies” (Lewis and Mosse 2006: 3). 11 It is important to note that Mosse and others do not use “governmentality” in Ferguson’s sense, but much more closely to that of Agrawal (2005) and others, viz., “governmentality…works through a form of ‘positive power that wins legitimacy and empowers action’” (Watts 2003: 12, cited in Lewis and Mosse 2006).
55
“pries open the large black box that exists between policy prescriptions, on the one hand, and
poverty reducing effects on the other.” He pays particularly close attention to how policy
ideas are produced socially, noting that “authoritative interpretations have to be made and
sustained socially” (646), and how policy prescriptions and practices on the ground inform or
do not inform each other.
He argues that there is an intrinsic gap between policy and practice due to the different
institutional worlds that each lives in, and that “making better policy” or “improving
implementation of policy” to narrow this gap is to miss the point. He demonstrates that
policy primarily functions “to legitimize rather than orientate practice” (Mosse 2004: 648),
and that development interventions on the ground are “driven not by policy but by the
exigencies of organizations and the need to maintain relationships” (Mosse 2004: 651).
Examining closely the relationships between project activities and policy prescriptions,
Mosse (2004: 645-6) argues that “projects work to maintain themselves as coherent policy
ideas, as systems of representations as well as operational systems,” that “projects do not fail;
they are failed by wider networks of support and validation,” and thus “‘success’ and
‘failure’ are policy-oriented judgments that obscure project effects” (662). In sum, Mosse
(2004: 663) demonstrates that
“policy goals come into contradiction with other institutional or ‘system goals’
(Latour, 1996: 2) such that policy models are poor guides to understanding the
practices, events and effects of development actors, which are shaped by the
relationships and interests and cultures of specific organizational settings.”
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Ultimately, “ideas that make for ‘good policy’ – policy which legitimizes and mobilizes
political and practical support – are not those which provide good guide to action” (Mosse
2004: 663).
Another analytical tool delineated by Mosse and others that is critical to my
dissertation is the tension between order and disjuncture, and the constant work of translation
and composition needed to maintain order in the face of disjuncture or difference, thereby
bridging institutional relationships, logics and incentives. The tension between order and
disjuncture is worth elaboration since it is a key analytical tool used in this dissertation.
Specifically, Mosse notes that “the ethnographic question is not whether but how
development projects work; not whether a project succeeds, but how ‘success’ is produced”
(Mosse 2005: 9). To produce success development projects must maintain “control over the
interpretation of events,” which requires an “interpretive community” (Mosse 2005: 9).
According to Mosse (2005: 9), development projects need to “enroll a range of supporting
actors with reasons ‘to participate in the established order as if its representations were
reality’ (Sayer 1994: 374, cited in Li 1999: 298-9).” Mosse (2005: 9) explains the dynamics
of enrollment in and crafting of order as follows:
“common narratives or commanding interpretations are supported for different
reasons and serve a diversity of perhaps contradictory interests…This is possible
because of the productive ambiguity that characterizes development policy’s ‘master
metaphors.’”
Mosse (2005: 9) concretizes this process of crafting and maintaining “master metaphors” as
follows:
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“it also requires the constant work of translation (of policy goals into practical
interests; practical interests back into policy goals), which is the task of skilled
brokers (managers, consultants, fieldworkers, community leaders…) who read the
meaning of a project into the different institutional languages of its stakeholder
supporters, constantly creating interest and making real.”
The productive tension of crafting and maintaining these master metaphors or order lies in
the recruitment of multiple actors, which simultaneously stabilizes and destabilizes these
master metaphors: “the problem is that this diversity and multiplicity of interests (and needs
to be met) itself destabilizes and militates against coherence” (Mosse 2005: 9).
Given this tension between order and disjuncture, Mosse (2005: 9) articulates the
ethnographic task as follows:
“The ethnographic task is…to show how, despite…fragmentation and dissent, actors
in development are constantly engaged in creating order and unity through political
acts of composition. It involves examining the way in which heterogeneous
entities…are tied together by translation of one kind or another into the material and
conceptual order of a successful project.”
In his own work, Mosse (2005: 10) analyzes this “double effect of ordering and disjuncture”
by examining
“how subordinate actors in development – tribal villagers, fieldworkers, office staff,
even project managers and their bosses in relation to donors – create every day
spheres of action autonomous from the organizing policy models…but at the same
time work actively to sustain those models – the dominant interpretation – because it
is in their interest to do so.”
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In doing so, Mosse (2005: 10) clarifies
“how, paradoxically, the practices of project workers erode the models that they also
work to reinstate as representations; and moreover, that because it rests on disjuncture
and contradiction, the coherence and order of a successful project is always
vulnerable; interpretations can fail.”
In this dissertation, I examine in one analytical frame (1) project plans and intentions,
(2) the context within which activities take place and the relationships between the different
actors engaged in CIFOR’s activities on the ground, and (3) how CIFOR addresses or
represents the difference between plan and outcome to a broader public. In doing so, I show
that although “the coherence of design unravels in the practical unfolding of a project”
(Mosse 2004: 664),” CIFOR’s particular reporting and publishing of unintended outcomes of
their interventions incorporate and repackage this unraveling into an organized and
authoritative narrative of prescriptions for CIFOR’s epistemic or interpretive community.
CIFOR’s articulation of these prescriptions -- which promote an approach to international
conservation and development that is adaptive, flexible and accommodating to local variation
-- through the vehicle of self-critical reflections is essential to legitimizing and mobilizing
support for them and CIFOR since that rhetorical mode is more palatable to CIFOR’s
epistemic and interpretive community who are directly involved in policy and practice.
Second, I examine the tension between order and disjuncture in the broader landscape
of aid-related forestry institutions in Indonesia. I investigate, on the one hand, the order that
maintains international attention and aid in the Indonesian forestry sector in the face of the
lack of progress and, on the other, the disjuncture of knowledge, policy and practice both
within and between institutions, which in turn perpetuates the lack of progress on reforms.
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More specifically, I examine how the “order” or “master metaphor” (Mosse 2004, 2005) or
“standardized package” (Fujimura 1992) of forestry reform agreeable to both the
international community and Indonesian government at the highest levels of diplomatic
relations was crafted and maintained to justify or legitimize aid-interventions. I also
investigate how this master metaphor evolved through the active refashioning by both donors
and government to address the reality that the commitments agreed upon were not being met.
Moreover, I examine the structural and institutional dynamics that explain the lack of
progress on the agreed upon commitments and the ineffectiveness of aid-related forestry
interventions in Indonesia and consequently the disjuncture or disconnect between
knowledge, policy and practice, as well as how these disjunctures are maintained. In doing
so, I expand the use of Mosse’s framework beyond any one given development project and
into the realm of multiple projects, multiple interests and multiple actors all of whom have
publicly or formally bought into a particular master narrative of forest reform in Indonesia
that maintains international aid and attention.
My dissertation also draws upon the substantive and analytical contributions of recent
work by Fairhead and Leach (2003). Their work also integrates structural- discursive and
actor-oriented approaches to analyze the relationships between science, society, policy and
power from local to global levels in the context of forest conservation and development in
Guinea and Trinidad. Methodologically, they take a “multisited and ethnographic
approach….extending from international organizations and networks, through national
bureaucracies, scientists and activists and their local staff and activities, to the complexities
of everyday life” so that they can understand “the processes by which different strands of
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science and policy come to shape each other, and gain authority…in the broader social field
of which they are a part” (Fairhead and Leach 2003: 3).
Analytically, they combine Foucauldian approaches to power and knowledge with
“ethnographic approaches to scientific practice, actors and networks originally associated
with Latour and others” (Fairhead and Leach 2003: 13). They interpret Foucault’s notion of
discourse and “power/knowledge” to mean that “discourse does not merely act on individuals
but also produces its subjects, through a combination of external subjection and internal
subjectification, shaping desires” (Fairhead and Leach 2003: 14).
Fairhead and Leach (2003) take seriously the notion of science and policy as practice
and that this practice needs to be studied ethnographically. In taking a practice-based
approach combined with a Foucauldian discourse analytics, Fairhead and Leach (2003: 18)
“pay attention not only to co-production (of science and policy) but to co-endurance and co-
validation,” as well as “what comes to be construed as Science (and policy), by whom and
when, and how a composite of practices comes to acquire the authenticated signature of
‘Science.’”
III. Research Methodology
A. Overview of Methods
I conducted multi-sited fieldwork in Indonesia over a 24 month period (August 2002
through August 2004), tracing the creation, flows, types and transformations of knowledge
about forests and forest-dependent people and examining the effects of that knowledge at
global, national and local levels (Marcus 1995, Markowitz 2001). I divided the research
period between the national capital of Jakarta, the neighboring city of Bogor, the Malinau
district of East Kalimantan, and Samarinda, the capital of the province of East Kalimantan.
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Jakarta is where central government offices, such as the Ministry of Forestry, forest industry
associations, national level NGOs and international forestry-related institutions and donors
are located. One hour south of Jakarta by car, Bogor is where CIFOR headquarters is located;
CIFOR also maintains a small office in the Ministry of Forestry in Jakarta.
The Malinau district of the province of East Kalimantan is where CIFOR has conducted
multiple applied research projects since the mid-1990s, including a forest co-management
initiative. Since the passing of administrative and fiscal decentralization laws in 1999, district
level governments have come to wield an unprecedented level of authority over district
affairs. The provincial capital of East Kalimantan, the city of Samardina, is where the
provincial government, regional forest industry associations, regional Indonesian NGOs and
regional offices of international funded forestry projects are located.
I employed a repertoire of methods most closely associated with an ethnographic and
anthropological tradition (Emerson et al. 1995, Markowitz 2001): (1) participant observation,
(2) semi-structured and open-ended interviews, and (3) document collection and analysis.
Using this set of methods allowed me to triangulate interview, observational and
documentary data and analyze the continuities and disjunctures between data sources, e.g.,
compare and contrast discourses and practices of various social actors. I also employed a
broader set of methods associated with conceptual shifts in notions of the “field.” These
included journalistic-type interviewing of certain informants, reading of newspapers and
other documents, informal socializing and telephone and email interviews (Markowitz 2001).
Employing these methods greatly enhanced my understanding of the worldviews and
interactions of certain social actors in an indirect fashion, and improved interpretation of
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those occasions when direct observation and/or interaction with those actors was possible
(Markowitz 2001).
My informants included, but were not limited to, villagers in Malinau; CIFOR scientists
and management; government officials at central, provincial and district level offices;
national and international NGO representatives; international donors in the forestry sector
and project staff affiliated with these donor funded projects; and forestry industry
representatives. In the process of research, I attempted to ensure not only that a broad
spectrum of informants were consulted, but also that I developed rapport with them over time
to both cross-check information and delve deeply into key issues. The 53 interviews I
conducted with villagers and government officials in Malinau formed the foundation of data
for Chapter 4 regarding relationships between CIFOR and other actors in Malinau. Over 50
interviews with CIFOR scientists and staff were a key source of data for Chapter 8 regarding
institutional issues within CIFOR. Further, over 50 interviews with senior national level
government officials, international donors, national level NGO representatives and
internationally funded project staff were the source for Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, both of
which concern the institutional landscape of aid-related forestry institutions in Indonesia.
These interviews constitute only a small portion of the data collected, viz., other interviews,
field notes, and various documents ranging from government decrees to grey literature.
Equally as important, for a 24-month period I was embedded in and indeed part of the
communities I write about here, and the social and cultural intimacy derived from this intense
period of participant-observation was absolutely critical to ascertaining who to talk to, what
questions to ask them, and how to listen and interpret the words spoken.
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On a logistical level, my collaborating with CIFOR each summer since 1999 and
engaging other aid-related forestry institutions and projects over those years provided me the
necessary access and institutional intimacy to conduct this study successfully. At CIFOR I
had access to project documents, participated in CIFOR meetings and was a member of
various working groups within CIFOR. Further, CIFOR at an institutional level and in its
various research initiatives in Malinau specifically incorporates a reflexive learning
component, and hence my dissertation research in part dovetailed and harmonized with
institutional objectives. Indeed, I presented my preliminary findings in various forums at
CIFOR, including the 2003 CIFOR Science Seminar. Given that I was at various times and in
various capacities a member of CIFOR in Malinau, or at least perceived to be, I do not claim
this analysis to be objective in the sense of “standing above the fray or of suppressing
subjectivity” (Mosse 2004: 666). As I discuss below, similar to Mosse (2004: 666), I was
“part of the world described” in this dissertation, and my analysis only attempts to “add
interpretations to those of actors whose experience I share.”
The extended 24 month field work period built on preliminary research I conducted in
Indonesia during the summers of 1999, 2000 and 200112. Preliminary research focused on
the relationships among actors concerning control over and access to forest resources in
Malinau and the effects of CIFOR's co-management initiative on these relationships, with
close attention to they ways local actors represent themselves and others to justify and
contest resource claims. Conducting research during those periods allowed me to track the
changes of those relationships in the context of dramatic policy and governance changes in
12 The 1999 and 2001 research periods were solely focused on CIFOR and its co-management initiative in Malinau, East Kalimantan. During the 2000 period, I was enrolled full-time in an advanced Indonesian language program in Indonesia, and hence research was not directly focused on CIFOR, although I did carry out two weeks of fieldwork in Malinau and carried out policy research over the entirety of the summer.
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Indonesia. In combination with fieldwork, I have conducted research on the political
economic history of the region and the history of Dayak settlements and migrations in the
region. Through this previous research I have built strong professional relationships with
local level actors in Malinau, as well as with CIFOR and other forestry institutions in
Indonesia.
B. Rationale of Methods
I carried out my dissertation research with an ethnographic focus on how knowledge is
produced, used and transformed (Dove 1999b, Markowitz 2001). It also required attention to
the relationship between local level natural resource issues with regional, national and global
political economy (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987, Bryant 1992). As Markowitz (2001) and
others argue (Dove 1999a, 1999b), ethnographic methods, the backbone of which is
participant observation, are particularly well suited to addressing my dissertation research
concerns, e.g., how transnational institutions link with broader aspects of society such as the
state and households and the "real and potential coincidence of interests that motivate
individual involvement" (Markowitz 2001: 40).
Further, recent anthropological scholarship on the nature of the "field" and an
examination of traditional notions of scale in studies of transnational institutions provided
useful methodological insights in carrying out the study (Appadurai 1997, Marcus 1995,
Markowitz 2001, Riles 2001, Tsing 2000a). Specifically, instead of assuming a "nested levels
of analysis" 13(Markowitz 2001: 41), these scholars suggest "following the project" since
"[i]dentifying and tracking multidirectional flows of information, ideas and material requires
constant attentiveness to the appearance of new units of analysis and fresh linkages between
13 Markowitz (2001: 41) notes that "to address links between macro and micro phenomena, anthropologists have traditionally used spatially derived units of analysis in which households are nested within villages, villages within regions, regions within states, and states within the global system."
65
them" (Markowitz 2001: 42). In other words, beginning with a "project," in my case CIFOR's
co-management initiative, allowed the "tracing out of its articulative elements" (Tsing 1999b:
38) to figure out appropriate categories of scale and "units of culture and political economy
through which we make sense of events and social processes" (Tsing 2000a: 347). In light of
these insights, although traditional structural and scalar categories were analytical entry
points, I paid close attention to the scales and social categories that, for example, CIFOR's
research initiatives in part influenced and/or generated.
Although engaging in a participant observation or “participant comprehension” (Mosse
2005) of CIFOR and other aid-related forestry institutions provided me with the necessary
access to carry out an ethnographic study, it was also the most challenging aspect of the
research for several reasons, perhaps the most pragmatic reason being that elites often do not
appreciate being studied (Dove 1999b, Markowitz 2001, Pierce 1995). Indeed, "participant
observation is a research technique that does not travel well up the social structure"
(Gusterson cited in Markowitz 2001: 42). This in part explains the relative lack of
ethnographies that "study up,"14 even though the need for them was articulated over thirty
years ago (Nader 1972). Even explicit calls in anthropology for political engagement and the
study of "up, in and near" fall victim to "the predisposition of averting our [anthropologists']
gaze from home" (Dove 1999b: 239).
C. My Positionality
A critical methodological issue in conducting my research was my positionality as a
researcher, i.e., "situating oneself as a researcher within a nexus of fluid interpersonal and
14 Dove (1999b) notes the following exceptions with respect to institutions: Douglas (1986), Fairhead and Leach (1996), Ferguson (1990), Herzfeld (1992), Thompson, Warburton and Hatley (1986), and Traweek (1988).
66
institutional relationships, while simultaneously linking these evolving relationships to
variable flows of money and influence" (Markowitz 2001: 41). To navigate or negotiate my
positionality in CIFOR specifically and forestry institutions in Indonesia generally, I
attempted to take certain measures, the first of which, of course, was being aware of it, viz.,
that it is not a question of whether I influenced my dissertation research, but rather how I
influenced it (Pierce 1995). Secondly, I wore "multiple hats," working with CIFOR,
critiquing from both inside and outside the practitioner world, analyzing and writing for
different audiences at different times (Dove 1999b), and trying to contribute something that
these institutions would consider practical (Mosse 2005). More generally, I employed a
repertoire of methods that allowed me to obtain and triangulate data on certain issues that if
approached more directly could compromise my position and credibility with CIFOR and
others, but were integral to my dissertation project. Methods included journalistic-type
interviewing of certain informants, reading of newspapers and other documents, informal
socializing and telephone and email interviews and conversations (Markowitz 2001).
Employing these methods greatly enhanced my understanding of the worldviews and
interactions of certain social actors in an indirect fashion, and facilitated the interpretation of
data collected during those occasions when I did directly observe and/or interact with those
actors (Markowitz 2001).
That said, on a daily basis I was confronted with a question that Pierce (1995: 95) raises
regarding her fieldwork on issues of gender and power in a law firm: "how does ethnographic
authority play out in a field setting where the relations of power and authority between
researcher and subject are not so clear cut?" Unsurprisingly, the answer in my case was
equally “not so clear cut.” From the beginning of my field research in 1999 for my Master’s
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project through my extended period of field work in 2002-2004 (24 months) for my doctoral
work, it was never entirely clear or definitive to what extent I would be able to “study up” to
examine institutional realities, or to what extent members of the practitioner community,
whether in CIFOR or other institutions, would be comfortable with my attempt at an analysis
of institutional realities.
My confidence in being able to achieve this as a researcher, the comfort level of the
members of the practitioner community with my carrying out this type of research, and the
way I framed my research to this community have greatly varied since I started this project in
1999. The variability is in part a function of trust and familiarity: generally, the more familiar
I was with members of the practitioner community and the more trust I built with them, the
more comfortable and understanding they were of my research. That said, for certain
members of this community, the more familiar they became with me and my research
agenda, the more threatened they felt and the less trusting they became. These perceptions,
however, were not fixed or definitive, and individuals’ understanding or judgment of my
research agenda, and consequently their interactions with me, could and sometimes did
change. Thus, as my fieldwork period progressed, I almost expected an element of
unpredictability or transience in the quality of my interactions with members of the
practitioner community.
This unpredictability in the quality of interactions was closely related to the multiple
positions and identities I assumed during my fieldwork. In conveying to individuals in this
community my research agenda, I would tailor or frame my research interests in ways that I
felt would resonate with their interests and would militate against a defensive stance from
them, while also maintaining the integrity of my research agenda. For example, I was
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concerned that I would be perceived by members of the international practitioner community
in Indonesia as an academic who wanted to expose all that was deficient about this
community, and thus in my initial interactions I highlighted my focus on village level and
government dynamics and de-emphasized the institutional ethnography components of my
research agenda, until we reached a certain level of rapport.
I took this approach for several reasons. One of the most important was that in my own
thinking I was unsure to what extent I would be able to -- or wanted to -- examine the
institutional realities of aid-related forestry institutions. I revisited my research agenda often
based on my fieldwork progress, and thus my research evolved significantly during the
fieldwork period. I realized early on that my research agenda would evolve, and thus, I did
not want to inadvertently alienate potential informants by articulating a research agenda that
was in many ways inchoate. On a related point, through my work experience, previous
periods of fieldwork in Indonesia and academic training, I knew that the practitioner
community in Indonesia was coming from an institutional worldview significantly different
from mine, viz., as a graduate student conducting dissertation field research. Given these
differing institutional realities, I represented myself and my research project to members of
the practitioner community in ways that I thought would resonate with their interests and
perspectives. These were the methodological challenges in carrying out an institutional
ethnography when the ethnographer is in a lesser position of power and authority vis-à-vis
his/her subjects.
Navigating my multiple positions and identities as an insider and outsider in the
practitioner community in Indonesia was the most difficult at CIFOR. Because CIFOR is an
applied research institute with scientists from different disciplinary backgrounds and with
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different experiences, it was difficult for me at times to gauge to what extent they would be
comfortable with my studying the institution. In a sense, the institutional worldview of
CIFOR scientists was too close to my own to be able to accurately and consistently draw
boundaries and represent myself and my research interests in a way that consistently
maintained a productive relationship and the integrity of my research agenda. Further, certain
CIFOR scientists – some only at certain times -- viewed a critical, reflexive gaze on the
institution itself as integral to the evolution and improvement of the institution itself, while
others did not share this sentiment, or shared it in differing degrees at different times. Thus,
not only was my own research agenda and representation of it shifting, but so was CIFOR’s.
Complicating this further, the comfort level of CIFOR’s scientists with articulating and
acting on this reflexive stance also varied with individual scientist, their context, and the
extent to which they were familiar and comfortable with their perception of my research
agenda.
D. Methodological, Theoretical and Moral Implications of “studying up”
My study and other recent "institutional studies" on discourse, knowledge and power
raise important methodological and moral issues regarding "studying up.” The key issues
involved in studying people and institutions with authority and power center around the
power and position/authority of the researcher vis-à-vis the people and/or institution. I
believe these issues to be sufficiently important for methodological, theoretical and moral
concerns to warrant elaboration. Before discussing the issues related to “studying up,” I
contextualize the discussion with a brief summary of the reflexive turn in anthropology and
related disciplines and politics of research and representation.
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1. Reflexivity, the Politics of Representation, and the Call to "Study Up"
Since the mid-1980s, anthropology and related ethnographic sciences have engaged in
debates about power and discourse in light of post-modern critiques and their demands for
reflexivity15. One of the manifestations in this theoretical shift has been a debate regarding
the politics of ethnographic representation. Post-modern or interpretive scholars argue that
anthropologists by the very act of writing "inescapably exercise textual and social authority
over the people they study, particularly people who occupy subordinate social positions"
(Pierce 1995: 94). Indeed, these scholars have claimed that "representation is domination
and must therefore be avoided" (Dove 1999b: 226). Their critics, however, counter that post-
modern critics "employ the same conceptual tools that they attempt to deny others and that
their work further inhibits the possibilities within ethnography of practice (Dove 1999b:
226). Out of these debates has come an array of concerns, inter alia, about "Who writes? For
whom is the writing being done? In what circumstances?" (Said 1983: 7 cited in Dove
1999b). This debate has highlighted the awareness of the political position of both the
ethnographer and the ethnography. As Alcoff (1991: 12) states,
“A plethora of sources have argued in this century that the neutrality of the theorizer can
no longer, can never again, be sustained, even for a moment…who is speaking to whom
turns out to be as important for meaning and truth as what is said.”
Related to this re-thinking of ethnography sparked by post-modern critiques has been a
reconceptualization of what constitutes the ethnographic research "site" or "field." This
reconceptualization has enlarged the "domain of ethnographic study to include transnational
15 A full discussion post-modernism and its effects on anthropology are beyond the scope of this dissertation. Following Dove (2001: 91), where I do use the term, I mean it to "refer to that paradigm self-characterized by 'incredulity toward metanarratives' (Lyotard 1984: xxiv)--referring here to conceptual paradigms so hegemonic as to leave little space for critique."
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and global studies" (Dove 1999b: 227; see also Brosius 1999; Gupta and Ferguson 1992;
Marcus 1995)16. In this reformulation, traditional ethnography focusing on single locations
where subjects are "automatically and naturally anchored in space" (Gupta and Ferguson
1992: 17) is considered insufficient to account for the multiple extra-local processes that
influence the constituting of local identities and places. The conventional notion of the field
site has in part been displaced by what Marcus (1995) calls "multi-sited ethnography," which
"moves out from the single sites and local situations…to examine the circulation of cultural
meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space" (Marcus 1995: 96).
In addition to the heightened awareness of the politics of representation and the move to
multi-sited ethnography, some scholars have called for ethnographers to "study up" (Nader
1972) and argue that it should be the core of the discipline of anthropology (Dove 1999b).
The call to study people and institutions of power preceded post-modern critiques of
anthropology and the related move to multi-sited ethnography. It was in part originally a
moral call for anthropologists to contribute to citizens' understandings of "those who shape
attitudes and actually control institutional structures" during a period in history when "so
few, by their actions and inactions, had the power of life and death over so many members of
the [human] species" (Nader 1972: 284).
Although studying powerful institutions and people has ethical and theoretical affinities
with issues raised about the politics of representation and research, there has yet to be a
substantial number of ethnographies of powerful/central institutions (Dove 1999b). Perhaps
most responsible for this relative dearth is ethnography's, particularly anthropology's,
"centrifugal" impulse, in which even explicit calls in anthropology for political engagement
and the study of "up, in and near" fall victim to "the predisposition of averting our 16 See Dove (1999b) for a summary of these reconceptualizations.
72
[anthropologists'] gaze from home" (Dove 1999b: 239). At a conceptual level this
centrifugal impulse is in large measure due to the "distinction between the 'self 'of the analyst
and the 'other' of the subject," a distinction which "keeps study, critique, and ultimately
blame safely away from those who design, fund, implement, and also study these projects"
(Dove 1994a: 335, emphasis added)
2. Issues related to "Studying Up"
It is within this context that I discuss specific issues related to studying institutions and
people with authority and power. One critical issue mentioned earlier, and worth elaborating
further, is the positionality of the researcher. In the analysis of her fieldwork on issues of
gender and power in the male dominated law profession, Pierce (1995) notes that although as
an ethnographer she exercised textual authority over her subjects, Pierce's authority was often
challenged and negotiated because of her relatively submissive position vis-à-vis the male
elites who were the focus of her study. In her discussion of the relationship between science
studies and scientific communities, Franklin (1995: 179) concurs with Pierce's insight that
ethnographers do not maintain total authority:
"Many scientists remain unconvinced that scholars with no specialized expertise in their
particular branch of… research can contribute usefully to understanding scientific
problems, and they suspect that such studies are most usefully aimed at identifying
sources of public misapprehension of scientific enterprises."
Yet this subordinate position can be a useful tool if the ethnographer is explicitly aware
of and deploys this positionality. Pierce (1995) demonstrates not only that the classic
conception of ethnographic authority obscures the multiple ways the researcher's authority
and power shifts and changes, but also that these shifts and changes are a key methodological
73
tool in "studying up." To navigate or negotiate positionality requires first that a researcher to
be aware of it. As Dove (1999b: 239) notes, "reflexivity need not extinguish the political; it
just means being conscious of it." In so doing, the ethnographer becomes aware of his/her
multiple positions and identities vis-à-vis the institution under study and the multiple actors
within the institution. He/she can then consciously move between these positions and
identities, thereby disrupting norms that can uncover how power operates within institutions
(Pierce 1995). For example, Pierce (195: 106) notes, "it is through the reactions I elicit in my
movement between positions…that I unsettle the boundaries between gender and power" and
"uncover the operations of power and privilege that are never formally stated." Another
aspect of shifting identities or wearing "multiple hats" is working with an institution,
critiquing from both inside and outside the practitioner world, and analyzing and writing for
different audiences at different times (Dove 1999b). For example, in relating his strategic
writing for and representation of Dayak, Dove (1999b) demonstrates that it is possible to
work on behalf of institution, in his case the IDRD, while also analyzing it.
3. Audiences
“Studying up” and shifting positionalities also raise the question of the potential multiple
audiences to be addressed by anthropology and other ethnographic sciences and the
implications of reaching those audiences, particularly considering that those individuals in
the institutions we study are more likely to read, or at least come across, what we write. That
said, even though many anthropologists have demonstrated that the discipline is well-suited
to conduct institutional ethnographies and there is now a growing number of them, the
audience for them remains largely other academics, intentional or not. This is in part due to
the fact that ethnographers have paid relatively little attention to issues of audience and
74
engagement, which is somewhat ironic considering the heated debates among ethnographers
over the politics of representation (Dove 1999b).
In essence, these debates about the politics of representation have analyzed primarily
only one side of what constitutes representation, viz., writing. Much critical attention has
been paid to the act of writing and the assertion that representation is domination, and much
less so about who is reading and what the effects of the circulation of representations are
(Dove 1999b). As Akhil Gupta (cited in Dove 1999b: 228) has observed, there has been
"very little sociology of the circulation of our [ethnographers'] representations." Reflection
on the politics of readership and circulation has received very little attention even when
confining this issue to the walls of the academy. For example, in her discussion of the
movement in the anthropology of science to examine the linkages between the cultures of
science and the cultural milieu in which they are embedded, Franklin (1995: 179) notes that
"[o]ne of the most important concerns facing anthropologists of science is how to enable
their work to speak to the broadest audience of scientists, social scientists, and other
scholars. It remains unclear what language is needed for this to occur."
Franklin's comment about audience is also notable for not mentioning non-academic
ones, which points to another important issue regarding intended audiences. On those
occasions when ethnographers have discussed the politics of reading, the contours of this
debate reveal that the implied "normal" audience for these writings is other academics (Dove
1999b). For example, Dove (1999b) notes that in discussions regarding subjects as engaged
readers of writings about them, some ethnographers make explicit that the intended audience
should be academics due to a concern that subjects will react negatively to what the
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ethnographer has written17. Others are less concerned with the reactions of subjects, and
more concerned with appropriation of their analyses by oppressive forces (Dove 1999b). For
example, in expressing his concern regarding ethnographic studies of local social/sub-altern
movements, Brosius (1999: 368) argues that these analyses can jeopardize movements by
describing "terrains of resistance, providing maps for those who wish to subvert subaltern
studies." Although Brosius' concern is well-founded in arguing that studies of social
movements are in part "missing the mark," not writing about social movements, which he
suggests, does little to resolve his dilemma. As Alcoff (1991: 20) notes, “Even a complete
retreat from speech is of course not neutral since it allows the continued dominance of
current discourses and acts by omission to reinforce their dominance." Also problematic in
his and other concerns of readership is the implied "'normal' ethnographic audience that
makes no political use of information, whether for good or ill," usually defined as other
academics, which in turn is "the tacit admission of non-engagement with the non-academic
world" (Dove 1999b: 241).
This tacit admission of non-engagement is all the more ironic given the heightened self-
consciousness over "ethnographic authority." This non-engagement is especially troubling
with respect to ethnographies of powerful institutions and people since a key impetus in the
original call to "study up" was moral call to engage with non-academic audiences (Nader
1972; see also Davis 1992; Dove 1999b; Scheper-Hughes 1995). Admittedly, the move to
studying powerful institutions from an ethnographic perspective is relatively recent, yet
without conscious and repeated attempts to engage, these studies could also fall victim to an
impulse analogous to anthropology's "centrifugal" one, namely, the predisposition to write in
17 For an argument against this and a description of benefits of subjects as engaged readers, see Dove's (nd) essay "Kinds of Fields" in which he discusses Harold Conklin's practice of "reading back" to his subjects his and others' analyses of the livelihood practices of those subjects.
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"distant grammars" (i.e., jargon laden language), for "distant places" (i.e., the academy), and
"distant times" (i.e., the flawed modernist assumption of a distinction between subject and
object18) (Dove 1999b)19.
As both a preventive and corrective measure, I concur with the position argued by many
scholars for an explicit ethical position and practice (Dove 1999b, Brosius 1999, Alcoff
1991, Nader 1972), captured in Dove's (1999b:233) comment that
"[e]thnographic representation is in principle devoted to the representation of local
perceptions, perspectives, and ‘voice,' and, however far short of this ideal it may fall in
practice, it may still be preferable to patterns of representation that , e.g., are expressly
devoted to the direct ridicule of that local voice."
Implied in his statement is an ethnographic practice that analyzes and critiques powerful
institutions, offers "counter-representations"20 of marginalized/sub-altern groups that contest
disempowering ones and/or writes selectively for multiple audiences (Dove 1999b). As Dove
(1999b: 233) argues, “The concern of ethnography must often be to assert rather than
question its narrative authority, to employ and contest-- but not avoid-- ethnographic
representation."
Perhaps one of the most illuminating reflections on positionality and “studying up”
and their implications is Mosse’s (2005) recent institutional ethnography of a DFID
development project in India in which he was a long-term consultant over a 12 year period.
In his book, Moose (2005) devotes several pages to a discussion of his own multiple 18 See Agrawal (1995) and Dove (2000) for a discussion of how "indigenous knowledge" was reified and located in opposition to western knowledge by this modernist process of purification. 19 Dove (1999b) use of "distant" refers to distance from the academy (center) to the field (periphery). Here I invert the perspective, using "distant" to refer to distance from the perspective of the field. 20 Examples of this include selectively problematizing and not problematizing essentialized representations of states, communities, etc.
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positions -- as an insider and outsider in development work and as a practitioner and
academic of development – in his multi-sited ethnography. With respect to being an insider,
he notes that “[t]here is no position from which I can analyse the circuitry of project and
policy processes…which does not place me within it as a member of the communities I
describe” (Moose 2005: 11). He also argues that insider status allows him to better
understand the social processes of organizations, particularly since in these institutions
“information is a private good rather than a public asset” (Mosse 2005: 11).
Mosse (2005:12) elaborates that although development institutions are “in the habit of
dealing with criticism and the questioning of their claims and actions,” they are “less tolerant
of research that falls outside design frameworks, that does not appear to be of practical
relevance, is wasteful of time or adds complexity and makes the task of management harder.”
And thus, it is “virtually impossible to sustain long-term participant observation in the
absence of making a practical contribution….being a member of the community and having a
certain status” (Mosse 2005: 12). That said, Mosse does recognize the limitations of being an
insider, noting that while he acquired a “performative knowledge” of the development
project and practitioner, “this also constrained the interpretive possibilities” (Mosse 2005:
12). This is precisely where multipositionality is important and useful: “I could use my part-
insider/part-outsider position to engage in ‘participant deconstruction’ (Shore and Wright
1997: 16-17), trying to wrest my thinking free from prevailing models and means-ends
rationality in order to offer critical insight” (Mosse 2005: 13). At the same time, stepping
outside comes with risks, placing the researcher “at the margins of the project community” or
worse yet “excluded as an irrelevant, not to say disruptive, academic outsider” (Mosse 2005:
13).
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The implications of these multiple positions for both the ethnographer and his
potential audiences are intriguing. Mosse (2005: 14) notes that his narrative “becomes the
meta-narrative” and that it is an “interested interpretation” whose “objectivity…cannot be
that derived from standing above the fray or of suppressing subjectivity, but rather that which
comes form maximizing the capacity of actors to object to what is said about them (to raise
concerns, insert questions and interpretations) (Latour2000).” To this end, Mosse (2005: 14),
drawing on Gupta and Ferguson (1997), observes the following about knowledge production
and our perceptions of it: “the interpretive account that is ‘anthropological,’ always ‘coexists
with other forms of knowledge’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 39), ‘the political task [is] not
“sharing” knowledge with those who lack it, but forging links between different knowledges
that are possible from different locations...’” It is in this spirit of forging links between
different knowledges, that I write and present my ethnography of forestry institutions in
Indonesia.
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CHAPTER 3
THE RESEARCH CONTEXT: THE FOREST AND INSTITUTIONAL LANDSCAPES IN THE
CONTEXT OF INDONESIA’S POLITICAL-ECONOMIC TRANSITIONS
I. Introduction
In this chapter, I provide a detailed overview of the context within which the
dissertation research is situated. I describe the current political-economic situation in
Indonesia, viz., the transition towards administrative and fiscal decentralization, and the
institutional legacy of the New Order regime. I then move to a discussion of the current
perceived forest crisis and attempts at curbing this crisis; I discuss the political economic
drivers of the perceived crisis and the engagement and activities of the international aid
community involved in forestry in Indonesia. To localize these national and international
level dynamics, I then discuss the Malinau District of East Kalimantan and how
decentralization has played out there. In the last section of this chapter, I discuss CIFOR’s
history and activities in the district.
II. Indonesia: From Centralization towards Decentralization
In Indonesia, forests are often arenas of conflict between actors with differing political
power, especially in regions like Kalimantan that are rich in commercially valuable natural
resources and also home to politically weak forest dependent communities (Barber et al.
1994; Dove 1993; Lynch and Talbott 1995; Poffenberger [ed.] 1990; Tsing 1993, 2005).
Until the fall of Suharto in May 1998, control over natural resources lay with the authority of
a highly centralized state, characterized by authoritarian rule, aggressive exploitation of the
nation's natural resources, and the marginalization of forest dependent communities justified
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by national laws and policies (Lev 1973, 1985; Poffenberger [ed.] 1990; and Barber et al.
1994). The economic crisis and era of the political reform (reformasi) created dramatic
changes in the laws and policies of the Indonesian government, perhaps best evinced by the
passing of two key decentralization laws in 1999, viz., the Regional Autonomy Law (UU No.
22/1999) and the Intergovernmental Fiscal Balance Law (UU No. 25/1999) . These two laws
de jure have significant implications for the use and management of natural resources, and,
as I discuss later in this chapter, their de facto effects have also been substantial, albeit
unpredictable.
Even though Indonesia’s decentralization laws were passed in May 19991, official
implementation of the laws and related regulations has been slow and inconsistent, and
uncertainty is great among all relevant actors as to how regional autonomy will affect
authority over and access to the nation’s natural resources (MFEC 2000). Yet, de facto or ad
hoc decentralization has been taking place since the passing of the laws – actors with vested
interests (e.g., local communities, government, companies, and NGOs) have been
strategically maneuvering and positioning themselves, taking actions regarding natural
resource use based on their own understandings of what decentralization means. This ad hoc
implementation of decentralization is in large part due to institutional arrangements that are
the legacy of the Suharto regime's successful efforts not only to debilitate local institutions
that serve local people’s interests, but also to create a state bureaucracy accountable only
upwards (Anderson 1990; Barber 1989; Dove and Kammen 2001; Winters 2002).
1 The decentralization laws were not officially implemented until January 2001, but ad hoc decentralization processes were initiated soon after the laws were passed in May 1999.
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A. A Difficult Transition to Decentralization: The Legacy of the New Order’s Institutions
Indonesia's transition is indicative of the international community's push globally for
decentralized governance, although for the most part decentralized governance has not been
implemented successfully (Agrawal 1998b, Agrawal and Ribot 1999). Agrawal and Ribot's
(1999) analysis of decentralization of natural resources to local people in West Africa and
South Asia points to the necessity of downward accountability of local decision makers to
their constituents for successful decentralization, and the frequent absence of this mechanism
in many countries ostensibly decentralizing. Although electoral processes are important to
operationalize downward accountability, they also list mechanisms such as referenda,
lobbying by associations, legal literacy by media and non-governmental organizations, and
central state oversight of local governments (Agrawal and Ribot 1999).
Further, Agrawal (1998b: 22-23) suggests that success of any decentralization program
requires the following three interconnected steps:
"The first is the management of political relationships at the level of the central state so
that some powerful actors at that level become committed to pursuing decentralization.
The second is the creation of institutional mechanisms at the level of the locality that
prevent elite actors at that level from cornering the increased flow of benefits directed
toward lower levels of governance and administration. The final important step is the
management of flows of information and creation of capacities so that the new
information is used appropriately to produce goods and services for people."
The institutional mechanisms necessary to carry out the three steps articulated by Agrawal
were to a great extent absent in Indonesia when the decentralization laws were passed and
implemented. And while a gradual transition has occurred in Indonesia, with the first direct
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elections of the president in 2004 and direct elections of other government officials such as
regents (Bupati) following, the institutional arrangements that the post-Suharto governments
inherited were antithetical to the type of decentralization described by Agrawal (1998b).
These institutional arrangements are the legacy of the Suharto regime. Proper
implementation of decentralization in Indonesia will require a difficult undoing of the
institutions and incentives fostered and sedimented in the nation-state's colonial and post-
colonial history. The decentralization laws themselves, their ad hoc implementation, and the
subsequent inter-ethic and intra-village conflicts are by and large a result of the institutional
arrangements created by the New Order regime during 32 years of centralized, authoritarian
rule.
The New Order regime created these institutional arrangements through myriad policies
and practices -- based upon precedents set by the Dutch colonial administration -- that
justified aggressive, inequitable exploitation of the nation's natural resources and the
marginalization of forest dependent communities (Lev 1973, 1985). These institutions are a
product of a particular form of centralized, authoritarian bureaucratic rule cultivated by
Suharto and rooted in the political-economic ideology of "development" and Javanese
cultural values (Anderson 1990; Barber 1989; Dove 1988, 1999b; Dove and Kammen 2001).
Further, the lack of institutional mechanisms at the village level that serve villagers’
interest and that have fomented inter- and intra-village conflicts is due in great measure to the
territorialization initiatives pursued by the New Order and predicated upon colonial
antecedents. In the following, I discuss both the New Order's project of "development" and
the history of territorialization as explanatory forces acting against decentralization in
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Kalimantan specifically and Indonesia generally with respect to control over and access to
natural resources.
1. The New Order's "Development" Ideology and the Marginalization of Forest Dependent
People
The overarching political-economic ideology of Suharto's New Order regime was the
project of "development," which was characterized by the two following parts, as noted by
Dove (1999b: 231-232):
"On the one hand this project has privileged central planning and control, western
technocratic ideals, and Javanese cultural values. On the other hand, the project of
development has marginalized -- as impediments to development -- all other values,
including the social and economic values of minority groups like the Dayak."
This particular project of "development" was embodied by Suharto himself, in being
"officially known as Bapak Pembangunan (Father of Development) and his cabinet as the
Kabinet Pembangunan (Development Cabinet)" (Dove 1988:33, see also Liddle 1985). This
personal embodiment of "development" is also indicative of the true purpose of the New
Order's development policies, which was to create economic wealth and political power to an
elite few, i.e., Suharto and those within his ambit, yet articulated as nation building
(Anderson 1990, Dove 1988, Liddle 1985).
The New Order cast development in terms of culture, i.e., "progressive" culture that
supported it and "backwards" culture that retarded it (Dove 1999b). In doing so, any
opposition to the initiatives of the state was considered a sign of underdevelopment and
indeed anti-nationalist. Thus, through this idiom of development, the New Order framed
local communities contesting state control, such as Dayaks, as "backwards," "primitive," and
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"wasteful," thereby justifying state interventions and expropriations informed by state-
sanctioned notions of development (Dove 1983). Moreover, in articulating the conflict in
these terms, the state cast political economic conflicts related to resource access in terms of
cultural traits related to distinct groups and ordered along a trajectory of development (Dove
1999a, Li 1999b). Further, in mapping "development" onto culture, the New Order also cast
any opposition to its particular brand of development as "conflicts between the welfare of the
country as a whole and the self-indulgence of one particular group" (Dove 1988: 32).
One important consequence of the New Order's particular brand of development and
articulation of it in the idiom of culture was the institutionalization of "structural ignorance"
in the state bureaucracy, defined as "the failure to perceive that which is not in one's own best
interests to perceive" (Dove 1988: 28). The New Order created a state apparatus in which
ignorance or denial of realities proved to be an asset for those within it (Dove and Kammen
2001). Thus, for example, the persistence of three central "myths" prevalent in Indonesian
development circles regarding swidden cultivation and cultivators, viz., primitive
communalism, misuse of the environment, and an isolated subsistence economy, can be
understood in terms of the purposes that this ignorance serves, viz., extension into and
exploitation of swidden agriculturalists' territories by "those groups with the most political
and economic capital, and the greatest ability to direct and benefit from large-scale, capital-
intensive, resource exploitation" (Dove 1983: 96, see also Li 1999b). Indeed, the New Order
was emblematic of what Dove (1983) has referred to as a "political-economy of ignorance."
And it is this "political economy of ignorance" that is the foundation of Indonesia’s transition
to a decentralized system of governance.
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2. Territorialization initiatives of the New Order
The conflicts between and within ethnic groups that have become prevalent in the
post-Suharto period indicate an impotence of local institutions to serve local interests, as well
as an unwillingness or indifference of supra-local institutions to mediate these conflicts. For
example, conflicts between Dayak groups have been exacerbated by the growing number of
outsiders who provide increased yet, differential access to profit. Intra-community conflict
has resulted due to a perceived lack of accountability of leaders to their constituencies. Weak
local institutions are manifestations of a particular history of New Order and Dutch attempts
to establish territorial authority over land, people and resources articulated as "development"
(Li 1999b, Vandergeest and Peluso 1995). This process can be glossed as territorialization,
defined as the process through which "all modern states divide their territories into complex
overlapping political and economic zones, rearrange people and resources within these units,
and create regulations delineating how and by whom these areas can be used" (Vandergeest
and Peluso 1995: 387).
State territorialization initiatives have had a profound negative impact on local
institutions in Kalimantan regarding use of and control over natural resources, especially
during the Suharto regime, but also including the Dutch colonial period (Harwell 2000). One
of the essential territorialization mechanisms of the New Order in Kalimantan was law. As
Barber (1989: 94) notes, law was "an idiom and vehicle of state power in the New Order."
Perhaps the best illustrations of law as a territorialization mechanism are the Basic Forestry
Law of 1967, which turned approximately 66% of the nation-state's landmass into state
property, and the Village Governance Law of 1979, which transformed local leaders from
representatives of villagers to representatives of the state (Kato 1989).
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Although the Dutch colonial administration lacked the human and financial resources,
as well as in part the economic interest to control Kalimantan specifically and the Outer
Islands generally, they established precedents for the New Order (Lev 1985). The Agrarian
Law of 1870, which was directed at the time toward state control of Java and Madura's teak
forests, was the foundation upon which the Suharto regime laid claim to 66% of the nation-
state's land mass as state property through the Basic Forestry Law of 1967 (Barber 1989).
The Agrarian Law of 1870 declared that all "unclaimed" or "wasteland" the property of the
state and defined "wasteland" as land not continuously under cultivation (Lindayati 2002).
The impact would be profound in Kalimantan since swidden agriculture, the primary
form of agriculture for Dayaks, is characterized by long fallows due to poor soils. With the
Agrarian Law of 1870 as its legal precedent, the 1967 Basic Forestry Law delegitimized
Dayak systems of land tenure by representing Dayak land tenure as either communally
owned or not owned at all and hence justifying its classification as state land (Dove 1983).
The Basic Forestry Law also stipulates that that state-sanctioned forest production initiatives
take precedence over customary law systems (Moniaga 1993). Mayer (1996: 178) explains
that "the 1967 Basic Forestry Law differentiates between 'proprietary forests' (forest growing
on land that is covered by private property rights) and 'state forest' (a forest region or forest
growing on land that is not covered by state-sanctioned proprietary rights)." Representing
privately owned fallow fields as part of a communal land tenure system allows the
government to classify these fields as "state forest" (Dove 1983). Through the 1970
implementation regulation, land regulated by local customary rights can rarely be considered
"proprietary forest" under this definition (Mayer 1996). The effects of this legislation have
been devastating: "traditional adat [customary] tenurial rights of millions of forest-dwelling
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and forest-dependent people have been handed over to a relatively small number of
commercial firms and state enterprises" (Barber 1994: 17).
In 1999, the Government of Indonesia passed a new forestry law (UU 41 1999) to
replace the 1967 Basic Forestry Law and that explicitly recognizes “customary (traditionally
managed) forests.” While the de jure recognition of “customary forests” in the 1999 forestry
law seemed to create possibilities for local people to gain legal control and access over
forests, in reality this has not materialized, even though there has been other legislation
passed that supports local control and tenure2. Moreover, the new forestry law has not
officially changed or affected the existing government claims of “state forest” (kawasan
hutan), and thus two-thirds of Indonesia's land mass, which includes 90% of Kalimantan,
remains controlled by the Ministry of Forestry, regardless of whether there is actually any
forest there.
Through Law No. 5/1979 on Village Governance, the New Order government
enforced a uniform administration system on all villages throughout Indonesia, transforming
the role of the village head from a representative of villagers to a representative of the state at
the village level, thereby dismantling local forms of order and regulation (Kato 1989; Li
1999). This law also created the implementation of village government structures such as the
LMD (Lembaga Musyawarah Desa or village legislative body) that delegitimized local
forms of regulation and governance, establishing state authority over village affairs. Through
this law, the Suharto regime turned the village into the fundamental unit of state
administration and control of its populace and nested it within a national bureaucratic
hierarchy accountable only upwards and towards the center, instead of downwards to a
2 For example, the regulation from the Minister of Agrarian Affairs/Head of the Bureau of Lands No. 5/1999 Guidelines to Resolve Adat (Customary) Communal Rights Conflicts, notes that the National Land Agency will accept the registration of Adat lands and treat them as a communal and non-transferable right.
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constituency (Li 1999b). Related to this, New Order programs for "isolated" or "backwards"
villagers such as resettlement have only further strengthened the state's control over people
and territories, removing people from regions rich in forest resources and placing them
within the state's purview (Dove 1983, Li 1999b).
In the post-Suharto reformasi period and particularly with the transition to
decentralization, the uniform administration system of villages has to a great extent
unraveled and been discarded. And indeed in some regions of Indonesia there is a
rejuvenated public celebration and embrace of traditional institutions, e.g., the re-introduction
of the nagari system in Padang West Sumatra. That said, in many places, e.g., Malinau, the
New Order significantly frayed the social fabric and weakened locally meaningful
institutions, and thus with reformasi and decentralization, the vacuum left by the discarding
of the uniform administration system has been filled by a different, but equally pernicious
and unaccountable, system of patronage or “KKN,” the popular Indonesian acronym for
corruption, collusion and nepotism. Indeed, the abuse of the new found authority of Regents
(Bupatis) in the context of a weak or non-existent system of downward accountability in
many districts was so prevalent that it led to the coining of the phrase “raja kecil” or “little
king” to describe how Regents acted like the Suharto regime at a district level.
B. Decentralization in process: Uncertainty and Ambiguity
Decentralization3 and community control and management of natural resources in
Indonesia remain problematic, and the forces working against them are many, with deep
historical roots. Decentralization processes in Indonesia continue to be plagued by
3 "Decentralization" is used here in the normative sense, as Agrawal (1998b: 4) defines it: "an umbrella term that refers to multiple processes of relaxation of control by a central authority…[that] aims to achieve one of the central aspirations of modernity: democratization, or the desire that humans should have a say in their own governance."
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uncertainty and ambiguity for all actors involved. To date, only a fraction of the
implementing regulations have been passed and/or implemented with respect to the roles and
responsibilities of district, provincial and national governments. Decentralization in
Indonesia has been characterized by an extreme lack of coordination among the various
levels and agencies of government.
Decentralization in Indonesia is an attempt to resolve the long-standing problem of
resource wealth flowing to the central government without equitable distribution at the
regional level (see Dove and Kammen 2001 for analysis of inequitable flows). It is a
reactionary measure that attempts to ensure that those regions that have natural resources and
bear the costs of their management in turn gain the benefits from those resources (Down to
Earth 2000, MFEC 2000). Prior to decentralization, the most resource-rich regions received
little benefit from the immense profits that those resources created for the Suharto regime and
those within his ambit (Dove and Kammen 2001). Moreover, the Suharto regime accrued its
riches at the expense of the millions of forest dependent communities in Indonesia, turning
them into squatters and criminals (Barber 1989; Dove 1983; Lynch and Talbott 1995; Peluso
1992; Poffenberger [ed.] 1990).
The reactionary ethos of decentralization is captured in the ambiguity of the laws
themselves. The Regional Autonomy Law (UU No. 22/1999) transfers responsibility and
decision-making authority for the management of natural resources from the central
government to provincial (propinsi) and regency/municipal (kabupaten/kotamadya)
governments. Under this law, the hierarchical government structure is replaced by a parallel
organizational structure between regency, provincial and the central governments (Article
4/Paragraph 2). The law provides wide ranging authority to kabupaten (regency)
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governments to control and govern all sectors, except international politics; national security;
judiciary, monetary and fiscal concerns; environmental concerns; and religion (Article 11/
paragraph 2). However, the system of shared responsibility between the three levels of
government with regard to natural resource management and conservation is entirely unclear
(Down to Earth 2000). That said, certain local actors have taken advantage of the ambiguous
policy context, and ad hoc decentralization is occurring, based on local understandings of the
new legal environment, even though the existing legal framework may not support their
actions (Rhee 2000). As I discuss in detail later in this chapter, in the area of East Kalimantan
where I conducted my dissertation research, ad hoc decentralization created opportunities for
local government officials, village elite and companies to enter the area, while exacerbating
inter- and intra-village conflict (Rhee 2000).
The Intergovernmental Fiscal Balance Law (UU No. 25/1999) delineates the natural
resource revenue sharing allocations and the levels of government that will manage them.
Under the natural resource allocation system stipulated in the new law (Chapter 3, Article 6),
provincial governments will receive 80% of the tax revenues from fisheries, forestry and
mining, 15% of the oil revenue, and 30% of gas revenue (Sondakh 2000, NRM 2000). Of
the 80% from fisheries, forestry and mining, 32% goes to the producing
regency/municipality, 32% to other regencies in the province, and 16% to the provincial
government (Sondakh 2000). The central government, however, still retains a major share of
oil (85%) and gas (70%) revenue, which constitutes the majority of the nation's natural
resource earnings (Sondakh 2000). Also, due to the unequal distribution of natural resources
in Indonesia, the impacts of this natural resource-based revenue allocation system will differ
throughout the country. For example, only four provinces gain significantly from natural
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resource-based revenue sharing, whereas ten natural resource poor provinces obtain little
under these resource revenue sharing formulas (NRM 2000).
While the regional autonomy legislation takes important steps toward initiating
decentralization in Indonesia, the laws are vague, filled with loopholes, and contradict
previously passed legislation and regulations (Down to Earth 2000). The level of uncertainty
and disparity in perceptions regarding decentralization and its implications were captured in a
study carried out from December 1999-February 2000 by the Institutional Task Force for
Forestry Sector Decentralization under the auspices of the Ministry of Forestry and Estate
Crops (MFEC 2000)4. This study revealed that there is no consensus on what
decentralization means, how it should be implemented, and how roles and responsibilities are
to be divided. The results of this study also show that central government and regional
government officials have significantly different opinions regarding virtually every aspect of
authority over and responsibility for forests (MFEC 2000).
Ambiguity and uncertainty continue to be central themes in the process of
decentralization. For example, in a workshop I attended in East Kalimantan in September
2002 that aimed to improve coordination between district and provincial governments for
better forest management, province level and district level officials agreed not to discuss the
division of authority between districts and the province with respect to forest resources,
which effectively precluded substantive discussion of coordination. The reason for this is
that the implementation of decentralization laws and regulations regarding logging permits
and revenue sharing between district and provincial governments remains unclear and ad
hoc. This ambiguity in decentralization processes provides both district and provincial
4 In this study, the task force conducted interviews and group discussions with central and regional representatives of government agencies, legislative bodies, NGOs, universities, and communities, and held a three-day workshop with regional government representatives from six provinces (MFEC 2000)
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governments “room to maneuver” to attempt to profit from issuing permits, taxes from
logging, and informal payments or bribes.
III. Broader Political Economic Context of Forestry and International Forestry Aid5
A. Political Economic Drivers of Deforestation
In this section of the chapter, I provide a brief summary of the perceived crisis in the
Indonesian forestry sector, paying particular attention to the political economic dimensions,
to contextualize the role of international-aid related interventions in the forestry sector.
Indonesia is renowned for both its forest resources and the rate of its loss. Indonesia’s state
controlled “forest estate” (kawasan hutan) is vast, covering about two-thirds of the nation’s
land – 120 million hectares encompassing not only actually forested areas, but also millions
of hectares of agricultural land, mining operations, upstream villages and downstream towns
(Bennett and Walton 2003). The forests are also diverse with links to national economy and
local incomes, export earnings and domestic trade, small scale livelihoods and vast industrial
enterprises, foreign and domestic investment, private and state management, and security and
conflict issues (Bennett and Walton 2003).
From a biophysical perspective, Indonesia’s forests are among the most extensive,
complex, diverse and valuable in the world. They account for approximately 10% of the
world’s remaining forests and are important to the survival of Indonesia’s biodiversity.
Indonesia is home to 25% of the world’s fish species, 17% of birds, 16% of reptiles and
amphibians, 12% of mammals and 10% of plants (Lele et al. 2000). Further, Indonesia’s
forests are a globally important climatic resource, both as an atmospheric filter and as a sink
for carbon that would otherwise contribute to global warming.
5 This section draws heavily on and is in part a summary of Rhee et al.’s (2004) assessment of biodiversity and tropical forests in Indonesia.
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Moreover, approximately 40 million Indonesians depend directly on forest resources
(timber, rattan, firewood, etc.) and millions of others reap indirect benefits (World Bank
2001, Bennett and Walton 2003). Further, Indonesia’s forest based industries contribute
significantly to the national economy, although long term sustainability hinges on a
significant increase in supply of timber and fiber. Indonesia’s wood-based industry is ranked
third in overall non-gas and oil export value, after electronics and textiles. In 2001, wood-
based exports were valued at more than USD 4.23 billion, and accounted for almost 10% of
Indonesia’s non-gas and oil revenues (Bennett and Walton 2003).
The significance of Indonesia’s forest resources is matched only by its destruction. In
2003, the rate of deforestation in Indonesia was the highest in the world, conservatively
estimated at 2.4 million ha/year6. This figure represents a dramatic increase from previous
years, which was already shocking for the international community. In 2000, forest maps
showed that for the 12-year period ending in 1997, Indonesia had lost on average 1.7 million
ha per year, which was nearly twice the deforestation rate that most people had estimated in
the early 1990s (World Bank 2001). Deforestation has placed the greatest pressure on the
country’s lowland forests, which correspond to the most biodiverse habitats. The World Bank
estimated that non-swampy lowland forests outside protected areas would be highly degraded
in Sumatra by 2005 and in Kalimantan by 2010 (Holmes 2000).7 Further, although timber,
6 It is important to note that there is not consensus on this figure since data remain unreliable. Estimates range from the World Bank’s 2.4 million hectares/year to the Ministry of Forestry’s 3.6 million hectares/year. 7 This often cited prediction requires the following contextualization: In that report, Holmes (2000) notes that the reminants of non-swampy lowland forests in Sumatra in 2005 and in Kalimantan in 2010 “will not be viable as timber resources or as habitats for biodiversity” (Holmes 2000: ii). Further, this prediction is based upon the comparison of forest cover maps produced by the Ministry of Forestry and Estate Crops c. 1997 with the c. 1985 forest cover maps produced by the Regional Physical Planning Programme for Transmigration (REPPProT). The c. 1997 maps are satellite images and were produced as part of an attempt to obtain a rapid overview of the change in forest cover. The scale of these maps is 1:500,000. There was no ground truthing. The methods and scale of the c. 1997 mapping exercise were intended to provide information on forest cover
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rattan, fisheries, swiftlet nests and other biological resources are major contributors to the
national economy, they are exploited at unsustainable rates.
The significant increase in forest degradation is attributed to a range of often inter-
related problems intimately related to immense social, economic and political changes, which
began in 1997 and continue to the present, thereby exacerbating illegal logging and a gap
between wood-based industry capacity and a legal, sustainable supply of timber. The
economic crisis, dramatic political transition, ad hoc devolution of authority to provincial and
district (kabupaten) levels, lack of law enforcement and poor governance have led to
increased pressures on forests throughout the country. Accelerated illegal logging and land
encroachment are often sponsored by powerful political figures and institutions, and continue
to be encouraged in the name of economic recovery and development.
Although the rate of forest loss was already high and accelerating in the mid-1990s,
in 1997-1998 this escalated as a consequence of the devastating fires in Kalimantan and
Sumatra, which burned nearly 5 million ha and imposed approximately USD 8 billion in
economic losses on Indonesia’s citizens and businesses (World Bank 2001). These fires were
unprecedented in number and geographic scope, and international attention was drawn to the
massive scale of environmental damage occurring in Indonesia (Barber and Schweithelm
2000). Indisputable evidence demonstrated that these fires were by and large caused by oil
palm plantation companies that converted forest using fire (Barber and Schweithelm 2000,
World Bank 2001).
Further, during the economic crisis of 1997-1998, Indonesia saw the loss of 80% of
the value of the rupiah and the flight of working capital. This led to the collapse of Java’s
only, i.e., “natural forest that could be recognized as such on satellite images” (Holmes 2000: i). Holmes (2000: 1) notes that “the data must be regarded as provisional.”
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industrial sector, and as a result, Indonesians, including policymakers, looked to their
traditional economic base in natural resources to power the country’s economic recovery
(World Bank 2001, Sunderlin et al. 2000).
Moreover, with the fall of the 32-year centralistic Suharto government in May 1998,
the call for political reform (reformasi) by various segments of society and the enactment of
a set of decentralization laws in 1999, the central government’s control over regional affairs,
including natural resource extraction, was vastly reduced. Regional governments, unable to
develop during the New Order8, are to a large extent ill equipped to cope with these new
responsibilities. Also, civil society – greatly suppressed during the New Order -- has yet to
fully mobilize to monitor the government in attempts to keep it accountable and transparent.
Thus, one result of this transition towards decentralization has been the manifestation and
expansion in the regions of the system of corruption, collusion and nepotism that
characterized the New Order regime.
Overcapacity in the wood-processing industry, which consumes at least six times the
officially annual allowable harvest (6.3 million m3 for 2003), is a key factor driving over-
exploitation of the forests and illegal logging. While wood-based exports were led by
plywood through the 1980s and 1990s, pulp and paper exports have gradually replaced
plywood as the primary export product. Indonesia’s pulp capacity rose from 606,000 metric
tons in 1988 to 4.9 million metric tons in 2000. Paper production capacity rose from 1.2
million to 4.3 million metric tons during the same period. Operating at current capacity,
Indonesia’s pulp and paper mills alone would consume some 24 million cubic meters of
timber, more than four times the current Annual Allowable Cut (AAC) (Barr 2001).
8 “New Order” or Orde Baru is the term coined by Suharto to refer to his regime and to mark a break with the previous Sukarno regime.
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Annual round wood consumption by the wood-processing industry is generally
regarded to be around 60 million m3 (Bennett and Walton 2003). With the AAC from
Indonesia’s forest in 2002 at 12 million m3, this means that legal, authorized consumption
was only one fifth of actual demand. As the AAC has been reduced in recent years to 6.3
million m3 in 2003 and further to 5.7 million m3 in 2004, there has not been a noticeable
decline in wood processing activity and industrial timber demand, meaning a greater share is
coming from illegal and unsustainable sources. Official statistics indicate that wood supply
comes from a variety of sources, including timber concessions (HPHs) and forest clear-
cutting for plantations and industrial timber plantations (HTIs).
Overcapacity is a consequence of more than a decade of government policy
incentives to develop local value-added industries, as well as below-market stumpage fees
and log prices and a lack of care by banks in their evaluation of new wood-processing
investments. Of the USD 51.5 billion in private debt owed to the Indonesia Bank
Restructuring Agency (IBRA), USD 4.1 billion is in loans to the forest industry, of which
USD 2.7 billion are classified as non-performing (World Bank 2001, Simangunsong and
Setiono 2003).
The wealth of forest resources, both products and environmental services, also results
in extensive conflict over control of these resources. These are reflected in horizontal
conflicts between local communities and timber concession holders, as well as vertical
conflicts between different levels of government (Bennett and Walton 2003). Moreover,
years of built-up resentment from forest dependent communities and the political changes in
the reformasi era have fomented another set of challenges for Indonesia’s forests.
Specifically, the New Order denied communities access to their customary natural resource
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base, thereby exacerbating poverty for many rural households. Now, communities that
believe they have claims against GOI or logging or plantation companies for compensation
or return of land use rights perceive a sense of power and are willing to act. In many places,
they have created new local pressures on forests that have exacerbated the strains imposed by
large-scale operators (World Bank 2001). Hence the factors driving deforestation are not
only multiple, but also are the legacy of the New Order.
B. Summary of International Donors, Activities and Trends9
In this section, I provide a brief overview of international donor involvement in the
forestry sector in Indonesia, primarily focusing on the bilateral and multilateral donor
community. This overview does not attempt to be comprehensive, but rather illustrative or
indicative of international aid assistance in the Indonesian forestry sector. The following
discussion does not include the numerous international NGOs, such as The Nature
Conservancy and Conservation International, and other international organizations, such as
CIFOR and ICRAF, that are active in the Indonesian forestry sector as implementing and/or
re-granting agencies. The overview focuses on the bilateral and multilateral donor
community because this group of institutions has formally committed to coordinating and
collaborating with each other and GOI through the Donor Forum on Forestry (DFF) and is
also a focal point or platform for other institutions to engage in the Indonesian forestry sector
at an international level.
Before discussing the international donor community and its activities, it is important
to note that GOI has also formally committed to resolving the crisis in the forestry sector,
which includes bilateral and multilateral mechanisms. For example, GOI has ratified or been
9 This section draws heavily on and is in part a summary of Rhee et al.’s (2004) assessment of biodiversity and tropical forests in Indonesia.
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party to most international conservation treaties, albeit implementation of these agreements
has been lacking (see Table 1).
Table 1: Indonesia’s Membership in International Conservation Treaties
TREATY DATE (m/d/yr) Signatory to CITES10 12/28/1978 Signatory to Ramsar Wetlands Convention11
8/8/1992
Signatory to Convention on Biological Diversity12
8/23/1994
Signatory to other international treaties designed to protect or manage biological resources
Party to: Biodiversity, Climate Change, Endangered Species, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Nuclear Test Ban, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Tropical Timber 83, Tropical Timber 94, Wetlands signed, but not ratified: Desertification, Marine Life Conservation
Source: http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~sustain/h90/Indonesia.htm
In addition to these treaties, more recently GOI has engaged in a number of
multilateral and bilateral agreements in attempts to address the national and international
dimensions of illegal logging, which is perhaps the most significant symptom of Indonesia’s
multi-faceted forest crisis and a stated key priority for the Ministry of Forestry (see Table 2).
These agreements also represent part of the international community’s formal or public
commitment to addressing the forestry crisis and awareness of its transnational dimensions.
10 CITES: Formulated in 1973, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora is an international agreement between governments that aims to ensure that international trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival. Today, CITES accords varying degrees of protection to more than 30,000 species of animals and plants, whether they are traded as live specimens, fur coats, or dried herbs. For more information see www.cites.org. 11 Ramsar Convention on Wetlands: Formulated in Ramsar, Iran in 1971, this convention is an intergovernmental treaty which provides the framework for national action and international cooperation for the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources. For more information see www.ramsar.org 12 The Convention on Biological Diversity was agreed to in 1992 in Rio by the vast majority of the world’s governments and sets out commitments for maintaining the world’s ecological underpinnings as economic development continues. The CBD establishes three main goals: the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits from the use of genetic resources. For more information see www.biodiv.org.
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Table 2: Indonesia’s MOUs/Agreements to Curb Illegal Logging
Agreement Description East Asian Forest Law Enforcement and Governance (FLEG). 9/1/01
Ministerial Declaration agreed at the end of East Asian FLEG conference in Bali. Includes indicative list of actions for the implementation of the declaration www.worldbank.or.id/fleg-eap
Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT). 5/1/03
EC measures set out in this plan include support for improved governance in wood-producing countries, voluntary partnerships with producing countries to ensure only legally harvested timber enters the EU market, and efforts to develop international collaboration to combat the trade in illegally harvested timber. http://europa.eu.int/comm/external_relations/flegt/workshop/forest.htm
Asia Forest Partnership (AFP). 2002
Asia Pacific forest partnership (AFP) promotes sustainable forest management in Asia through addressing the following 5 urgent issues: Good governance and forest law enforcement; Developing capacity for effective forest management; Control of illegal logging; and Control of forest fires. http://www.asiaforests.org
Indonesia-UK. 4/1/02
MOU on co-operation to improve forest law enforcement and governance and to combat illegal logging and the international trade in illegally logged timber and wood products. It aims to establish a system of legality identification and verification in Indonesia (with capacity-building assistance from the UK), and to move towards excluding products not so identified from the UK/EU market. http://illegal-logging.info/dfid/DFID%20FLEG%20web%20output1.htm
Indonesia-EU. End 2003 (expected)
MOU would see the EU ban the entry of illegal logs from Indonesia into their countries. To aid this, Indonesia will supply both governments with a list of companies that are licensed to export logs, and will audit local timber companies to ensure that their logs come from sustainable sources. http://www.ran.org/news/newsitem.php?id=837&area=home
Indonesia-Norway. 8/30/02
LoI to cooperate to improve forest law making and law enforcement to combat illegal logging. http://illegal-logging.info/dfid/DFID%20FLEG%20web%20output1.htm
Indonesia-Malaysia. 6/25/02
Malaysian government bans the importation of logs from Indonesia. On 6/1/03, Malaysia banned the importation of squared logs from Indonesia. http://www.ran.org/news/newsitem.php?id=693
Indonesia-China. 12/18/02
MOU concerning co-operation in combating illegal trade of forest products contains a list of objectives and areas of cooperation, including identification of illegal timber, data collection and exchange of information. http://dte.gn.apc.org/53MoU.htm
Indonesia-Japan. 6/24/03
MOU to cooperate over their opposition to illegal logging and trade in illegal forest products by building on existing bilateral schemes and multilateral frameworks. Contains a list of objectives for the partnership and areas that the partnership will focus on. http://www.illegal-logging.info/textonly/documents.php?sortByMode=title
Indonesia-Korea. 7/12/01
MOU to cooperate in some projects including trees planting, investment in ecotourism, human resources training, illegal logging and forest fires fighting. http://forests.org/archive/indomalay/siforagr.htm
Source: Rhee et al. (2004)
These bilateral and multilateral agreements are one aspect of a broader commitment
from the international donor community to assist GOI in resolving problems plaguing the
forestry sector. International aid in the form of bilateral or multilateral projects focusing on
technical and policy assistance has been a key manifestation of this international
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commitment. The following discussion provides a brief summary of the history of
international aid to the forestry sector and current bilateral and multilateral projects and
funding.
International assistance to the forestry sector in Indonesia was initiated in the 1970s,
and at that time focused on the development of forest transmigration sites and watershed
management. In the 1980s, donor assistance focused on reforestation for watershed
management, a national forest inventory, protected area management, and training and
research. From the 1980s to the 1990s, donor assistance also moved towards supporting the
management of natural forests. Moreover, starting in the mid-1980s up to the present, forest
co-management with rural communities became a central focus for donor assistance.
Examples include the Ford Foundation’s support of social forestry in Java and the Outer
Islands and GTZ’s decade-long community-based logging project in West Kalimantan. Other
examples of donor focus on communities include DFID’s Multistakeholder Forestry
Programme initiated in 1998 and a series of USAID-supported Natural Resource
Management (NRM) projects that began in 1991 with assistance for protected area and
concession management and later moved to a more decentralized approaches and
community-based initiatives (Bennett and Walton 2003).
At the time research was conducted (2002-4), many donors were active in the forestry
sector, primarily through grants and not loans. The three largest are the European Union
(EU), the United Kingdom’s DFID, and Japan through JICA. Also active with substantial
funding levels are USAID, Germany’s GTZ, Denmark’s DANIDA, Canada’s CIDA, the
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ITTO and the Netherlands through Tropenbos and universities. Although not a bilateral or
multilateral agency, the Ford Foundation remains a key donor in the forestry sector13.
The EU funds multiple projects in the forest sector (USD 112.6 million in grants from
1995 though 2005) that cover biodiversity conservation, illegal logging and concession
management. The EU’s flagship forest and biodiversity project is its long-term (1995-2004)
investment in the management of Gunung Leuser National Park in Aceh and North Sumatra.
The EU has also funded projects to support forest concession management in South
Kalimantan and East Kalimantan, as well as forest fire management in South Sumatra that
complements institutional strengthening at the MOF level. It also supports an illegal logging
response center based at MOF in Jakarta and the Forest Liaison Bureau (FLB) based in MOF
to link its own projects and provide technical assistance and coordination to MOF.
The UK (USD 42.7 million) through DFID funds the Multistakeholder Forestry
Program (MFP), the largest single donor project in the forestry sector (USD 41.3 million for
2001-5). The MFP is active across Indonesia, supports participatory processes for
decentralized forest resource management and provides substantial grants for NGOs. An
additional USD 1.4 million supports a Cambridge University primate research project in
Central Kalimantan and supports a seconded staff member at the World Bank to work on
forestry dialogue and governance issues.
Japan through JICA (USD 21.5 million) funds multiple projects in the forestry sector,
including those concerned with carbon-fixing (2001-6), forest tree improvement (1992-2002)
and the propagation of native species for rehabilitation and reforestation in Java, Kalimantan
and Sumatra (2003-6). Additionally, assistance on biodiversity conservation is provided to
13 The following discussion of donor projects adapted from Rhee et al. (2004) is based on Bennett and Walton (2003) and the EU Forest Liaison Bureau database of forestry projects.
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Way Kambas National Park in Lampung, Sumatra (2000-4) and Halimun National Park in
West Java (1998-2003). Other projects include a mangrove information center in N.
Sulawesi (2001-4), a forest fire prevention project in Jambi, Sumatra (2002-6), and a forest
sector development project based in MOF (2001-3). Japan also through Komatsu Ltd. (USD
600,000) conducts research and development on Dipterocarp species.
Several other bilateral donors have played a significant role in providing assistance to
the Indonesian forestry sector. Germany through GTZ (USD 18.8 million) funded an
integrated forest fire management project (1994-2004), as well as a project based at MOF
that focuses on strengthening management capacities of Ministry officials and working with
MOF on the National Forestry Program (1997-2005). Denmark through DANIDA (USD 10.3
million) funds a forest seed project that focuses on training, technical assistance, institutional
strengthening and provision of equipment to the Ministry and to six regional tree seed
centers throughout the country. USAID’s assistance program of approximately USD 10
million funds the NRM program (USD 8 million for 2002-4) and the GreenCOM
Environmental Education and Communication Project (2002-5). The NRM project focuses
on participative and decentralized natural resource management and good governance, with
particular geographic focus on East Kalimantan and North Sulawesi.
Multilateral donors have also supported activities that affect the forestry sector,
through both policy reform efforts and land management efforts. The World Bank has been
active in biodiversity conservation and protected area management but absent from the
forestry sector until the economic crisis in 1997. After the economic crisis, the World Bank
helped to include forest policy reform conditions in both the IMF loan package and the
Bank’s own structural adjustment loans in 1998 and 1999. Further since then, the World
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Bank has been involved in forest policy dialogue with GOI and served as the coordinator of
the DFF.
ADB support in forestry has emphasized watershed management, including
reforestation initiatives that incorporate community-based approaches to agroforestry in
upper catchment areas. For example, ADB funds a watershed management project in central
Java that includes reforestation and community forestry components. Although they address
forestry issues, many ADB funded projects are not directly linked to MOF, as other donor
funded projects are. For example, ADB poverty alleviation initiatives have bearing on forest
lands and rehabilitation. The Poor Farmers Income Improvement through Innovation Project
(USD 56 million) started in Central Sulawesi, NTT, and Lombok where it builds on a GTZ
fruit tree lease initiative. ADB also has several large flood control projects, such as the South
Java Flood Control Project (USD 88 million), which includes nursery development and tree
seedlings for farmers. The ADB also has a number of large projects in development that
have direct bearing on forestry, land rehabilitation and watershed management.
The International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) (USD 6.2 million) supports
15 forestry projects ranging from about US$ 0.05 to 1 million. The largest of these is the
Sustainable Forest Management and Human Resources Development Project (US$ 1.1
million, 2001-2003), which include guidelines for illegal logging control, breeding,
plantation management, community-based forest management, wood-based industry
development and strategy and forest certification.
One other international donor is important to mention. The Ford Foundation began
working in Indonesia in 1953 and has provided over USD 125 million in grants in selected
fields. Although it is a non-governmental organization, it is also an important donor agency
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because of its substantial grants program. Ford has focused on environment, forestry and
natural resource issues in Indonesia since the 1980s. Ford grants (about USD 3 million per
year) to government and NGOs have been instrumental in evaluating, testing, and promoting
community-based forestry and natural resource management approaches, including social
forestry, in Indonesia. In recent years, Ford has expanded support to cover good governance
of natural resources in general.
The table below summarizes the preceding discussion and other bilateral and
multilateral aid commitments to the Indonesian forestry sector.
Table 3: Summary of Funding for Donor Projects in the Forestry Sector14
Country/Donor
Life of Project Commitment15
(USD)
% total
Ave. Annual Spending (USD)
% total
European Union/EC 112,600,000 37.5% 17,287,937 27.1% United Kingdom/DfID 42,700,000 14.2% 10,605,000 16.6% ADB (loans and grants) 40,000,000 13.3% 8,000,000 12.6% Japan/JICA 22,246,496 7.4% 5,174,400 8.1% Germany/GTZ 20,000,000 6.7% 2,786,667 4.4% Ford 18,000,000 6.0% 3,000,000 4.7% Denmark/DANIDA 10,349,153 3.4% 2,733,192 4.3% U.S.A./USAID 10,000,000 3.3% 4,666,667 7.3% Canada/CIDA 9,220,000 3.1% 3,289,333 5.2% I.T.T.O. 6,294,794 2.1% 3,527,963 5.5% The Netherlands/ Tropenbos 6,080,655 2.0% 1,520,164 2.4% Korea/KOICA 1,485,000 0.5% 495,000 0.8% WB/Alliance 1,160,662 0.4% 656,705 1.0% Grand Total 300,136,761 100.0% 63,743,027 100.0%
Source: Rhee et al. (2004)
14 Much of the data to construct this table are from the Forest Liaison Bureau (FLB), which intermittently collects data on funding of donor projects in the forestry sector. The FLB data do not include all projects and funding agencies that impact forestry, and indeed their data is limited to bilateral and multilateral donors that fund projects with direct linkages to the Ministry. ADB and Ford Foundation funding were added to the data collected by FLB for a sense of completeness. That said, funds from organizations such as CIFOR and conservation NGOs such as TNC are not included in this table. Moreover, funding from the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), which provides millions in funding for conservation projects, is not included. The table is illustrative and not comprehensive. 15 “Life of project commitment” is an approximation of the most recent 5-7 year period. Durations of projects vary, and projects begin and end at different times.
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The approximately USD 300 million refers to the sum of all “life of project” funding
commitments. While it is a useful benchmark, it does not provide a full picture of current or
annual funding available because projects vary in duration and begin and end at different
times. With that caveat, the table provides an analysis of average annual spending based on
project years of funding. Funding levels are ranked by size, and percentages are calculated
for ease of comparison.
Perhaps the most important insight from this table is that although total donor project
funding is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, annual funding for the most recent 5-7 year
period is closer to USD 60 million. To place this figure in perspective, it is useful to note that
Indonesia’s GDP attributable to forestry and processed wood products in 2000 was nearly
USD 4 billion and export earnings were about USD 3.5 billion, excluding pulp and paper,
which were worth another USD 2.2 billion. Further, in 2000, GOI earned USD 275 million
from forest sector revenues and reforestation funds, not including corporate taxes.
IV. Malinau and Decentralization
The Malinau District of East Kalimantan and CIFOR’s applied research initiatives
there are indicative of the aforementioned broader political economic dynamics and related
issues in the forestry sector, as well international concern over Indonesia’s forests. As
discussed in detail below, ad hoc decentralization processes, valuable forests (from both
commercial and conservation perspectives), opportunistic logging, and social conflict are all
at play and interrelated in Malinau. Moreover, CIFOR has brought international attention to
Malinau since 1996, when CIFOR started its applied research initiatives in the area. Thus,
CIFOR in Malinau provides an extremely robust case study to ground and localize the
broader political-economic dynamics.
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The CIFOR and Malinau case is also informative because of CIFOR’s focus on
research and knowledge production versus a more straightforward development project
intervention, which often puts less explicit emphasis on evidence and scientific rigor.
Moreover, as I demonstrate in this dissertation, CIFOR’s applied research in Malinau is
linked to the broader landscape of forestry related institutions in multiple ways. Given
CIFOR’s position as an international applied research institute, its mission is to provide
knowledge to other forest-related institutions, and thus examining knowledge flows are
important. Indeed, for CIFOR not only are knowledge production and dissemination
institutional priorities, but so is the applicability of context-specific research to other regions.
Further, CIFOR’s research priorities of improved local livelihoods, local people’s control and
access to forest resources and improved forest management all articulate with – at least at the
level of public discourse -- the priorities and concerns of other forestry related institutions in
Indonesia, including the Ministry of Forestry. Lastly, CIFOR has worked in Malinau
consistently for over ten years -- both during and after the Suharto regime, which gives it a
deeper history and perhaps a deeper understanding of relevant dynamics in Indonesia vis-à-
vis other international forest related institutions.
A. Brief Description of people and place
Located in the northern interior of the province of East Kalimantan, the district of
Malinau was established in October 1999 through the division of the then Bulungan district.
The Malinau district covers approximately 42,000 km2 – an area the size of the Netherlands
and the largest of East Kalimantan’s districts. The district is distinguished by its large
expanse of Dipterocarp forest, noted as one of the largest remaining contiguous forests in
Southeast Asia, which is primarily due to rugged terrain that has ensured that many areas
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remain inaccessible to commercial logging, even though most of the catchment was officially
allocated to timber concessions (Campbell et al. 2003, Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming a],
Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming b]). Ninety-five percent of the district is classified as state
forest land (Kawasan Hutan) by the Indonesian government (Barr et al. 2001), and indeed
Malinau’s forests are relatively intact compared with other forest lands in East Kalimantan,
which have been heavily logged since the early 1970s. Approximately three-fourths of
Indonesia's second largest national park, Kayan Mentarang (1 million ha), is located within
the regency's boundaries (Barr et al. 2001). However, most accessible lowland forest, e.g.,
along the lower reaches of the Malinau River, is fragmented and degraded due to logging and
extensive swidden cultivation (Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming b]).
Like much of Borneo, this district is traversed by a dendritic system of rivers; the
primary waterway being the Malinau River. The Malinau joins the Mentarang River near the
river town of Malinau to form the larger Sesayap River by which one can travel eastward to
the larger trade town of Tarakan, which commercially connects northeastern East Kalimantan
with the rest of the province. Although air service has improved over the last few years and
the district government is expanding the airport’s capacity, the river route from Tarakan to
Malinau remains the primary avenue of transport for people and goods from the coast to the
interior.
The district is sparsely populated with a total of approximately 40,00016 inhabitants
(Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming a], District Government of Malinau 2003). Malinau’s
inhabitants self-identify into more than 20 ethnic groups, most of which fall under the
16 Estimated from 2003 election census.
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category of Dayak17, and include the largest population of Punan in Borneo18 (Wollenberg et
al. [forthcoming b]). The vast majority of Malinau’s inhabitants are rural upland Dayaks
living in villages, more than half of which are poor by national standards in terms of housing,
clothing and number of daily meals (Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming a]). They practice
swidden agriculture and hunting and gathering from forests, directly depending on forests for
income and subsistence needs (Levang 2002, cited in Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming b])19.
Approximately 20% of the population lives in the district capital, the town of
Malinau, which is located in the basin of the Malinau River catchment (District Government
of Malinau 2003). This more urban population is highly mixed, with a strong representation
of local and non-local Muslim traders and migrants, Tidung and Bugis (South Sulawesi),
respectively, as well as Dayak and Punan. Additionally, a small number of individuals from
Java, Flores and other islands and regions of Kalimantan have settled in town, with a few
settling in upland villages.
Most of CIFOR’s research initiatives in Malinau district, particularly activities related
to the Adaptive Collaborative Management project (ACM) and the ones that I most closely
attended to in this analysis, are focused on the Malinau watershed (See Figure 3), which is
17 “Dayak” is an umbrella and exogenous term referring to the upland, indigenous groups of Borneo, who are now primarily Christian. Punan sometimes fall under this term. See for example King (1993). 18 See Sellato (2001) for a historical overview of the upper Malinau River during the last 150 years. 19 Although beyond the scope of this dissertation, it is important to note that these Dayak groups have been involved in international trade networks for centuries. Prior the arrival of the Dutch in the late 19th century and as in many parts of Kalimantan, the Malinau watershed was characterized by trade relationships between upland Dayak groups and coastal sultanates and petty kingdoms, who in turm traded non-timber forest products (NTFPs) with seafaring merchants, viz., the Taosug and Bugis (Peluso 1983, Warren 1981). Trade in NTFPs with China is recorded in Chinese archives dating to c. 1000 AD (Sellato 2001). In the late 19th century the Dutch colonial administration began a systematic program to control economic and political activities in inland East Kalimantan, spurred on in part by increased demand for NTFPs in Europe and West Asia (birds nests and gaharu), as well as the threat of British expansion into Dutch controlled Borneo (Peluso 1983, Linblad 1988, Black 1985). Gaharu is the resinous heartwood that results from a fungal infection (Cytosphaera mangifera) in some species of Aquilaria. The resulting aromatic heartwood is exported and used in perfumes and incense.
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the most densely populated and most developed area of the district (Wollenberg et al.
[forthcoming b]). Approximately 6,67320 people live in 27 villages distributed in 21
settlements in the 500,000 ha watershed (Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming b])21. Village
populations range from 15 to 997 individuals each (Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming b]).
20 Based on voting census data in April 2003. 21 Villages (desa) are defined administratively, and several villages maybe located physically together in one area due to government resettlement programs. Each of these villages have desa status administratively, i.e., each has a government document noting its village status, and are not administratively hamlets (dusun).
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Figure 4. Map of Ethnic Groups in the Malinau Watershed22
22 This map was produced in 1999 by Asung Uluk, who was a member of the CIFOR ACM team in Malinau.
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At least eleven Dayak ethnic groups live in the watershed, but the situation is
complicated by the fact that within a particular Dayak ethnic category, e.g., Kenyah, villagers
further differentiate themselves by identifying a specific river of origin or other historically
significant indicator, e.g., Kenyah Lepo’ Ke’ or Kenyah Oma’ Lung. Each of these sub-
groups speaks a distinct dialect or language, which may or may not be intelligible to
individuals from another sub-group. For example, Kenyah Oma’ Lung can understand
Kenyah Lepo’ Ke’, but generally Kenyah Lepo’ Ke’ do not understand Kenyah Oma’ Lung.
The Punan are often noted by villagers of various ethnic groups as being the most
linguistically accomplished, often able to speak multiple languages, which is unsurprising
given their historically marginalized position in trade relations and thus the need for them to
learn how to communicate with more dominant groups. In addition to Dayak groups,
individuals from Sulawesi, Flores, Java and Sumatra or elsewhere in Kalimantan have settled
in the area, often having significant influence locally due to their education and broader
experiences (Wollenberg and Uluk 2004).
The history of settlement, migration, and government interventions has strongly
influenced the current ethnic diversity in the Malinau watershed and inter-ethnic relations23.
Since migrating to the Malinau in the mid-nineteenth century from the Bahau, the Merap
have claimed most of the watershed as theirs, which is recognized by other ethnic groups
who, when migrating to the Malinau watershed, requested permission from the Merap Chief
Customary Leader (Ketua Adat Besar)24. The Merap claim the Malinau watershed25,
23 See Sellato (2001) for a detailed discussion of these issues. 24 See Sellato (2001) and Kaskija (1999, 2000) for historical and anthropological studies of the Merap. 25 “Territorial claims” should be interpreted loosely here since it is debated whether the Merap or other Dayak groups, including Punan, had fixed or firm ideas about territory or boundaries beyond the level of individual ownership.
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particularly the middle and upper portions, as their customary land (tanah adat), and are
recognized by other Dayak groups as “indigenous” (asli), which in the current era of
decentralization confers substantial political leverage (see following section). The Kenyah26
groups, however, have the largest population in the watershed and the most political control
of any single Dayak ethnic group. The Kenyah groups migrated en masse to the Malinau
from the Bahau-Pujungan watersheds starting in the 1960s to be closer to markets and
schools and have succeeded both economically and politically due to several factors, inter
alia, intact hierarchical social structure and expert skills as swidden cultivators (see Sellato
2001). It is important to underscore that they intentionally moved to the Malinau for
economic purposes and were not forcibly resettled, although their migration might have been
influenced by government resettlement programs. When migrating to the Malinau, the
Kenyah requested permission from the Merap Chief Customary Leader to settle in the region,
and subsequently received legal recognition from the sub-district government. The Punan are
traditionally hunter-gathers, but for the most part have now settled in permanent villages,
although it is not uncommon for Punan to be absent from their villages for long stretches of
time due to hunting and/or foraging expeditions. They continue to be the most marginalized
politically, which is indicative of their historical role as clients, or often slaves27, of
swiddening groups such as the Merap and Kenyah (Sellato 2001).
Government resettlement programs from the 1960s to 1980s and one in 1999 strongly
influenced current settlement locations and their ethnic make-up, most deleteriously affecting
the Punan28. Through various promises, mostly unfulfilled to date, these programs
26 For studies of Kenyah social stratification see, for example, Whittier (1973) and Rousseau (1990). 27 Sellato (2001) uses the term “slave.” Please see his text for an explanation.
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encouraged Dayak groups from more remote areas to resettle in areas closer to the district
capital of Malinau. One of the consequences of these programs was to have two to four
ethnically homogenous villages29 located in one area, such that one area consists of multiple
villages and ethnic groups. For example, Long Loreh is one large area consisting of four
ethnically distinct villages – the Kenyah village of Long Loreh proper, the Merap village of
Sengayan, the Punan Tubu village of Bila Bekayuk and the Punan Malinau village of
Pelancau. In 2003 there were nine such locations or settlements in the watershed. The Punan
incurred the most negative consequences of these programs because the promises of homes
and agricultural land were unfulfilled, and hence many currently continue to maintain
settlements in their original locations upstream, spending part of their time in those upstream
areas.
Each village has a village head (kepala desa) who is elected by villagers after
candidates for the position have been vetted by the sub-district government. The village head
is part of the official government structure and paid Rp. 750,000 (approximately USD 80) per
month by the district government. Most of the individuals who serve as village heads are also
customary leaders in the village, a position that was not recognized during the New Order.
Current village locations reflect the history of migration and settlement patterns of
different ethnic groups arriving in the area at different times. Indeed, a reading of the
landscape of villages demonstrates alternating sequences of “older” and “newer” villages
(Limberg [forthcoming]). This history of migration and settlement in the context of current
increased pressures on, and incentives to claim, land and resources has engendered and
exacerbated inter-village conflicts with respect to territorial claims and justifications, which
28 For ethnographic studies of the Punan see, for example, Sellato (2001, 1994), Hoffman (1986, 1988), Kaskija (1999, 2000), and Puri (1997). 29 I use the term “village” here in its administrative and legal sense (desa).
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is discussed in detail later in this chapter. The district government has attempted to change
the administrative status of clusters of villages into single villages through district
government decree (District Decree No. 3/2001) and declared that villages can only claim
land they are living on, but implementation of these directives has not occurred.
The inter-ethnic tensions and struggles over forest and land resources in the Malinau
watershed are indicative of alliances and tensions in the district more broadly. Ethnic
affiliations, economic interdependencies, strategic kin relations and historical relationships
form the fabric of current alliances and tensions. In recent years, Kenyah, Lundaye and
Tidung groups have been the most politically active and dominate the district government.
Together with the Merap, these groups have worked the most aggressively to consolidate
claims to forest and land. The Punan, on the other hand, are only minimally represented in
the district government, lack strong documentation of their territorial claims, and must
struggle against a history of marginalization by these other groups30.
B. Decentralization Processes in Indonesia related to forestry and community management
After the passing of the decentralization laws in 1999, district governments,
particularly in regions with rich forest resources, took advantage of the decentralization laws
and more broadly the reformasi31 ethos and quickly issued permits for small scale timber
concessions ranging from 100 ha to 5,000 ha per permit that were valid from a few months
up to two years. The most common ones in East Kalimantan were Hak Pemungutan Hasil
Hutan (HPHH) or Forest Product Harvest Concession and Izin Pemungutan dan
30 The Punan historically lack the strong social cohesion of groups such as the Kenyah and lack effective institutions to represent their interests. Only in the mid-1990s did the Punan in Malinau organize the appointment of a Punan customary leader (Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming b]) 31 Reformasi “refers to the transformation and dismantling of the policies, practices, and institutional structures through which the New Order leadership and a handful of well-connected conglomerates controlled the political and economic life of the country prior to Suharto’s resignation in May 1998” (Barr et al. 2001: v).
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Pemanfaatan Kayu (IPPK) or Timber Extraction and Utilization Permits. HPHH permits
allow “the extraction of timber and/or non-timber forest products in areas of 100 ha that are
located within the government controlled Forestry Estate (Kawasan Hutan)” (Barr et al.
2001: 56). IPPK permits are “small scale forest conversion licenses,” ranging from 1,000 to
5,000 per permit, for areas designated as “social forest” (Hutan Rakyat) or “privately-owned
forest” (Hutan Milik) (Barr et al. 2001: 13).
It is important to note here that while these types of permits seem to carry the
signature of clear legal justification and certainty, precisely the opposite is true – their
issuance and implementation are indicative of ambiguous, contentious and ad hoc
decentralization processes. Due to loopholes in legislation, these permits did not require
central government approval prior to their issuance. For example, the areas covered by these
permits often overlapped with those of forest concessionaires who had received permits from
the central government during the New Order, as has been the case in Malinau (Barr et al.
2001, Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming a]). Even the “legal genealogy of IPPKs issued by
Malinau’s district government is in fact, rather sketchy,” not citing the proper legal decisions
and regulations, mistakenly citing the wrong ones, and/or erroneously referring to the wrong
types of permits, e.g., referring to IPPKs as Izin Pemanfaatan Kayu (IPKs) or Timber
Clearance Permit, which can only be issued by the Ministry of Forestry (Barr et al. 2001: 43).
Indeed, indicative of the legal confusion over these permits and the general lack of concern
over legal accuracy during this period, district government officials, villagers and industry
actors in Malinau referred to IPPKs as IPKs (Barr et al. 2001)32.
32 This general lack of concern regarding the legal accuracy of permits reflects more an opportunism of district governments taking advantage of legal loopholes in the post-Suharto era than it does an intentional confusing of permits and regulations. For example, in the case of Malinau, the district government had nothing to gain by referring to IPPKs and IPKs – the district government was authorized to issue IPPKs and not IPKs.
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In Malinau, which is indicative of the situation in forest rich districts, the district
government issued 46 IPPK permits to timber concessionaires (1000 to 5000 hectares per
permit) between April 2000 and April 2001 and thus opened up approximately 60,000 ha of
forest for unsustainable harvesting (Wollenberg et al [forthcoming a]). These entrepreneurial
concessionaires secured agreements with villages that claimed the surrounding forest through
negotiations with village leaders33.
In exchange for agreeing to allow the concessionaire to harvest timber, villages were
promised a fee per cubic meter of timber harvested, which in the worst case was not defined
and in the best case was 50,000 rupiah (approximately USD 6) per cubic (Limberg
[forthcoming]). Further, villages also sometimes negotiated in-kind benefits, such as “roads,
public buildings and public facilities such as generators, rice hullers and water pumps to the
villages” (Wollenberg et al [forthcoming a]: 10). The cash benefits alone were much more
than what villages had received previously. For example, in the seven villages studied in the
Malinau watershed that entered into IPPK agreements,
“cash benefits from three years of IPPK fees averaged about USD 1,000 per
household…compared to prior benefits from large scale logging companies or
government of only about USD 1,500 annually per village, plus minor community
development projects” (Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming a]: 10, italics in original).
That said, Wollenberg et al. (forthcoming a: 11) “estimate that villagers received only 1.4%
of the gross value of the timber harvested, based on timber prices in Malinau town.”
Additionally, the issuance of permits and operations of IPPKs in a weak institutional
environment created a host of problems and conflicts for villagers. For example, “common
33 To apply for an IPPK permit, logging companies were required to secure a timber harvest agreement with the village that claimed the forested region that was to be exploited (Barr et al. 2001)
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villagers benefited less compared to village leaders, who sometimes received an individual
fee of about 10,000 rupiah per m3 beyond what was paid to the village, in addition to less
transparent payments,” which has generated conflict (Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming a]: 11).
Additionally, the fulfillment of contractual obligations has been minimal. Nineteen of
the 22 villages in Malinau that had agreed to IPPKs “mentioned that they had encountered
problems with the broker because of unfulfilled promises” (Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming
a]: 11). There were few, if any, attempts by the district government at monitoring and
enforcement of IPPKs, which in theory should have paid various taxes and levies to the
district government that it had not received previously from large-scale concessionaires (Barr
et al. 2001). It seems, however, that many IPPKs were negligent in paying these taxes and
levies, yet were allowed to operate, which indicates the payment of bribes to certain officials
by these companies (Barr et al. 2001). Indeed, Barr et al. (2001: 19) note that several of their
informants involved in securing IPPK permits
“indicated that informal payments were routinely required at each step of the permit
approval process where a signature is needed. Timber brokers interviewed in September
2000 indicated that they had paid as much as Rp. 50 million (or roughly US$7,500 at an
exchange rate of Rp. 6,700/US$) for individual signatures.”
Further, the lack of proper institutional mechanisms in district government and the
new possibilities of cash compensation provided by timber entrepreneurs exacerbated
conflicts between villages that compete with each other to claim forests, based on
justifications of indigeneity and/or historical agreements. IPPKs also fueled intra-village
conflicts due to inequitable distribution of benefits among villagers.
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In issuing logging permits, district governments, including Malinau, effectively by-
passed the central government’s Ministry of Forestry, which during the Suharto regime was
one of the most powerful ministries, claiming authority over two-thirds of Indonesia’s
landmass which was classified as “state forest.” During the New Order the vast majority of
government revenue from forest resources fell into the coffers of the Ministry of Forestry,
with resource rich districts receiving little benefit. Decentralization processes have shifted
logging revenues from central to district governments and have also officially weakened the
Ministry of Forestry’s authority. This is strongly resented and resisted by the Ministry, and
indeed the Ministry has attempted to re-assert its authority and re-centralize forestry based on
the justification that district governments are acting irresponsibly and creating autonomous
fiefdoms.
As part of this justification, the Ministry to a large extent blames the current
deforestation rate in Indonesia of 2.4 million ha per year on decentralization processes and
the lack of district regulatory mechanisms, enforcement and monitoring. The Ministry points
out that district governments have issued a multitude of logging permits, e.g., IPPKs, that are
not in accordance with permit issuing protocol, that are not regulated in the least, and that
often overlap with existing permits. Moreover, according to the Ministry, with the loss of
central government authority and the lack of law enforcement in the regions, illegal logging
operations have been able to increase in number and also work more openly and intensively.
According to the Ministry, regionalized or localized systems of corruption, collusion and
nepotism have facilitated rampant illegal logging.
As part of its attempt to re-centralize control, in June 2002 the Ministry passed a
regulation stipulating that all logging permits must be issued by the central government and
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that district governments no longer had the right to issue permits34. This regulation was both
drafted and passed by the central government without consultation with provincial or district
governments and civil society groups, and because of that and its ethos of re-centralization,
other actors strongly contest this regulation and have called for a judicial review. That said,
district governments, including Malinau, have stopped issuing small scale logging permits
such as IPPKs due to directives from the central government that make them illegal. These
directives have leverage in part due to the continued heavy dependence of district
governments on the central government for their operating budgets. In the case of Malinau,
over 95% of the district government’s annual budget comes from the central government; the
district is as yet unable to generate significant revenue locally.
V. CIFOR in Malinau: institutional arrangements and plans
A. Formal Institutional Relationships
As part of the host country agreement with the Government of Indonesia (GOI),
CIFOR was provided privileged access35 to a large forested area to conduct long-term
applied research on forest related issues (Sayer and Campbell 2004). The “research forest”
was part of GOI’s bid to have CIFOR headquartered in Indonesia, when CIFOR was created
in 1993. Initially, there was debate within CIFOR regarding the location and nature of the
research forest, which was a “reflection of attitudes of people [at CIFOR] with different
perspectives on the role of science in natural resource management” (Sayer and Campbell
2004: 146). Several scientists advocated an area of forest that could be a controlled
34 Peraturan Pemerintah Nomor 34 Tahun 2002 tentang Tata Hutan dan Penyusunan Rencana Pengelolaan Hutan, Pemanfaatan Hutan, dan Penggunaan Kawasan Hutan. 35 By “privileged access” I mean that CIFOR scientists do not need to apply for research permits to conduct research in Malinau, and CIFOR is guaranteed long-term access to the region. That said, CIFOR’s access to this area is not exclusive – other actors such as logging companies may operate in the region as well.
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experimental environment, while others preferred an “ill-defined area where the interactions
among different stakeholder groups could be studied (Sayer and Campbell 2004: 146).
In consultation with GOI, CIFOR chose a forested region in the then Bulungan
district (now Malinau district), East Kalimantan where logging had not yet taken place, but
was scheduled in the medium term, and where local communities were living. The area was
also adjacent to a large national park, Kayan Mentarang, and it was assumed that “the
research forest would act as a buffer zone for the protected area and that requiring access to
extensive pristine forests could make use of the part” (Sayer and Campbell 2004: 146).
Further, WWF had been active in Kayan Mentarang for quite some time and by having
CIFOR’s research forest next to the national park, it was hoped that there would be close
collaboration between the two institutions. It transpired, however, that the area would not be
logged as soon as anticipated, and as research initiatives unfolded, “it proved expedient to
locate more and more of the work outside in areas outside, but adjacent to the designated
research forest” where a timber concessionaire actively operated (Inhutani II) and many local
communities lived (Sayer and Campbell 2004: 146). With time, researchers were active in
various parts of the district and “in fact more work was going on in the inhabited areas
outside the forest than in the forest itself” (Sayer and Campbell 2004: 146). The forest itself
was formally known as the Bulungan Research Forest and was recognized through
Ministerial Decree36. In 2003 “Bulungan Research Forest” was changed to “Malinau
Research Forest” to reflect the change in the name of the district.37 Formally, the Malinau
36 This decree from the Minister of Forestry, signed on January 23, 1996, is entitled Keputusan Menteri Kehutanan No. 35/Kpts-II/1996: Pemberian Izin Kegiatan Penelitian Kepada Center for International Forestry Research 37 In late 1999, the Bulungan district was divided in three districts: Malinau, Bulungan and Nunukan. The region of forest where CIFOR had privileged access was entirely in the district of Malinau, and thus CIFOR felt that the name of the research forest should reflect this.
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Research Forest is 302,900 ha, but has never been gazetted, and when people refer to the
“Malinau Research Forest” they mean the general region of Malinau where CIFOR is active.
With decentralization, district-level governments – previously rubber stamps of the
central government – gained a broad range of decision-making authority, and thus in 2002
CIFOR initiated and signed an MOU with the district government38. The official agreements
between CIFOR, GOI and the Malinau district government signify, at least in public
discourse, a recognition and willingness to engage in collaborative research on a host of
forest-related issues and to apply research results. The extent to which this assumption has
been borne out is questionable. As I discuss in Chapter 4, much of CIFOR’s applied research
activities has not been adopted by district government whether in policy or practice.
It is unsurprising that the MOUs between CIFOR, the central government and district
government have not engendered the types of collaborations that one would anticipate. They
are general enough to allow all parties to interact with each other without compromising any
of their respective positions. A brief examination of these MOUs shows they are policy
fictions and vehicles of articulation or platforms for negotiation more than anything else (see
for example Mosse 2004 and Rossi 2004).
In the agreement signed between the GOI and CIFOR on May 15, 1993 that legally
recognizes the relationship between CIFOR and GOI, it is noted that the
“agreement shall be interpreted in light of the primary objective of enabling the
Center….to discharge fully, efficiently and effectively its responsibilities and fulfill
38 It should be noted here that the Ministry of Forestry initially opposed the MOU between CIFOR and the Malinau district government because the Ministry perceived this as inadvertently undermining its authority. CIFOR already had a MOU with GOI via the Ministry, and since Malinau is part of the Republic of Indonesia, a separate MOU is thought to be unnecessary and implies that the MOU with the Ministry is somehow insufficient. The resistance from the Ministry is related to the ongoing tensions between central and district governments in the context of ad hoc decentralization.
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its purposes and functions as described in its Constitution, without jeopardizing, with
regard to the Center’s programme in Indonesia, the Government’s policy on national
development and prevailing laws and regulations” (Article 2).39
With respect to CIFOR’s work in Indonesia specifically, the agreement states that
“the Government recognizes the right of the Center to freely conduct research in
lands mutually agreed, and publish and disseminate research results and information
internationally and within the Republic of Indonesia in pursuit of objectives set out in
the Center’s Constitution” (Article 3, 3a).
Both of these statements express common ground for CIFOR and GOI to engage with
each other through an articulation of the freedom of each party, as well as the limits of that
freedom – the agreement provides an ill-defined yet bounded arena for CIFOR and GOI to
engage and negotiate with each other.
With respect to the Malinau Research Forest, the Ministerial decree notes that
“although there are research activities conducted by CIFOR, activities of forest
concessionaires and/or other approved activities that have been there before continue to
operate under the legal regulations that apply” (8)40. Additionally, research activities
conducted by CIFOR should be “based on planned activities that are agreed upon together by
39 This agreement in both Indonesian and English is entitled “Agreement between the Government of the Republic of Indonesia and the Center for International Forestry Research regarding the Headquarters Seat of the Center” and was signed on May 15, 1993 by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ali Alatas, and the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of CIFOR, Bo Bengtsson. It was approved by the President of Indonesia Suharto on August 4, 1993 through Presidential Decree No. 71 (Keputusan Presiden Republik Indonesia No. 71 tentang Pengesahan Agreement between the Republic of Indonesia and the Center for International Forestry Research regarding the Headquarters seat of the Center). 40 This is a translation of the original agreement in Indonesian, which reads “walaupun ada kegiatan penelitian dilakukan oleh CIFOR, tetapi kegiatan pengusahaan hutan dan atau kegiatan sah lainnya yang telah ada sebelumnya tetap berjalan sesuai dengan peraturan perundang-undangan yang berlaku” (8)
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CIFOR and the Ministry of Forestry” (4)41. Thus, as in the original agreement between
CIFOR and GOI, the Ministerial decree provides CIFOR and the Ministry of Forestry ample
room to negotiate and compromise with each other – the decree recognizes CIFOR’s
freedom, yet places vague limits on it by not providing exclusive access to the forest and
requiring some form of agreement of planned activities.
The broad swathe of authority gained by district governments with the ad hoc
implementation of decentralization laws in conjunction with concerns from the district
government of Malinau that CIFOR was bypassing them led to a Memorandum of
Understanding (MOU) between CIFOR and the district government of Malinau, signed on
May 13, 2002 by the Director General of CIFOR, David Kaimowitz, and the Regent of
Malinau, Marthin Billa.42 This MOU articulates the shared interests in
“identifying and improving ways to improve the sustainability of forestry and land
benefits in the district of Malinau…through research, capacity building and
community empowerment” (1).
The MOU calls for consultation and cooperation “in identifying research issues, in
implementing research activities addressing these problems, and in communicating the
results of such research” (Article 1, 1) and that the
“aim of cooperation is to produce integrated natural resource management models,
scientific knowledge and appropriate technologies and to transfer them for practical
application….both in Malinau and elsewhere” (Article 1, 2).
41 “kegiatan penelitian yang dilaksanakan oleh CIFOR berdasarkan rencana kegiatan yang disetujui bersama oleh CIFOR dan Departemen Kehutanan” (4). 42 This agreement is in both Indonesian and English and is entitled Nota Kesepahaman Antara Kabupaten Malinau, Kalimantan Timur, Indonesia dan Center for International Forestry Research tentang Kerja Sama Ilmiah dan Teknis or Memorandum of Understanding Between the District of Malinau, East Kalimantan, Indonesia and the Center for International Forestry Research for Scientific and Technical Co-operation.
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The types of cooperation anticipated
“will include but not be limited to exchange of scientific information, exchange visits
of scientists and other experts as well as planning and implementing cooperative
research activities designed to produce new information or new or improved
technologies” (Article 1, 3), with the open ended possibility that the “scale and nature
of cooperative activities…can be revised form time to time based on a joint
evaluation of the cooperation activities” (Article 1, 5).
As in the other agreements, this MOU provides a broad, ill-defined platform for
engagement that addresses the interests of both parties, while obfuscating possible political
tensions between them. The MOU is about possibilities without mentioning limits, which
provides for greater opportunities of articulation without threatening the authority of either
party.
This MOU, however, is somewhat more specific than the others, noting the following
agreement about research agendas:
“Research in the district will be focused on forestry and forest science including but
not limited to research on the biophysical aspects of forests and forest management
technologies, values of forest, people’s dependency on income of the forest and
impact of people’s activities on the forest, the development of informal and formal
land use planning processes involving communities and coordinated by BAPPEDA43
at both Kabupaten and desa levels; clarification and development of processes to
legitimize community claims to forest land resources; the identification of effective
mechanisms for inter-community communication and coordination; impact of
43 BAPPEDA is an Indonesian acronym for the regional, in this case district level, development planning agency, Badan Perencanaan PembangunanDaerah.
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decentralization and improvement of civil and state governance structures to improve
negotiation by communities with other stakeholders” (Article 1, 6.1).
As I discuss in detail in Chapter 4, the district government has demonstrated little
interest in these items and has made minimal progress in policy and/or practice on these
issues. This raises the issue of whether these agreements have any authority beyond formally
legitimizing the relationship between CIFOR, the central government and district
government. In Chapter 4 I demonstrate that they indeed do not. For example, the limited
authority of and interest in these agreements is demonstrated by the fact that most of
CIFOR’s activities to date have taken place outside of the area originally demarcated as
CIFOR’s research forest in the Ministerial Decree, and none of the actors, including CIFOR,
seem too concerned about this.
B. CIFOR Activities in Malinau, particularly Adaptive Collaborative Management
In this section of the chapter, I provide a brief overview of CIFOR’s activities in
Malinau, which began in 1996, and then move to a summary of the CIFOR project I was
most closely associated with as both participant and observer, viz., the Adaptive
Collaborative Management project (ACM)). It is important to note here that although CIFOR
has conducted and continues to conduct numerous activities led by various CIFOR scientists
with different disciplinary backgrounds that fall under different projects, government
officials and villagers refer to “CIFOR” without necessarily being aware of, distinguishing
between or taking into consideration all of CIFOR’s activities. Indeed, their references to
“CIFOR” are usually from the partial perspective gained through involvement in particular
activities or with particular individuals. A global understanding of CIFOR’s activities in
Malinau is uncommon not only among villagers and government officials, but also among
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CIFOR scientists themselves (Sayer and Campbell 2004). In other words, CIFOR scientists
working in Malinau often do not have a strong understanding of other CIFOR research
initiatives in Malinau beyond the one(s) they are directly involved in – an overarching
research coordination or harmonization mechanism does not exist. With that caveat, I briefly
summarize the different types of major activities CIFOR has initiated in Malinau.
Under the general mandate to improve the sustainability of forests and to help
alleviate poverty, CIFOR has conducted a broad suite of applied research activities in
Malinau funded by various donors and led by various CIFOR scientists with different
disciplinary backgrounds that taken as a collective embrace a multi-disciplinary or integrated
approach and that have evolved through time (Sayer and Campbell 2004; Wollenberg et al.
[forthcoming b]). Most of CIFOR’s activities have been focused on the Malinau watershed
(approximately 500,000 ha) of the district of Malinau.
One of the earlier research activities was Reduced Impact Logging (RIL) in
conjunction with the parastatal timber company Inhutani II in Inhutani’s 48,300 ha
concession in Malinau. The purpose was to compare RIL with conventional logging from
ecological and economic perspectives. With the implementation of decentralization and the
subsequent issuance of IPPKs and loss of authority of Inhutani II, this activity had much less
relevance than initially anticipated because Inhutani has been forced to stop its operations
and IPPKs have no interest in RIL (Sayer and Campbell 2004).
Another major CIFOR activity in the Malinau watershed has been the
Multidisciplinary Landuse Assessment (MLA) led by a forest ecologist. Initiated in 1999,
MLA has “focused on researching and developing tools to assess biodiversity value from the
perspective of remote and marginalized forest communities,” in this case villagers in the
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Malinau watershed (http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/mla/_ref/philosophy/index.htm). Data
collection for MLA has ended, but the CIFOR MLA team continues to work in Malinau on
disseminating research results to villagers and district government officials through popular
media such as posters, playing cards, and videos. Since 2000, another CIFOR research team
led by an anthropologist and agronomist has focused on understanding and analyzing the
livelihood activities, forest dependence and health of Punan in the entire Malinau district,
ranging from those still living the uppermost reaches of watersheds to those living in Malinau
town. In addition to researching these issues, this team has presented research results to both
villagers and district government officials, and convinced an international medical NGO,
Medicin du Monde, to assist Punan villagers in the region with health related concerns.
The other major CIFOR research activity in Malinau is Adaptive Collaborative
Management (ACM), which focuses on the 27 villages in the Malinau watershed, with
certain villages being sites of more intensive activities than others. I was most closely
affiliated with this applied research initiative, and it is a key focus of my analysis in Chapter
4. Initiated in 1998, ACM in Malinau seeks “to empower local communities to increase their
access and control over forest benefits and decisions” (Wollenberg et al. 2004: 21). To this
end, the ACM team employs an “action research” approach44 in which they act as
researchers, facilitators and information resources. Through this approach, the objectives of
ACM have been “to facilitate communities to work with other stakeholders to learn to:
• Increase awareness about their opportunities
• Know and confidently express their needs and opinions
44 The logic of “action research” or “participatory action research” is to plan and implement activities with relevant actors, documenting the process and then reflecting on the results and planning next steps often with those actors. The expectation is that this learning cycle will contribute to improved communication among groups and more inclusive planning and management.
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• To manage conflict and negotiate for their demands more effectively
• To understand how to use and influence political decision making in relation to their
interactions with local government, local companies and other villages or ethnic
groups.” (Wollenberg et al. 2004: 21)
Research and facilitation activities fall under the following components, which were
“built up over time, with each serving as a layer that augmented previous components”:
(1) village surveys and monitoring to understanding local concerns and conditions
(2) participatory mapping and inter-village agreements
(3) community and district government legal awareness and policy dialogue
(4) community participation in district land use planning
(5) community participation in village economic development and land use (Wollenberg
et al. 2004: 21-22)45.
The ACM team remains active in all components in various extents. Since 2003, the
team has also worked with the district government to
“develop indicators to gauge poverty and the impacts government programs have on
poverty” and also to “prepare tools that help local governments develop, implement
and evaluate programs to improve the well-being of poor, forest-dependent people”
(http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/docs/_ref/research/poverty/).
At the time of writing, the core ACM research team included an international social
scientist (the team leader) with nearly 10 years of research experience in Kalimantan and a
US-trained Indonesian policy analyst, both of whom are based in Bogor, and a two-person
field team based in Malinau, one of whom is a local Dayak Kenyah villager and the other
who is a Dutchman who has settled down and worked in East Kalimantan for over 15 years. 45 See this paper for a detailed discussion of each of these components.
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Additionally, three other individuals, two local Dayaks and one Balinese with extensive
experience in this region of East Kalimantan, have been part of the Malinau field team in the
past. Collaborators on various aspects of activities have included representatives from the 27
villages in the watershed, government agencies, Indonesian NGOs, and Indonesian and
foreign universities (Wollenberg et al [forthcoming b]).
As discussed in detail in Chapter 4, the ACM project and CIFOR’s other applied
research activities, to lesser extents, employ a research approach that invites various actors’
participation in research, convenes or “bridges” various groups, and provides information
with the expectation of better managed forests and improved local livelihoods. The
overriding logic of CIFOR’s applied research in Malinau is that engagement by various
actors will lead to more informed and equitable decision making regarding control and access
to forest resources and benefits derived from forests. CIFOR has become an effective means
of obtaining information for villagers, yet the actual tangible effects or benefits associated
with ACM and other CIFOR activities have not been fully realized.
At the district and village levels, CIFOR generally is in a less powerful or authoritative
position than one would perhaps assume because its points of leverage are limited. For
example, CIFOR does not bring to villagers or to local government the financial and other
material resources of traditional development projects, but rather provides information and
opportunities for dialogue, which would not exist otherwise. To a large extent, CIFOR relies
on the self-interest of villagers and local government to engage in its project objectives and
activities, and thus the extent of these actors’ involvement in the project is determined by the
extent of overlap of their respective interests and CIFOR’s interests. As I detail in Chapter 4,
shared interests among these actors are only partial, and hence many of CIFOR’s activities
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have had only partial expected results. In that chapter, I also expand upon the relationships
between CIFOR, villagers and local government in Malinau in the context of decentralization
to provide a deeper understanding of the constraints that CIFOR and ACM face.
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CHAPTER 4
LOCATING CIFOR LOCALLY: RELATIONSHIPS AND PERCEPTIONS OF VILLAGERS, DISTRICT
GOVERNMENT AND CIFOR IN MALINAU
I. Introduction
In this chapter, I describe and examine the relationships and perceptions of villagers,
district government and CIFOR vis-à-vis each other. In doing so, I try to understand the
activities, influence and power of CIFOR, an international applied forestry research institute,
in the context of a politically contentious forest landscape, viz., in the context of Indonesia’s
ad hoc decentralization processes. Moreover, I analyze the perceived expectations and
benefits of the actors that CIFOR engages in Malinau – why they are interested in working
with CIFOR – and the extent to which these expectations are borne out. Further, I examine at
the local level of intervention the role of a publicly funded, international research
organization that ostensibly should have global influence.
II. Decentralization processes and dynamics of village-government relations
A. Villagers’ perceptions of their relations with district government
1. Patron-client
Prior to decentralization and to a large extent now in the decentralization transition, the
relationship between local government and communities is one perhaps best characterized as
patron-client, to a great extent lacking formal institutional mechanisms of downward
accountability and transparency. Moreover, the authoritarian Suharto regime successfully
stunted meaningful participation of Indonesian citizens in political processes. Hence,
decentralization and its attendant transfer of governing authority to district governments have
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taken place in a context of ill-prepared district government officials, weak civil society
groups, and extremely limited experience with participatory, democratic political processes
among all actors.
Villagers themselves often perceive their relationship with the district government as
patron-client. For example, several villagers noted that they often bring meat or forest fruit to
government officials, which according to them makes it much easier to secure an
appointment. Indeed, the way that villagers talk about the district government and their
relationship to the district government indicates the prevalence and persistence of this
perception. For example one villager noted to me the hierarchy where “the district
government is above” villagers.1 Another noted that “villagers are extremely dependent on
the district government” for aid and assistance.2
Villagers often comment that local officials abuse their positions in government for
personal benefit, but that there is little that local people can do to hold them accountable.
Indeed, some villagers articulate district government decisions and affairs as something
disconnected from what villagers can influence, referring to government affairs as “urusan
dalam” or “internal issues,” implying that villagers were outside the realm of influence.
Another villager lamented that “the district government has yet to visit their village” and that
“villagers are tired of attempting to speak with district government officials because it has
proven ineffective.”3
Other villagers go further and note that district officials prioritize personal interests at the
expense of villagers’ interests. For example, one villager noted that the attitude and behavior
1 “di atas ada pemda.” 2 “masyarakat sangat tergantung pada pemda.” 3 “pemda belum turun ke lapangan, desa…kita malas bicara…nga ada artinya.”
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of the district government now was like the authoritarian control of the state-owned timber
concessionaire, Inhutani II, operating in Malinau during the Suharto regime.4 Similarly,
another villager observed that district government officials deceive communities because
they use their positions for personal gain. He gave the example of district forestry and other
agency officials coming to his village on behalf of companies using the mask of government
to scare villagers into accepting, in this particular case, a proposed pulp and paper plantation,
and thus were acting similarly to IPKs5 6. Indeed, another villager succinctly observed that
“the district government keeps community rights hidden and has as yet no approach with
communities.”7
Some villagers perceive an actively antagonistic relationship between themselves and the
district government, such as the villager who rhetorically asked “if the district government
controls all [of the forest resources], where will the communities go?”8 Another villager
commented flatly that “the district government was in conflict with custom.” 9
2. Social structures in which relationship is embedded
This patron-client relationship is embedded in several important social structures and
institutions. First, the notion that the government “develops” or “guides” (membina)
villagers, which reflects the doctrine of the 32-year authoritarian regime of Suharto, remains
4 “seperti dulu dikuasai Inhutani II.” 5 “IPK” is the colloquial acronym for short-term timber concessionaires (IPPKs) that had to secure village agreement through the village head before receiving a timber extraction permit from the district government. These companies rarely fulfilled the promises and agreements they made with villages. 6 “pemda main-main masyarakat…ada kepentingan pribadi…kehutanan dan pejabat lain kesini mewakili perusahaan…sama dengan IPK…pemda pakai topeng…pemda takutkan masyarakat.” 7 “hak masyarakat sangat ditutupi pemda…belum ada pendekatan pemda dengan masyarakat.” 8 “kalau garap pemda semua, masyarakat kemana?” 9 “pemda betertentangan dengan adat.”
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a strong influence in the terms of engagement between villagers and local officials. Some
villagers lament that the local government has left them behind, not developing them and not
providing development assistance. Indeed, villagers very much want development (see Li
1999b).
For many villagers the notion of development (pembangunan or pembinaan) translates
into government provision of schools, health care facilities, infrastructure, income generating
opportunities and “projects” such as building village meeting halls and cementing walkways.
Many villagers’ vision of development and how it should be delivered is not different from
the New Order ideals or modernist notions of development. This is unsurprising. Many
Dayaks, particularly the Kenyah, migrated to the Malinau region to be closer to
“development,” e.g., markets and roads and speak of their original upland settlements in
terms of hardship and scarcity. Also, many Dayaks have endured a long history of socio-
cultural and political-economic discrimination and marginalization by the government and
other actors, who have impressed upon Dayaks that their cultural and livelihood practices are
backwards and primitive (Dove 1983). Thus, the imperative that they “need to develop,” a
perception that many Dayaks have of themselves, is in part a consequence of this
disenfranchisement.
Further, Dayak visions of development are greatly informed by what they have seen and
experienced as development, which by and large have been extractive industries such as
logging, mining and plantations. Although recognizing that this form of development has
negative effects, many villagers view the trade-off as worth it, albeit with extreme
consternation, believing that it is not realistic or feasible to have the benefits of development
without incurring the costs. As a senior Punan customary leader flatly put it with respect to
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IPPKs, “you get a fee [from the timber company] but drink muddy water” (“dapat fee tapi
minum air keruh”). It has only been since the fall of the New Order and implementation of
decentralization that Dayaks have had the possibility of benefiting from development.
Previously, they were by and large spectators of development, which took the form of
rapacious extraction of landscapes that Dayaks depended upon and managed for their
livelihoods.
Another important social institution is the history of interethnic relationships between
Dayaks and non-Dayaks and between Dayak groups themselves, discussed in Chapter 310.
The history of relationships between ethnic groups plays a critical factor in articulating
claims to forest areas and gaining access to government officials. For example, certain Dayak
groups, viz., the Merap and Tidung, assert that they are the “original” or “indigenous” (asli)
inhabitants of the Malinau watershed and hence have legitimate claim to it, whereas
“migrants” or “newcomers” (pendatang) do not. Other more recently arrived Dayak groups,
who are far more numerous, viz., the Kenyah, argue that it is not fair or just that the small
number of “original” inhabitants can lay claim to such a vast area, particularly considering
that these “original” inhabitants also moved to the Malinau watershed from another region.
The conflicts between ethnic groups also play out within the district government, and
villagers often approach government officials based on ethnic affiliations. That said, many
villagers are disappointed with and cynical about having “orang kita” (literally, “our
people”), or in this case local Dayak, in district government. At the onset of decentralization
in 2000, villagers expected that having “orang kita” in government would benefit them
10 For a detailed discussion of the cultural politics in Malinau and the history of inter-ethnic relationships that inform them, see Rhee’s chapter “The Cultural Politics of Collaboration to Control and Access to Forest Resources in Malinau, East Kalimantan” in the book by Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming c], Riding the Rapids of Malinau: Local Governance, Forests and Conflicts in Indonesian Borneo. See Sellato (2001) for a detailed treatment of the history of migration and inter-ethnic relationships in Malinau.
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because these individuals knew villagers and their situation intimately. Many had grown up
in similar environments and attended school together and thus had first hand experience with
the difficulties Dayak villagers face. Hence, villagers expected these officials to by more
supportive of and concerned with increasing local prosperity.
After four years, most villagers do not believe their expectations have been met and thus
are disappointed and jaded. Indeed, several villagers noted that once these individuals entered
office, their attitudes towards villagers changed, becoming less accessible and more formal
and stiff in their interactions. Several villagers in Long Loreh noted this about the sub-district
head of south Malinau, whom they had grown up with and who lived in Long Loreh.
Moreover, two villagers I discussed this with commented that “it would be better to have
outsiders in district government instead of local people” because “outsiders don’t know
villagers’ weaknesses and thus are hesitant,” whereas “government officials who are local
know villagers weaknesses” and exploit them11. They ended the discussion by noting that
“communities were bitter” about this.12
Third, traditional intra-village social structures such as the role of elders, aristocrats and
kinship continue to play an important role in decision-making, settling disputes, as well as
whether/how officials are contacted or approached. Individuals elected as village heads
(kepala desa), who are the villagers’ most proximate representative in government, are often
either customary leaders (tokoh adat) themselves or descended from them, which sometimes
implies that they are from the aristocracy, at least for some of the swiddening Dayak
11 “lebih bagus hubungi orang luar dari pada orang dalam…orang luar masih ragu-ragu karna nga tahu kelemahan…orang dalam…mereka sudah tahu kelemahan kita.” 12 “masyarakat pahit sekarang.”
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groups13. As Wollenberg and Uluk (2004: 6) observe regarding representation and
representativeness of villagers in Malinau,
“representation of people’s interests in a village and beyond revolved around the village
head and his inner circle of powerful, often aristocratic individuals whom villagers called
the tokoh masyakarat (village elders14, leaders).”
Additionally, as mentioned earlier, although they make up a substantial percentage of the
district’s population, the Punan continue to be the most politically marginalized group in
Malinau, in part because of their historically weak position vis-à-vis other groups, i.e., as
clients in patron-client relationships (Kaskija 1999, Sellato 2001).
The above institutions overlap to form the basis for how villagers perceive district
government and make sense of the ways in which they can access government officials and
government services. The role of the district government in the broader government
framework of Indonesia is uncertain, and the rights and responsibilities of the district
government vis-à-vis villagers -- its ostensible constituents -- are ambiguous. Hence,
villagers make sense of this relationship through these existing reference points. That said,
one phenomenon that does not have historical or cultural precedent, but is now commonplace
among villagers in the era of decentralization, is to demonstrate or protest, e.g., in the form of
road blockades or seizing heavy equipment, until the government addresses their grievances.
Indeed, the number of conflicts within and between villages, as well as between villages,
13 Wollenberg and Uluk elaborate that (2004: 6) “although customary leaders were unrecognized by the Soeharto New Order, the practice was for the customary (adat) leader to become the village head and for local people to still refer to them as adat leaders. They thus carried both customary and government authority. Many of the older village heads today are descendents or relatives of these adat leaders.” 14 The tokoh masyarakat are not necessarily old, but they are considered the people most capable of making decisions on behalf of the community.
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companies and government has increased extraordinarily since decentralization (see Yasmi et
al. 2004, Sudana [forthcoming]).
B. District Government’s Relationship with and Perceptions of Villagers
1. Unconcerned with villagers’ aspirations
Similarly, district officials to a great extent perceive their relationship with villagers in a
reciprocal manner, viz., as villagers’ patrons. Generally, district officials do not know, do not
want to know, and/or are unconcerned with the desires and aspirations of villagers as
expressed by villagers – public consultations are not only superficial, but rare.15 For
example, in 2002 the district government commissioned the drafting of a district-level land
use plan (tata ruang kabupaten) that ostensibly includes consultations with local people, yet
in late 2002 just prior to a presentation of the draft plan, none of the villagers interviewed by
myself and a CIFOR researcher had heard of a land use plan, although they were interested
and considered it important. None were invited to nor attended the presentation held in the
district capital in November 2002. This is not at all uncommon in Malinau -- “invitations to
hearings were usually circulated only the day before the event” (Wollenberg and Uluk 2004:
8). Among a sample of six meetings, two had only one or no village representative, three had
10-30, and the district head’s accountability speech had the highest attendance with about 50
(Wollenberg and Uluk 2004). The reasons for this on the part of district officials are multiple,
including a lack of incentives and confidence in meaningfully engaging villagers; ingrained
15 In the 2001 elections of the district head and the 2004 elections of the district legislature, villagers voted for political party and not candidate. The winning party then decided on who would fill the positions the party had won. When the district of Malinau was created in late 1999, a provisional district legislature and district head were appointed by the provincial government. This system has not been conducive to downward accountability. In the 2006 both the district head (bupati) and members of the district legislature (DPRD) will be chosen through direct elections.
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habits and attitudes from the New Order; and concern of being confronted by villagers, who
are now more confident in asserting themselves (Wollenberg and Uluk 2004).
Moreover, officials tend to perceive villagers’ as ignorant and incapable of making
informed decisions, which is in part demonstrated by officials’ not wanting CIFOR to
distribute legal literacy literature to villagers because the government was sure villagers
would “misunderstand” or “misinterpret” the information. As another example, several
district officials noted to me that “the Punan think like monkeys” (“Punan…pikiran
monyet”), only thinking for today and not tomorrow and that generally communities in
Malinau lacked analytical abilities.16 Moreover, government officials emphasize the lack of
human resource development in the district.17
2. Government knows better
Government officials feel that they are more knowledgeable than villagers and know
what is best for villagers. For some officials, this perception is based on fact that they are in
office, which means that villagers have put their faith in them, and hence there is no need for
villagers to provide input to the government.
Another reason that officials rarely meet with villagers is, of course, to avoid villagers’
complaints and demands, which have become more aggressive and common with
decentralization (Sudana [forthcoming], Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming a], Yasmi et al.
2004).
As mentioned earlier, the district government’s attitude toward villagers is embedded in
an institutional structure that does not reward downward accountability. Further, district
officials have little previous experience with this mechanism and other democratic processes.
16 “masyarakat kita…pikiran kurang.” 17 “sumber daya manusia kurang.”
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Most of their experience as civil servants has been being upwardly accountable during the
Suharto regime. To a great extent the institutional structure of district government has not
changed with the transition to decentralization. It was only recently, with decentralization,
that district officials had any power, whereas previously they were “rubber stamps” and
awaiting orders from the central government.
One dramatic change with decentralization has been the inclusion of Dayaks in positions
of authority in the district government such as the Kenyah district head (Bupati), the Tidung
vice-district head (Wakil Bupati), the Lundaye district secretary (Sekretaris Daerah), and
Merap head of the district legislature (Ketua DPRD). Yet, these Dayaks embrace several
identities that are often conflicting. For example, when government officials speak casually
or outside of their official capacity, their rationale and statements are not different from
villagers themselves, e.g., they note that swidden cultivation is appropriate for the area, yet
once they put on their uniforms, they are transformed into bureaucrats who are still strongly
influenced by the Suharto regime’s notions of “development.” Moreover, ethnic affiliation
has in no way ensured that officials and other representatives are accountable to their
constituencies18.
One of the key dynamics in Malinau is that one ethnic group does not dominate
politically19. Further, the collective identity of Dayak has not been a cohesive force in
Malinau, and indeed there are struggles for power within the district government, as there are
between villages of different Dayak groups. The district head (Bupati) has crafted a tenuous
balance in the district government to not exacerbate inter-ethnic tensions. Based on ethnic
18 See Rhee on the cultural politics of Malinau in the forthcoming book by Wollenberg et al. (forthcoming c). See also Wollenberg et al. (forthcoming a). 19 Ibid.
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alliances, government officials marshal villagers for support, yet at the same time the district
government has consolidated and thickened the bureaucracy to keep people at a distance.
Civil servants are still relatively accessible for the people of Malinau, yet meeting with
government officials who actually have decision-making authority is much more difficult.
3. Visions of development: revenue, infrastructure, and payment for environmental services
Although the Malinau district government is far from monolithic, government officials’
visions of development – the future of Malinau – tend to be consistent. The three official
development priorities for the district are improving infrastructure, human resources (such as
education), and agriculture, broadly defined to include plantations such as oil palm and
acacia. The district government’s key focus is generating revenue ostensibly to improve the
prosperity of communities20, and in this regard the comparative advantage of Malinau noted
by government officials is the district’s natural resources, especially its forest and mineral
resources. To date the district government has operationalized this vision through timber
extraction and mining, as well as luring investors interested in oil palm and pulp and paper
plantations, e.g., Acacia mangium plantations. Even though CIFOR has conducted research
demonstrating the biophysical unsuitability of oil palm in Malinau and communicated this to
district government, the district government has moved forward with providing Sabah Forest
Industries an oil palm concession (Business Times Malaysia 3/19/2005). When I asked the
Head of the District Forestry Service about this, he remarked that the oil palm company
would not come to Malinau if it was unsuitable.
20 “meningkatkan kesejahteraan masyarakat..”
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The district government also initiated a program in which it expects 70% of the villages
to be economically self-sufficient by 2010 (Gerakan Pembangunan Desa Mandiri21). The
district government also hopes to take advantage of its international borders with Sabah and
Sarawak to increase investment and trade. As one government official in the district planning
office noted, development (pembangunan) is the primary priority of the district, and the
district wants to “invite investors so that the communities of Malinau improve their economy
like other areas.”22
In many ways the district government’s vision of development is a continuation of classic
New Order policies and practices. This is particularly evident in the types of development
occurring in Malinau, viz., large infrastructure projects such as road improvement and
construction, telecommunications and electricity, as well as its geographic focus, viz., in the
town of Malinau, with minimal development in the rural uplands. Also similar to the New
Order are the multitude of public works and reforestation projects that have failed to achieve
their ostensible goals, yet are ripe for graft (Barr et al. 2001).
Conservation, sustainable forest management, and community rights to forests resources
and land are not district government priorities. Conservation of forests only enters the district
government’s purview if monetary compensation is tied to it. “Lungs of the Earth” (paru-
paru dunia), conservation district (kabupaten konservasi), environmental services (jasa
linkungan), and medicinal plants (tanaman obat) are frequently invoked by district
government officials, but they are always couched in terms of compensation. Several senior
district officials noted that Malinau is the headwaters for six major rivers in East Kalimantan,
21 This is also referred to by its acronym Gerbangdema. 22 “mengundang investor-investor supaya masyarakat Malinau meningkatkan perekonomian…seperti daerah lain.”
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that Malinau’s forests produce oxygen for the world, and that Dayaks have conserved the
region’s forests. They go on to note that it has been unfair that the district and its people have
not accrued financial gains from the environmental services provided to the province, nation
and the world.
Essentially, the argument is articulated in terms of villagers’ wanting and having a right
to develop and that the only existing means for this development to occur is for the district
government to allow and promote the exploitation of natural resources. In this argument,
district government officials articulate the welfare of villagers and the conservation of natural
resources as mutually exclusive because the only development that these officials believe as
tangible is one that relies on extraction. The idea that forest dependent villagers want to
remain forest dependent is not within the purview. When speaking of forest conservation,
district officials noted that villagers “did not want to be primitive” (tidak mau primitif) and
that not providing them road access for the sake of conservation was tantamount to “keeping
them as Tarzan” (“Tarzan terus”), the popular representation of primitive man. The Head of
District Planning commented that there are 10 villages around the national park of Kayan
Mentarang that were there before the national park existed. He rhetorically asked whether it
was fair for them to continue to live in the middle of the forest.23
Another official was quite frank in noting that increasing access and opening up the
district’s isolation was part of the primary priority of development and that it was in conflict
with conservation.24 One official noted that the ideal development for Malinau would be
eco-tourism that catered to executives that involved chartering helicopters and airplanes and
23“Sepuluh masyarakat di sekitar taman nasional Kayan Mentarang. Adil kalau tetap tinggal di hutan? Mereka ada sebelum ada TNKM.” 24 “mau buka isolasi…akses…bebenturan dengan konservasi.”
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executives hunting with traditional weapons, practicing blow pipes and enjoying traditional
dances. The worst case scenario, in this individual’s opinion, is that the forest would be cut
down because that is all that Malinau has to offer to generate revenue and that the
consequences downstream would be severe.
These accounts demonstrate that district officials articulate development and
conservation as mutually exclusive, noting the extraction of natural resources as the most
likely means to development because “that is the only option they have” (dengan pilihan
yang ada). The justification for development is that villagers want it and it is a right that they
should not be denied – it is the officials’ rhetoric of villagers’ prosperity that justifies
development through extractive industries. Thus, in this context, conservation is only feasible
if there is financial compensation for the district and villagers, otherwise, according to
district government, it has no other option to develop other than through natural resource
exploitation.
C. Summary of Background, Context and Village-Government Relationships
To summarize, ad hoc decentralization processes and post-Suharto euphoria of reform
(reformasi) have transformed Malinau into a dynamic and rapidly evolving frontier in which
culture, history and politics at the district-level and below strongly influence decisions, their
implementation, and who gains and who doesn’t. It is a frontier in which formal regulations
are often not known, not implemented, and/or violated with impunity. Further, Malinau and
Indonesia more generally are currently mired in an ambiguous policy environment that is
indicative of the inchoate and weak governance mechanisms in the post-Suharto
decentralization transition. Malinau is also characterized by the richness of its natural
resources, which has the potential to generate substantial revenue to improve the livelihoods
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of its inhabitants and which holds extraordinary value for conservationists and
environmentalists if they were to remain minimally exploited.
The relationship between the recently-formed district government and villagers is by and
large patron-client, albeit villagers now feel more confident in explicitly expressing their
discontent with government decisions, and district officials are more aware of -- and attempt
to avoid -- these expressions of unhappiness. The current patron-client relationship takes its
precedent from the New Order, which is unsurprising given that most district officials were
trained as civil servants during that period, and villagers’ experience with government and
“development” were defined by that era.
The ethnic diversity of Malinau and the economic opportunities made available through
ad hoc decentralization have put a premium on the cultural politics at the district level and
below. Mired in a weak institutional environment, inter-ethnic disputes over forest and land
claims are much more common and heated among Dayak groups -- often with only
temporary resolution – compared to authoritarian New Order regime. Further, the difficulty
of keeping village elite somewhat accountable to their constituencies and minimally
corrupted by the ample opportunities afforded to them as official representatives of villages
has significantly disrupted village life and intra-village social cohesion.
It is in this context that CIFOR conducts its applied research initiatives that attempt to
improve the sustainability of forests and alleviate poverty. It is important to recall, however,
that CIFOR started its research activities in Malinau in an extremely different political-
economic and institutional context, viz., during the New Order. At that time, district
governments did not have the authority to make decisions independent of the central
government; villagers generally and Dayak swidden cultivators particularly were politically
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disenfranchised; and the destinies of forests and forest dependent people lay in the hands of
Suharto, his New Order apparatus – particularly the military -- and a small number of
massive forest industry conglomerates. No one could foresee or predict how the post-Suharto
period would play out, or the effects it would have on forests and forest-dependent people.
CIFOR’s research evolved and adapted to the situation. CIFOR’s early research on Reduced
Impact Logging with the parastatal timber company Inhutani II became even less relevant in
the post-New Order period as Inhutani’s authority waned and the institutional context
became entirely unsupportive of RIL, and thus CIFOR minimized its focus on this topic.
CIFOR’s ACM project initially focused on “action research” with villagers vis-à-vis central
government laws and regulations and central-government sanctioned extraction companies,
and then evolved into an emphasis on local-level (district and below) politics -- articulated in
terms of culture, history and decentralization -- in an ambiguous institutional environment.
Reformasi and decentralization have allowed CIFOR’s research to have a more explicit focus
on forest-related politics than could not have been imagined during the New Order, while
also confronting CIFOR and other actors with a much more complex, uncertain and rapidly
evolving institutional landscape. In the next section of the chapter, I discuss this landscape in
detail in terms of the relationships and perceptions of district officials and villagers regarding
CIFOR and its activities in the context of the ostensible transition to decentralization.
III. Perceptions and relationships between CIFOR, villagers and local government
A. District government’s perceptions and relationship with CIFOR: fragile, tenuous, and
constrained.
The district government perceives CIFOR as a primary interlocutor between it and
villagers and between it and the international community. But the relationship between
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CIFOR and the district government, and hence the meaning of being an interlocutor, is
fragile, shifting, negotiated and constrained. Although the collaboration between CIFOR and
the district government is officially recognized through a MOU, the MOU provides a vast
expanse of ambiguity and play for the agreement to be operationalized. It is also important to
note that since CIFOR was already working in the region for several years prior to the district
government being formed and becoming a powerful political player, the relationship between
the two was forged out of historical coincidence and accommodation, making the best of
existing resources, instead of a preliminary assessment of agreed upon priorities and tasks.
1. District Government does not use CIFOR’s Research
The district government has to a great extent neither used nor adopted CIFOR’s research
results and recommendations in policy or practice. For example, as mentioned earlier,
CIFOR has conducted biophysical research demonstrating that oil palm would not be suitable
to the region due to poor soils and steep topography (Sheil and Basuki, Jakarta Post,
3/30/05) and informed the district government of this, yet the district government has
dismissed this and issued an oil palm plantation permit to a company from Malaysia, Sabah
Forest Industry (Business Times Malaysia 3/19/05). Moreover, the district government
informed CIFOR not to distribute policy briefs, including one on oil palm plantations, to
villagers due to the ostensible concern from district government that villagers would
misunderstand the policy briefs. Also, in 2001 CIFOR provided input to the district
government to formulate district regulations (peraturan daerah) regarding village
governance, customary institutions (lembaga adat), forest exploitation and establishing and
merging villages, but none of these inputs were used in the drafting of district regulations.
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The mapping of village territories is another example of the district government not
adopting and/or following-up a CIFOR-initiated activity. In this case, the district officials had
made it explicit to CIFOR that they would continue with the community mapping exercise
and even charged the coordination of the task to BAPPEDA, the District Planning Agency.
This is not to say, however, that the district government finds the entirety of CIFOR’s
activities useless (the instances where the district government finds CIFOR useful are
discussed below), but rather to highlight that CIFOR in no way holds direct power or
authority over the district government.
2. District government is heterogeneous, which affects the relationship with CIFOR
District officials are in varying degrees supportive of, critical of and indifferent to
CIFOR, depending on the issue, context and government official. As with communities, the
district government is not homogenous, and indeed the multiple political, ethnic and
economic interests play themselves out in local government. For example, the District
Forestry Service, ostensibly a key government partner for CIFOR and an agency that CIFOR
has repeatedly attempted to engage, has shown minimal interest in working with CIFOR.
Indeed, CIFOR researchers themselves have noted this, as well as noting that CIFOR is
sometimes perceived as a threat by the District Forest Service specifically and the district
government generally (Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming b]). In an interview with me, the head
of the District Forest Service noted that “he didn’t know why [CIFOR] was in Malinau”25
and that “if CIFOR left [Malinau], it would not be a problem.”26 Moreover, he noted that
some of CIFOR’s activities such as informing villagers that the Malinau area was not suitable
25 “nga tahu kenapa disini” 26 “kalau pulang nga masalah.”
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to oil palm plantations were anti-investment and provoking communities to oppose
government plans (Widjono AMZ 2004).
On the other end of the spectrum of relations with district government is the district’s
Village Empowerment Service, Dinas Pemberdayaan Masyarkat Desa (PMD). Staff from
PMD have joined CIFOR researchers in monitoring visits to villages and other activities
related to poverty alleviation, which is a common priority for both institutions. The head of
PMD noted that “the working partnership is good,”27 that “there is a match of interests,”28
that CIFOR has expertise that should be used by the district government,29 and the district
government should be more active in applying CIFOR’s research, not blaming CIFOR for the
lack of application.30 Indeed, he even noted that “CIFOR is an angel” (“CIFOR adalah
malakat”).
One key reason for the two polarized views of CIFOR is that the forestry sector
generates revenue, and some of CIFOR’s activities question certain revenue generating
schemes such as oil palm, whereas the Village Empowerment Service is charged with leading
poverty alleviation strategies, which at the time in Malinau was not a revenue generating
sector. The multiplicity of perceptions and attitudes toward CIFOR means that a fixed, stable
relationship between CIFOR and the district government as an entity does not exist, but
rather CIFOR is faced with the challenge of articulating and negotiating common ground
with multiple district government players.
27 “mitra kerja cukup bagus.” 28 “CIFOR PMD nyambung.” 29 “CIFOR punya alihan, kenapa tidak tangkap…bodoh kalau nga pakai.” 30 “CIFOR adalah penelitian…jangan salahkan CIFOR…kita harus tahu tugas pokok…pemda harus aktif…applikasi.”
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3. Role of CIFOR is fragile and constrained
While perceptions within the district government can vary with respect to the perceived
usefulness of CIFOR’s presence and research in the district, there are several consistent
themes articulated by district government officials about the role of CIFOR and the
relationship between CIFOR and district government that locate CIFOR in a fragile, tenuous
and limited position.
a. CIFOR is not a powerful actor, not integral and has different priorities
Perhaps most significant is that district officials do not consider CIFOR to be a powerful
actor or in a position of influence. In a conversation about the role of CIFOR, the District
Secretary (Sekretaris Daerah), the second most powerful government official in the district,
noted to me that “CIFOR is not on equal footing with the government,” that “CIFOR is a
sub-unit of the global system,” and that “CIFOR does not influence government policy.”31
Making explicit that the district government has decision making power, he further noted that
the issues that CIFOR deals with “are strong [important], but CIFOR’s influence is limited
since it is not their [CIFOR’s] right.”32 He went on to comment that “CIFOR acts as if it has
bargaining power with district government, but actually does not.” 33 Fundamentally, he
perceived CIFOR’s presence or absence as unessential, noting that “CIFOR was not a
handicap [to the district] whether CIFOR was present or not.”34 Another government official
31 “selama ini CIFOR nga seimbang pemerintah….CIFOR dalam system global…sub-sub…CIFOR nga mempengaruhi kebijakan pemerintah.” 32 “CIFOR…isu kuat tetapi sejauh mana bisa pengaruhi…bukan haknya dia.” 33 “CIFOR seolah-olah punya bargaining position dengan pemerintah daerah.” 34 “CIFOR tidak menjadi handicap kalau ada, tidak ada.”
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who had previously worked for CIFOR in Malinau from 1998 through 2001 acknowledged
that “CIFOR was not in a strong position” vis-à-vis district government. 35
District officials make explicit that CIFOR is not integral to the governing and
administration of the district since CIFOR is outside their institutional system and mired in
its own, separate institutional world. In speaking of institutional incentives, the District
Secretary cynically noted about CIFOR and others that “international institutions look for
projects”36 and that “CIFOR has its own priorities to maintain its existence and create
[research] products.”37 The Head of the District Planning Agency echoed this point about
international organizations and NGOs existing in a different institutional landscape,
commenting that “all international bodies take up community issues, make proposals, and
look for funding with that issue.”38 On a related note, with respect to whether CIFOR
understands the issues being faced by district government, the District Secretary explained
that “it wasn’t that CIFOR doesn’t understand the issues but rather that CIFOR cannot be
involved in the government’s issues and problems and thus cannot provide an appropriate or
accurate response.” 39
On an issue related to different institutional incentives, many district officials explain that
often CIFOR’s priorities and research are not in harmony with the needs of the district
government, and often they fail to connect.40 One former CIFOR researcher who is now a
35 “CIFOR tidak kuat..” 36 “lembaga internasional cari proyek” 37 “CIFOR…kepentingan sendiri…existensi dan produk.” 38 “semua badan internasional ambil isu masyarakat, buat proposal, cari uang dengan isu.” 39 “bukan dia tidak memahami…tapi tidak masuk persoalan kita…tidak bisa memberi respons yg tepat.”
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civil servant in the district government’s planning agency noted that “CIFOR researchers do
not understand the district government bureaucracy” and that “CIFOR researchers only think
of their own needs,” not considering that “the district government has programs of its own in
place.” 41 He noted further that “CIFOR thinks it has a partnership with the district
government but in actuality it has yet to meet its partner [or in other words to achieve a
partnership].”42 He explained that although there is a MOU between CIFOR and district
government, CIFOR doesn’t allocate a budget for research collaboration initiated by CIFOR
and hence doesn’t recognize that these activities are a burden to district government43.
Further, he commented that the district government complains that “CIFOR is not
transparent, for example, with its project budget and that CIFOR researchers receive large
salaries.”44 He did, however, acknowledge that the “priorities of CIFOR and the district
government do not connect [in part] due to the rapid [socio-political] changes in Malinau and
the difficultly of research agendas adapting to these changes because research requires time
[or a relatively long time frame].”45 That said, he emphasized that the working relationship
is hindered by the lack of a shared budget.46 Further, he noted that “on both sides there are
strong personalities” and that “CIFOR researchers often think of themselves as smartest.”47
40 “nga nyambung.” 41 “orang CIFOR kurang paham birokrasi. Orang CIFOR pola pikir sendiri…pemerintah daerah udah punya program sendiri.” 42 “Orang CIFOR pikir mitra tapi belum ketemu mitra.” 43 “kerjasama CIFOR dan pemda dalam riset…CIFOR nga pikir beban pada orang pemda yang ikut riset [CIFOR]. Walaupun ada duit [pemda], nga dibudget [to be part of CIFOR’s research]….harus membahas budget.” 44 “CIFOR tidak tranparen, misalnya, anggaran…gaji besar orang CIFOR.” 45 “prioritas pemda dan prioritas CIFOR nga nyambung karna Malinau berubah terus…riset perlu waktu.” 46 “CIFOR tidak tahu betul recana pemda dan sebaliknya…walaupun ada MOU, nga ada budget sendiri.”
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He noted that ultimately “even though there is a MOU, if the process is not integrated
[harmonized], the research will not be used.”48
That said, this same individual noted that “CIFOR was needed in the district because of
its research abilities,”49 and that an adaptive, action-oriented approach was needed,50 but that
pure or basic research was inappropriate.51 Indeed, as analyzed later in this paper, many
district officials take this position of criticizing CIFOR’s work and constraining CIFOR’s
position, yet leave space for the relationship to continue.
b. Example of constraining: Mapping and evolution of district government’s perceptions
This type of attitude toward CIFOR is indicative of the fragile, tenuous and constrained
position that CIFOR is located in by district officials. Perhaps the most illuminating example
is the community mapping activity initiated by CIFOR in 1999-2000. Started just prior to
decentralization and the formation of the district of Malinau, this activity was initiated by
CIFOR at the request of the 27 villages in the Malinau watershed. The idea was to train three
representatives from each of the 27 villages in mapping technologies and skills such as using
a GPS unit and compass so that villagers could map territories they claimed, including
forests, and use these maps as bargaining tools with government and companies operating in
the area. CIFOR’s training and facilitation were expected to assist in the resolution of
boundary disputes between villages and between villages and companies/government.
47 “sama ego kuat….CIFOR pikir paling pintar.” 48 “walaupun ada MOU, kalau proses nga terpadu, nga pakai penelitian.” 49 “CIFOR perlu disini karena riset.” 50 “kalau mau riset [perlu] aksi…walaupun melangar ‘riset’…harus dipadukan…cocok riset ACM [adaptive, action oriented].” 51 “jangan penelitian murni.”
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As the mapping exercise progressed in 1999 and 2000, the new district was formed, and
the newly formed district government licensed small-scale timber concessionaires (IPPKs)
with short time horizons (1-2 years) to operate in the area, provided that the village claiming
the said forest area contractually agreed. The lack of clear village territorial rights to forests
preceding and during the move toward decentralization, as well as an ambiguous and weak
institutional environment, led to increased boundary disputes, increased inter and intra
community conflict, and villagers’ protesting and/or complaining to district government. A
key justification of villages’ claims to forested areas was the maps created with the
facilitation of CIFOR (see Harwell 2000 for a discussion concerning villagers’ appropriation
of mapping technologies). It should be noted that CIFOR made explicit that these maps were
not legal or authoritative and that they were temporary, but villages used and were allowed to
use them as tools of legitimizing claims anyway.
District government officials’ reactions to and perceptions of this mapping activity
illuminate their shifting perceptions of CIFOR and CIFOR’s tenuous and constrained
position. When the district was formed in October 1999, an interim district government was
put into place with the current District Head holding the second most powerful position in
district government, District Secretary (Sekretaris Daerah). According to one CIFOR
researcher who is now and civil servant and was intimately involved in the community
mapping activity from beginning to end, when CIFOR informed the interim district
government of the plan to conduct community mapping, the current District Head (then
District Secretary) supported CIFOR’s efforts and hoped that CIFOR could help settle
boundary disputes between villages. The interim District Head told CIFOR to proceed with
the mapping and report results back to him. In December 2000, CIFOR reported the results
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of the mapping activity at an annual meeting of villagers and district government initiated by
CIFOR. According to this same CIFOR researcher, at this meeting “he [the current District
Head] lauded the activity” and “was prepared to inaugurate the results.”52, 53.
Earlier, in August 2000, when the initial round of mapping of village boundaries had
been completed, the interim district government noted that it would carry forth the boundary
mapping activity, charging coordination to the district planning agency, and even requested
that CIFOR continue the mapping, although according to one CIFOR researcher the district
government’s actual commitment to this was unclear. For this reason and the limited
resources and programmatic boundaries of CIFOR, CIFOR did not continue with the
mapping, but moved on to another applied research activity, viz., village land use planning
and local resource regulations in three villages. Regardless of the district government’s
commitment, what is clear is that at that point in time – a time when several IPPK permits
had already been issued -- district government officials were not disapproving of the
mapping activity, and indeed there may have even been a few key supporters within district
government.
To date, however, none of the village territory maps have been recognized by district
government, and the district government has not followed up on the CIFOR-initiated
mapping activity, as it had noted to CIFOR previously, and CIFOR itself has not re-initiated
the mapping activity. At a meeting in October 2001 in which CIFOR was requested to
present its research results to all senior district officials, the district government reprimanded
CIFOR for the village territory mapping activity – which CIFOR had effectively ceased in
August 2000 – noting that the district government had to deal with the fallout of CIFOR’s
52 “dia salut…mau kukuhkan hasil.” 53 The district government by this point had issued IPPK permits, the first one being issued in July 2000.
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activity and that CIFOR’s mapping related activities had fueled community conflicts and
villagers’ protests against companies and the government. Further, according to one CIFOR
researcher present at the meeting, the Head of the District Forestry Service asked rhetorically
with respect to CIFOR’s mapping activity what CIFOR’s authority was and that it was
actually the authority of the government to conduct mapping and not CIFOR or the
communities.54 This was a significant change in the district government’s attitude toward
CIFOR and the mapping activity.
In July 2000, the district government started issuing IPPKs and as their numbers grew, so
did boundary conflicts between villages. Moreover, the IPPKs often would not pay the
agreed compensation to villages, and villagers by this time felt confident enough to protest
against government and companies. According to one CIFOR researcher, the district
government needed a scapegoat, and thus they blamed CIFOR and the village territory
mapping activity55. Prior to this meeting, the district government had never expressed
unhappiness with the mapping activity. Indeed, although certain villages were using the
temporary maps as justification for claiming large swathes of forest areas to broker deals
with IPPKs, it was the district government that was issuing the IPPK permits -- the district
government could have as easily not issued the permits. At this same meeting, the district
government criticized CIFOR for working closely with the central government in Jakarta and
villagers in Malinau, yet not engaging the district government enough.
As a result of this meeting in October 2001, CIFOR was told to stop field activities and
data collection temporarily because the district government needed to decide on how CIFOR
54 “mana hak kita? Wewenang pemerintah.” 55 That the mapping activity itself did not cause conflicts is evinced by the escalation in conflicts over natural resources involving communities throughout the country, many of whom lacked maps of any sort (see Yasmi et al. (2004) for documentation of the escalation of conflicts).
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should proceed. In February 2002, the District Head informed CIFOR that it should no longer
focus on community mapping, rights and tenure issues, and thus CIFOR necessarily shifted
its research focus to improving villagers’ economic options.
This was a shift in the district government’s attitude and perception of CIFOR, and
destabilized CIFOR’s position in Malinau, as well as limiting the scope of acceptable
research activities conducted by CIFOR. The shift in the district government’s attitude
toward CIFOR and mapping was also a way of displacing blame for conflicts within and
between villages, as well as between villages and companies and government. Additionally,
the district government’s criticizing and reprimanding CIFOR – constraining CIFOR -- was
not based on CIFOR’s violating a previous agreement between CIFOR and the district
government, and indeed from prior interactions, it seems that the district government had not
taken issue with the activity at all.
c. Constraining and destabilizing continue to be factors
The district government’s constraining and destabilizing of CIFOR’s role in the district
and relationship with the district government continue to be an everyday condition of
CIFOR’s work that CIFOR researchers must negotiate at an interpersonal level. In a
conversation I had with the Head of District Planning in July 2004, he made a series of
statements delimiting the space of CIFOR. He noted first that “sometimes there is a
difference of perception between CIFOR and the district government” such that “CIFOR
activities conflict with the government’s authority and laws and regulations.”56 For example,
he noted that CIFOR’s activity of “village level spatial planning was the district
56 “kadang-kadang ada ketidaksamaan persepsi antara pemerintah kabupaten dan CIFOR…pekerjaan CIFOR tumpang tindih….kebijakan daerah dan undang-undang.”
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government’s authority and could not be carried out by another party.”57 Implied in his
statement is that CIFOR is overstepping its proper role, and thus he is instantiating or
delineating what that proper role should and should not be. As a further example, with
respect to the village territory mapping, he noted that it was a “waste of time” (“buang
waktu”) since “after the mapping there were community conflicts over forests” and that
“after CIFOR left that activity, the district government had to deal with it.”58 Through a re-
telling of events that implies a causal linkage between the mapping activity, community
conflicts and a further burden on district government, the Head of District Planning is
making a prescriptive statement about what CIFOR should and should not be doing.
Further reprimanding CIFOR, he commented that “the application of CIFOR’s research
was to date not evident”59 and that “there had been no concrete action from CIFOR.”60 He
also noted that “while CIFOR does produce research results, it’s mostly for CIFOR itself,”
implying that it’s not applicable or appropriate.61 In a similar vein, another government
official noted that providing people research results in no way ensured that people would use
them and that CIFOR should instruct people on how to apply research results and
recommendations. Further, the district official who worked for several years as a member of
CIFOR’s field team noted that indeed the expectation from CIFOR had been that its research
results would be adopted or used by the district government, but that the idea that good
57 “misalnya membuat tataruang desa…itu pemerintah kabupaten, tidak boleh orang lain.” 58 “setelah pemetaan, berselisih asset hutan. Saling mengkalim. Setelah CIFOR pergi, harus selesai oleh pemerintah daerah..” 59 “applikasi penelitian belum kelihatan.” 60 “sampai sekarang belum ada tinkdakan konkret.” 61 “hasil penelitian CIFOR ada tapi sebagian besar untuk mereka sendiri.”
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research would sell itself proved to be a poor assumption since there were many other
political-economic factors involved in the district government’s decision making.
With respect to the type of research that CIFOR should be conducting, the Head of the
District Planning Agency was emphatic about valuation studies of Malinau’s forest resources
such as carbon stock and payment for environment services. He also made several
prescriptive comments about what CIFOR should not do, thereby circumscribing CIFOR’s
position and role – “don’t make problems with communities,”62 implying that CIFOR should
avoid activities such as mapping, which according to him created conflict at the village level;
“don’t follow issues handled by the district government”63; “there must be a solution, don’t
just criticize”64; and “don’t just be interested in pre-determined or pre-mandated research,”65
implying that CIFOR selected research priorities without consulting local actors.
d. District government constrains but maintains engagement
Although the Head of District Planning Agency is limiting the scope of CIFOR’s role and
relationship with villagers and the district government, he is not implying that there is not a
role or place for CIFOR. Indeed, he noted that “if CIFOR were to leave Malinau it would be
a [negative] effect” because “CIFOR activities can be used [by the district government].”66
Moreover, he noted that CIFOR has made certain contributions such as “collecting and
disseminating a list of plant species [in Malinau]” and “assessing the value of forests for
62 “jangan membuat masalah terhadap masyarakat.” 63 “jangan ikut isu yang ditangani pemda.” 64 “harus punya solusi. Jangan kritik aja.” 65 “jangan hanya diasyik dengan penelitian di-order.” 66 “kalau CIFOR pulang dampak ada. Kegiatan CIFOR bisa pakai.”
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communities.”67 Further, he made several suggestions as to future CIFOR activities, thereby
implying that he sees a role for CIFOR.
The repertoire of statements made by the Head of the District Planning Agency is
indicative of other officials’ perceptions of CIFOR and captures the attempts at constraining
or circumscribing CIFOR’s activities. For example, the Head of the District Forestry Service
criticized CIFOR for informing villagers that oil palm plantations are not suitable to Malinau
and that they will have negative effects. He noted that CIFOR did not consider the economic
benefits that the district and villages would gain, and that CIFOR “seems to be anti-investor”
(Widjono AMZ 2003: 13). In a further reprimand of CIFOR’s activities, the District
Secretary, in reflecting on the period of IPPKs, noted that at that time CIFOR was “acting as
an Indonesian NGO,” “fighting for the rights of communities” and acting “like a
provocateur” when they “should have been consulting with the district government.”68 Thus,
the district government attempts to limit CIFOR from engaging in activities that could lead to
criticism of local government policies and practices, create accountability demands from
communities onto local government, and/or strengthen villagers’ position vis-à-vis district
government. Conversely, the district government wants CIFOR to support its position and
policies vis-à-vis villagers. According to district government, this is justified because CIFOR
is a guest of the Indonesian government and the purpose of CIFOR in Malinau is to assist and
serve through its technical expertise.
Implicit in this constraining, however, is that district officials by and large still engage
CIFOR, maintaining a connection and thus possibilities. The question, however, is why.
67 ““penyebaran jenis-jenis tumbuhan. Menghimpun nilai hutan untuk masyarakat.” 68 “begerak sebagai LSM…perjuangan hak masyarakat…seharusnya CIFOR konsultasi pemerintah daerah…septerti provocateur waktu itu.”
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Why do district government officials engage CIFOR, albeit in varied and limited fashion?
What are the perceived benefits of CIFOR’s presence for district government officials?
Although it would be difficult for the district government to expel CIFOR from Malinau due
to the MOU between CIFOR and the Government of Indonesia, the district government could
decide to disengage entirely, but it does not. Indeed, the District Secretary referred to CIFOR
as the district’s “asset” and “hopes that CIFOR will continue to be in Malinau” and “involved
in various processes.”69 That said, he noted that “if CIFOR were to leave [Malinau], the asset
would be lost but [the district] would not be handicapped.70
CIFOR’s access to senior district government officials is indicative of the power
dynamics of the relationship. Since 2001, CIFOR’s field team, all of whom have an intimate
understanding of the history of the region and people and politics, has made an extensive and
intensive commitment to establish rapport with the local government. Their personal and
professional interactions with district government officials are frequent and cordial. That
said, although CIFOR does have access to district officials, it is not preferential access. For
example, CIFOR researchers must often wait for hours to meet senior officials, and
sometimes hours of waiting do not result in a meeting. Moreover, the attendance of officials,
particularly senior ones, at CIFOR initiated meetings to which they are invited is never a
certainty, which is indicative of the lack of commitment of the district government to CIFOR
and villagers.
The question of perceived benefits is even more intriguing given that CIFOR does not
offer large-scale projects or project funding to the district government. There are several
answers to the question of why district officials continue to engage CIFOR. In addition to not
69 “CIFOR asset…berharap tetap exist…terlibat proses Malinau.” 70 “Kalau CIFOR pulang, asset hilang tapi bukan handicapped.”
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tasking the coffers of district government, CIFOR fulfills certain social service functions that
the district government should carry out, e.g., villagers’ participation and involvement in
governance issues through such forums as the annual CIFOR initiated inter-village
workshops and community-government workshops, as well as through legal literacy and
conflict resolution initiatives not only for villagers but also for government officials.
Additionally, CIFOR has provided technical trainings such as GIS for the district officials
who have access to and are responsible for using the technology, yet lack the technical skills.
Moreover, as mentioned earlier, both district officials and villagers perceive CIFOR as
the main interlocutor between them. As one district government official in the legal affairs
division noted, “CIFOR is close to communities in the forest…the district government has
yet to be.”71 He also noted that “CIFOR has helped the district government sufficiently,”
providing legal drafting training and helping to familiarize district regulations to
communities.72 He went on further to note how understaffed his division was and how
CIFOR’s legal literacy and legal drafting activities were needed at the village level for the
district’s village autonomy program (Gerbangdema) and that it would help the development
of district authority73. It is clear from this official’s statements that CIFOR is filling a gap in
the functioning of district government.
This lower level government official, who has a NGO background, has a much more
positive perspective on the benefits of citizen involvement in governance than certain more
powerful government officials, such as the District Secretary, who in commenting on
71 Moses: “CIFOR dekat masyarakat sekitar hutan…pemda belum.” 72 “CIFOR cukup bantu pemerintah daerah…legal drafting…bantu sosialisasi ke masyarakat.” 73 “bagian hukum hanya delapan orang…tidak cukup…legal drafting perlu di tingkat desa kalau mau desa otonomi.”
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CIFOR’s activities with villagers noted that “CIFOR’s mission was okay,” but “the tools [or
methods] needed to be adjusted” to the local situation.74 As an example of how CIFOR had
erred, he explained how CIFOR’s community mapping activity, although good in its
community approach, “provided villagers an exaggerated sense of their tenure rights that was
not in accordance with the district government.”75 The District Secretary’s notion of
community participation or empowerment -- one devoid of negative political consequences
for district government – reinforces the idea that the district government perceives benefit
from CIFOR’s de facto government functions, as long as they remain within acceptable
boundaries.
District officials also perceive CIFOR as a vehicle to the potential national and
international largesse of conservation – a primary interlocutor between the district and those
with national and international conservation interests. CIFOR provides status and legitimacy
to the district government regarding, and allows the district government to tap into, the global
discourse of sustainable forestry, conservation and payments for environmental services.
Indeed, as discussed in an earlier section, many government officials, such as the District
Secretary, the Head of the District Forestry Service and Head of the District Planning
Agency, often speak of Malinau’s forest resources as the “lungs of the earth” (“Malinau paru
paru dunia”), and its geographic position as “the heart” (“jantung”) of Kalimantan.
Consistently, district government officials emphasized to me that Malinau is home to the
headwaters of East Kalimantan’s six major river systems and that Malinau’s forests protect
the region from extreme flooding. Indeed, 95% of the 42,000 km2 district is demarcated by
74 “misi CIFOR oke….alat harus disesuaikan.” 75 “masyarakat diberi pemahaman terlalu jauh untuk saat ini…pemetaan desa…bagus karna pendekatan tapi nga sesual dengan pemerintah daerah.”
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the government as forest, and CIFOR has noted that Malinau is home to one of the largest
expanses of intact tropical forest in the world (Barr et al. 2001). District officials continue,
noting that it is unfair that Malinau receives no compensation for the environmental services
it provides, and that villagers remain forest dependant without access to the benefits of
development. The district government expects monetary compensation for the services
Malinau’s forests provide the outside world, whether it is clean water to other districts in the
province or oxygen to the world. Conservation notions such as payment for environment
services, virgin forests and carbon trading are a common part of district officials’ discourse.
And it is here that the district government perceives the potential benefit of CIFOR’s
presence in the district, viz., that CIFOR should validate the importance of Malinau’s forest
resources for the outside world, justify payments for these environmental services to
Malinau, and identify external parties to make such payments76. Indeed, CIFOR has already
brought significant attention to Malinau’s forest resources. In addition to the mere presence
of CIFOR in Malinau, which confers a global importance to Malinau, CIFOR brings a
consistent flow of national and international scientists and policymakers to the district. Also,
through CIFOR’s efforts a village in the district won the National Environmental Award
(Kalpataru), which brought national recognition to the district. Further, CIFOR has raised
international awareness of the importance of Malinau’s forests and district-level efforts to
conserve its forests through such initiatives as nominating a village in the district in the
World Water Council’s Water Action Contest in 2003, which focused on initiatives to
resolve world water issues. The village was subsequently selected as one of the 150 global
76 CIFOR was indeed in the process of conducting research on this topic during my fieldwork period, as well as research on international donor interest in paying for these services. An article entitled “When donors get cold feet: The community conservation concession in Setulang (Kalimantan, Indonesia) that never happened” by Wunder et al. is an example of the results of this research and will be a chapter in a book to be published by Earthscan.
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finalists (out of 870) to attend and present at the World Water Forum in Kyoto, Japan. Thus,
the district government is well aware of the articulating and interlocuting ability of CIFOR.
The Head of the District Forestry Service noted that “CIFOR is the district’s channel and
voice to the outside.”77 Another official noted that one of the government’s expectations was
that CIFOR could “connect them with international donors.”78
That said, the recognition made possible by CIFOR has not translated into financial
compensation for the district, and thus district government officials emphasize that CIFOR
has not done enough and should assist in this endeavor “to sell Malinau to the outside world”
(“jual ke dunia luar”) so that the district can receive compensation for the environmental
services it provides. It is the possibility that CIFOR can serve as interlocutor, broker, and
legitimizer for the district government in the imagined world of conservation-related
payments -- in part evinced by CIFOR’s successful efforts at drawing national and
international attention to Malinau – that keeps the district government interested in CIFOR
itself.
4. Summary of District Government Perceptions and Relationship with CIFOR
I have attempted to describe and analyze the relationship between CIFOR and the
Malinau district government. In doing so, I have demonstrated the fragile, negotiated and
compromised position of CIFOR vis-à-vis the district government. Further, I attempted to
show that for the district government CIFOR is a primary interlocutor between the
government and villagers, on the one hand, and government and extra-local conservation
community, on the other. I also examined the conditions and practices of CIFOR being an
interlocutor and demonstrated that CIFOR does not have direct power or authority over the
77 “CIFOR suara guang di luar.” 78 “hubungan dengan international donor.”
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district government, nor is the relationship between CIFOR and the district government a
seamless given, a stable fact.
Indeed precisely the opposite characterizes the relationship. It is the district
government that maintains a position of power vis-à-vis CIFOR and attempts to constrain or
circumscribe CIFOR’s role and position in the district such that CIFOR’s work in no way
sparks criticism of the district government’s policies and practices. Moreover, the
relationship between CIFOR and the district government is not stable and must constantly be
negotiated by CIFOR through interpersonal engagements to find a perceived common ground
with district officials and their multiple and unpredictable interests.
As I discussed, there are several factors that militate against CIFOR having a more
embedded relationship with the district government – factors that district government
officials are well aware of. First, CIFOR does not hold institutional leverage vis-à-vis district
government – indeed, CIFOR is a guest of the Indonesian government. Moreover, although
CIFOR conducts applied research through the paradigm of “participatory action research,”
the “actions” of CIFOR’s initiatives are limited since ultimately CIFOR is a research center
and not, for example, an advocacy NGO. Thus, in many ways CIFOR’s influence is limited
to reports of research results, recommendations and provision of information. Second,
CIFOR and the district government are each mired in their own institutional bureaucracies
and incentives – although CIFOR maintains a certain amount of flexibility in its research
agendas, it is not at the beck and call of the district government. This difference in
institutional incentives has translated into a significant lack of interest on the part of the
district government regarding CIFOR’s research topics, use of CIFOR’s research and
collaboration with CIFOR. In other words, CIFOR to a great extent is conducting applied
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research in an unsupportive institutional environment – there is little to indicate that the
district government shares CIFOR’s concern with research-informed policy, equitable natural
resource management, and villagers’ rights to participate as full citizens. This inhospitable
institutional environment goes beyond the district government, and includes the multiple
uncertainties that ad hoc decentralization has engendered.
However, the district government continues to engage CIFOR. That CIFOR does
have access to senior district officials and that at times these officials make commitments to
support or partner with CIFOR demonstrate that the district government perceives a certain
level of shared interest with and/or need for CIFOR. For example, CIFOR works closely with
the District Village Empowerment Service on poverty alleviation issues, and the Head of this
agency strongly applauds CIFOR and the collaborative arrangement. Other government
officials have commented positively about CIFOR assisting the district in gaining national
and international environmental recognition, as well as the trainings and facilitation CIFOR
has provided for villagers and district government officials. The district government’s
perceived benefits from CIFOR’s presence are related to shared institutional incentives and
district officials’ personal ones. For example, very little evidence indicates that the district
government is committed, now or in the past, to sustainable forest management or to
improving the livelihoods of forest dependent communities, however there are strong
institutional and personal incentives to diminish community conflict and ease villagers’
dissatisfaction with the district government, particularly as it concerns basic livelihood
issues. These are issues that CIFOR has and does directly address, and hence, the district
government uses CIFOR to fulfill these social services that the district government is
incapable or unwilling to take on. Moreover, CIFOR does not task the coffers of the district
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government. Further, the district government has used CIFOR as a scapegoat in dealing with
community protests of IPPKs and government policies. Lastly, another personal and
institutional incentive for the district government to work with CIFOR is that through CIFOR
the district government taps into/accesses state and international power. The metaphor of
tropical forest, specifically Borneo/Kalimantan, being the “Lungs of the Earth” is recognized
and deployed by district officials. CIFOR brings national and international attention – some
wanted and some unwanted -- to Malinau, and it is the potential national and international
largesse that in part motivates the district government’s collaboration with CIFOR.
B. Villagers’ perceptions and relationship with CIFOR: a key interlocutor of whom much is
expected but who has been unable to deliver.
In this section of the chapter, I discuss villagers’ perceptions of and relationship with
CIFOR to understand their expectations regarding CIFOR, the extent to which those
expectations have been borne out, and explanations for unmet expectations. Fundamentally, I
examine why villagers are interested in working with CIFOR and how they perceive CIFOR.
Villagers perceive CIFOR to be a key interlocutor, confidant and “bridge” to the outside
world, even though many villagers’ expectations for CIFOR’s presence in Malinau have not
been met, and thus led to a sense of disappointment among some villagers. That said,
villagers continue to engage CIFOR, and the relationship is maintained through the hope and
possibility engendered by the collaboration’s more minor achievements.
1. CIFOR as Interlocutor: Bridge, Information Source, Confidant, Advocate
Villagers perceive CIFOR as one of their most trustworthy interlocutors with and about
the outside world. Particularly important for villagers is CIFOR’s interlocuting role between
them and the district government. Indeed, villagers frequently refer to CIFOR as the
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“bridge” (jembatan) between villagers and government, which is consistent with how CIFOR
institutionally represents itself to villagers and district government. CIFOR justifies this by
framing itself and its “bridging” role as neutral, as merely being a vehicle for information and
communication. CIFOR’s role as a “bridge” or interlocutor for villagers has several
dimensions in everyday practice.
Villagers perceive CIFOR as one of their primary means of obtaining information
about district government policies and practices, as well as broader issues that affect
villagers’ lives such as national decentralization policies. Indeed, many villagers note that it
is through CIFOR that they find out about district government regulations and decrees, and
that the district government itself rarely provides this type of information. While CIFOR has
conducted discrete “participatory action research” activities with villagers such as mapping
of village territories, through which villagers gain information, CIFOR also carries out a
more regular repertoire of information and bridging activities. Since 2000, CIFOR has
regularly provided villagers newsletters, policy briefs and other written material regarding
locally relevant issues such as different types of timber concessions, oil palm plantations, and
district government regulations affecting village governance and administration. Further,
since 1999 CIFOR has organized three-day annual workshops of the 27 villages in the
Malinau watershed. The agendas of these annual workshops are based upon prior input from
villagers. As part of or immediately following these workshops, CIFOR also organizes
dialogues between district government officials and villagers, topics and questions for which
are prepared during the inter-village workshop. These workshops and dialogues are one of
the few occasions where villagers from all villages gather to discuss and communicate, and
one of the very few events where villagers can speak directly with government officials in an
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open forum. Government officials sometime attend these workshops, although they are
frequently absent and their participation is limited.
Since 2000 the field team has also conducted monitoring visits of all the villages in
the Malinau watershed. These monitoring visits are conducted every six months and
normally are one day and one night per village. The face-to-face interactions are an
extremely productive way for villagers and CIFOR to exchange information. Another means
by which CIFOR provides information to villagers is by conducting visits to other regions of
Indonesia and meeting with villagers who have experienced situations pertinent to villagers
from Malinau, e.g., rubber gardens in the district of West Kutai and oil palm plantations in
the district Paser, both of which are in East Kalimantan.
Villagers’ comments reflect the value they attribute to CIFOR as an information
source and bridge. One villager noted that a key “benefit of CIFOR is that communities can
[now] know” about a range of issues such as government policies.79 Another commented that
“the use of CIFOR is the information [CIFOR provides]” because “the district government
rarely provides information.”80 Taking this one step further, another villager commented that
“communities benefit from CIFOR’s informing them of various policies and practices,”
which sometimes lead to villager protests of companies and/or government .81
With respect to being a bridge, one villager rhetorically asked, “If not CIFOR, who
can we rely on?” and observed that “CIFOR has a link to the district government, but is not
the same as the government.”82 Another noted that CIFOR was a “convener between
79 “kebaikan CIFOR…masyarakat bisa tahu.” 80 “guna CIFOR…informasi…jarang ada informasi dari pemda.” 81 “ada manfaat untuk masyarakat…CIFOR kasihtahu ini-ini pada masyarakat… jadi demo.”
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communities and government”83 and that CIFOR’s plans and activities were appropriate.84
Also, the visits to other regions were noted by villagers as extremely helpful,85 as were the
inter-village workshops, particularly since “the different Dayak ethnic groups themselves
were unable or unwilling to be close [to each other].”86
During the 2003 inter-village workshop a CIFOR staff member who is not involved
in the ACM project asked the 52 participants to evaluate the benefits or use of CIFOR.87
Participants’ responses emphasized the information and bridge building aspects, viz.,
expanding their thinking, information and experience; providing input to communities
through advice and explanations; improving relationships among villages; helping to bridge
communities and government; and improving awareness about forest conservation
(Wollenberg et al. 2004).
Another critical element of villagers’ perceptions of CIFOR as interlocutor is CIFOR’s
role as villagers’ confidant and advocate, and not merely a neutral party. In this regard, one
villager observed that “CIFOR protects us [villagers]” and that “if CIFOR had not come [to
Malinau], logging would be uncontrolled.”88 Indeed, CIFOR’s field team over the years has
built such strong rapport and trust with villagers that villagers frequently seek out members
of CIFOR’s field team to inform them or ask for information. One village head who has been
82 “kalau nga cifor, harap pada siapa? CIFOR ada kaitan sama pemda…nga sama pemerintah.” 83 “penggabung masyarakat dan pemda.” 84 “rencana betul-betul.” 85 “studi banding bantu betul.” 86 “suku-suku sendiri nga bisa begitu akrab.” 87 I was a participant-observer at this workshop and was present during this evaluation. 88 “CIFOR untuk melindungi kita…kalau CIFOR nga masuk, tebang sesuka-suka.”
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involved in CIFOR activities for several years noted that although he is disappointed with the
lack of concrete results from CIFOR activities, he an other villagers continue to participate in
CIFOR activities because of close relations with the field team who he “considers as local
people” (“anggap orang sini”).
CIFOR as villagers’ confidant is also demonstrated by the quality and quantity of
sensitive and personal information that villagers provide to the field team, ranging from the
history of inter- and intra-village conflicts to individual payments from timber
concessionaires. Villagers also provide critical feedback directly to CIFOR’s field team,
which is significant in light of the political-economic, power and status differences between
CIFOR and villagers. Villagers perceive CIFOR as a key means to access, inter alia, state
power.
That villagers to a great extent feel comfortable with providing critical feedback to
CIFOR indicates that this hierarchical aspect of the relationship is muted -- villagers are not
concerned that CIFOR will leave them because they are critical of CIFOR. Moreover, during
a field visit conducted by myself and a CIFOR field team member in November 2002, one
village head instructed us to write down that his village had not received any development or
assistance projects from the district government. His instruction for us to write down that
item demonstrates his understanding that CIFOR is an interlocutor and confidant, indicating
that he feels enough equity in the relationship between himself and CIFOR that he can make
that request. Villagers do not tell those they perceive as higher authorities, e.g., government
officials, to write things down. Related to the issue of writing, several villagers noted that
CIFOR’s documentation of local knowledge and practices support villagers. One older,
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illiterate villager noted the importance of CIFOR documenting so that others such as children
could see and read about local knowledge, since otherwise it could be forgotten.89
Another example of villagers’ trust in CIFOR is that several have requested CIFOR to
settle territorial boundary disputes between villages. One village head informed me that
CIFOR “should not be hesitant about determining villagers’ rights [regarding boundaries].”90
In regards to the CIFOR-initiated mapping exercise, another noted that although “there were
boundaries previously, they were not clear” and that “if CIFOR had not been there, it would
be chaotic [now].”91 Villagers also want the district government to settle these disputes, but
many feel closer to CIFOR. As discussed in an earlier section, many villagers have little faith
in the district government, noting that “the district government is hopeless”92 and that they
“wouldn’t imagine relying on the government,”93 and thus thank CIFOR for their efforts.94
Also, CIFOR asks villagers what they want, the government rarely does. Even though
CIFOR has repeatedly informed villagers that it does not have the authority to settle these
disputes and that villagers must first come to an agreement among themselves, which
villagers acknowledge as correct, they continue to request this. On a related point, villagers
are not singling out CIFOR to take on this task, but rather they are making a broader request
for resolution and enforcement of agreements, institutions for which are lacking.
89 “mendata semua…bisa lihat dan baca…anak-anak bisa tahu…kalau tidak, bisa lupa.”
90 “jangan ragu-ragu untuk menentu hak masyarakat.” 91 “batas…sebelum ada tapi belum hitam di atas putih…kalau CIFOR nga ada, ada kekacauan.” 92 “pemda tidak ada harapan.” 93 “kalau mengharap pemda, nga mungkin.” 94 “terima kasih pada CIFOR.”
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The trust villagers place in CIFOR is even more remarkable given that many villagers are
often unclear about the overall objective (tujuan) of CIFOR’s work. In my asking about
what he thought CIFOR’s objective was, one villager turned the question around asking
“what is [CIFOR’s] research for? What is the objective?”95, but then noted with certainty that
the objective was good and that CIFOR helps communities even though there had not been
any assistance yet.96 CIFOR has been able to establish this high level of trust through
various means: In addition to CIFOR’s long term presence in Malinau and in the villages,
CIFOR’s field team consists of individuals who are extremely familiar with and have an
intimate knowledge of local people and practices – there is a personal connection between
the field team and villagers. Indeed, one of the members of the field team is a local villager.
Moreover, members of the field team have cultivated a comfortable and casual relationship
with villagers – they often visit villages and stay overnight, and the team always welcomes
villagers to visit the field office. Further, from the perspective of villagers, CIFOR is one of
the few organizations or actors that demonstrates an explicit interest in their lives and
welfare, and thus their options are limited.
2. Villagers’ disappointment with CIFOR: lack of tangible impacts
While the relationship between villagers and CIFOR is positive, and villagers perceive
CIFOR as an ally, many of these same villagers express one consistent disappointment
regarding CIFOR and CIFOR activities, viz., that there have been no concrete results from
CIFOR’s research and related activities. This was not only expressed in interviews I
conducted independently of CIFOR in mid-2004, but also in interviews conducted by a
95 “Penelitian untuk apa? Tujuan?” 96 “tujuan bagus…bantu masyakarakat…belum ada bantuan.”
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CIFOR field team member and myself in late 2002. Villagers were quite frank about this
disappointment, and some villager leaders noted growing frustration among villagers.
Statements such as the following were indicative of the disappointment or criticism
expressed by villagers: One villager commented that “there is no change…no realization [of
CIFOR’s research] that can be seen by communities.”97 Another noted, “communities
haven’t felt the results, benefits from CIFOR’s research.” 98 With respect to CIFOR’s
research informing policy, one villager commented, “until now there has yet to be a policy
that can be felt by communities.”99 With respect to CIFOR being a bridge and information
source, one village head asked rhetorically, “how is the result? Until now there’s nothing.”100
On a related point, while villagers appreciate the information that CIFOR provides in
reports, newsletter and policy briefs, the use is limited because villagers note it is not their
hobby to read,101 as farmers they “don’t have the opportunity to study [reports],” 102 or they
are illiterate. This is problematic because CIFOR relies heavily on text to disseminate
information, particularly since the field team, ranging from two to four people, is limited in
how frequently they meet face-to-face with people from the 27 villages in the watershed.
Also, although villagers comment positively on the annual workshops, many agree with
the comment from one villager that “the workshop is not enough, there’s not follow up.”103
97 “tidak ada perubahan…nga pernah ada realisasi dilihat masyarakat.” 98 “masyarakat belum merasa hasil, manfaat dari penelitian CIFOR” 99 “sampai saat ini belum ada keibijakan dirasakan.” 100 “bagaimana realisasi? Sampai sekarang belum.” 101 “nga hobi baca.” 102 “petani nga sempat belajar.”
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For example, in the 2004 inter-village workshop, CIFOR invited the provincial forestry
research agency (BPPK) to demonstrate producing gaharu or eaglewood by inoculating an
uninfected tree with the fungi responsible for the aromatic, resinous heartwood. One village
head who attended noted that “there was no follow up to the gaharu training.”104 Similarly,
another village head commented that the problem with the gaharu training was that villagers
were just informed about it, shown a demonstration, but no extension or follow up.105
Another village head captured the general disappointment with CIFOR sentiment quite
well, explaining that he was not satisfied with the results of CIFOR’s research, and that “our
[villagers’] desires are results that can change villagers’ livelihoods….from impoverished to
a certain standard…[and that] the workshop was not satisfying…we have yet to see the
result…there has yet to be change based on results.”106 He continued slightly indignant that
CIFOR’s reports are good for CIFOR, “they make a report [and] are happy…they’re
finished…but there has not yet been change.” 107
3. Expectations unmet: Unfounded assumptions and unsupportive institutional environment
Indeed, from one vantage point, CIFOR’s “participatory action research” has not
achieved much for villagers. For example, boundary disputes between villages persist, village
territories have not been recognized by the district government, the district government has
not adopted recommendations based on research conducted collaboratively between CIFOR
103 “lokakarya tidak cukup…nga ada tindaklanjut.” 104 “tindaklanjut pelatihan [gaharu] kurang.” 105 “masalah dengan pelatihan gaharu...contoh, kasihtahu aja…’gimana?” 106 “keinginan kita…hasil yang bisa mengubah kehidupan masyarakat…dari miskin sampai standar tertentu…lokakarya nga puas…hasil belum kita lihat…hasil perubahan belum ada.” 107 “mereka buat laporan…senang…sudah selesai…untuk berubah belum.”
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and villagers, and villagers’ proposals to district government regarding income generating
activities based on research with CIFOR have not been approved. From a research
perspective, “participatory action research” is considered beneficial because it is less
extractive and more inclusive than traditional research and also allows for documentation and
analysis of particular interventions. Yet, from a development intervention perspective and
from the perspective of villagers, ACM specifically and CIFOR more generally seem only
partially committed since the extent of and follow-up to the intervention are limited by the
fact that ultimately CIFOR is a research institution and not a development one.
That said, villagers continue to participate in CIFOR’s activities and comment positively
about certain aspects of CIFOR’s work. As one villager noted regarding CIFOR, “there
hasn’t been anything we can feel, not yet any benefit from CIFOR’s activities…[but] it’s
impossible that good people would just look at us, definitely they have the good objective to
help.”108
As this comment suggests, it is the promise of change, of hope and possibility, cultivated
through CIFOR’s building strong rapport and constantly engaging villagers that keeps
villagers coming back. This individual’s comments are also illuminating with respect to
villagers’ expectations of CIFOR and CIFOR activities and the extent to which these
expectations are borne out. Putting together villagers’ disappointment and praise in one
analytical frame reveals a broader frustration and understanding regarding how villagers
expect CIFOR’s role to play out and how it actually has to date. Villagers’ expectations of
impact or change from CIFOR’s research are due to the following assumptions: (1) CIFOR
and district government have a MOU agreeing to collaborate, (2) CIFOR is an international 108 “belum ada yang kita rasa, belum ada manfaat dari kegiatan CIFOR...nga mungkin orang baik lihat kita percuma-cuma, pasti dia punya tujuan bantu baik.”
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organization and thus has influence over district government policies, (3) CIFOR has
conducted sound research based on community aspirations and thus would ostensibly inform
policy, and (4) participating in CIFOR activities through the “action research” approach
should lead to change. Indeed, as discussed earlier, these assumptions were not only held by
villagers, but were initially broad operating principles for CIFOR as well.
These assumptions came across in comments made during my conversations with
villagers regarding what they expected CIFOR’s leverage to be and what actually transpired.
For example, one village head noted that CIFOR should have leverage since CIFOR “is
supported, protected by multiple countries” and “protected by law.”109 Another noted that
CIFOR should have a powerful position since “CIFOR has the character of international
research, representing the world.”110 And indeed villagers have been frustrated by the fact
that the suggestions based on collaborative research between CIFOR and villagers have not
been taken into account in district policies. One village head noted with exasperation that
“policies are not in accordance with villagers’ aspirations” and asked “why are [these
policies] different from the research carried out by CIFOR and communities.” 111
As the relationship between villagers, district government and CIFOR has played out, it
has become clear that these assumptions were unfounded. As one villager observed, CIFOR
“appears strong but is not,”112 indicating an awareness of CIFOR’s lack of political power
vis-à-vis the district government. One of the key reasons for this is that in Malinau, as well as
in Indonesia and internationally, CIFOR operates in an institutional environment that is often
109 “berupa lembaga penelitian didukung, lindungi beberapa negara…dilindungi oleh hukum.” 110 “CIFOR bersifat penelitian internasional, mewakili dunia.” 111 “kebijakan tidak sesuai dengan aspirasi, kenapa beda dengan penelitian sama masyarakat.” 112 “kelihatan kuat tapi tidak.”
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unsupportive of and sometimes antagonistic toward many of the assumptions and values that
CIFOR was ostensibly founded upon. As discussed in an earlier section of this chapter, the
relationship between CIFOR and the district government is anything but given, and CIFOR’s
influence on district government has been limited. On this point, one villager noted that
“CIFOR inspires communities to demand [their rights] from district government…[but the
relationship] with the district government is not clear.”113 Similarly, with respect to why the
mapping of village territories had not led to the legal recognition villagers had expected, this
same individual observed that “the district government is unsupportive. The district
government and CIFOR do not collaborate closely, [and] the obstacle is the district
government. CIFOR cannot scold [or protest] directly, the communities are the ones that
scold directly, but the government has not responded although they’ve been scolded.”114
Thus, while expressing disappointment that CIFOR’s activities have not met their
expectations and manifested the changes hoped for, villagers are very much aware of the
unsupportive institutional environment and do not solely, or even mostly, blame CIFOR.
The unsupportive institutional environment within which CIFOR’s applied research
activities take place in Malinau is not limited to government, but rather extends to intra and
inter village relations among Dayak groups. Dayak villagers in Malinau often comment on
the prevalence of “Dayak eating Dayak” (Dayak makan Dayak) since decentralization,
referring to a lack of social cohesion or collaboration among Dayaks as well as sub-ethnic
groups. Analyzing territorial boundary conflicts between villages illuminates the various
dimensions of village-level institutional constraints to meeting villagers’ expectations for 113 “CIFOR membangkit masyarakat supaya bisa menuntut pemda…dengan pemda belum jelas.” 114 “pemda kurang mendukung…pemda dan cifor tidak begitu kerjasama…halangan pemda….cifor nga bisa menggonggong langsung, masyarakat yang menggonggong tapi pemerintah belum respon walaupun digonggong.”
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CIFOR related activities. With the implementation of ad hoc decentralization processes since
mid 2000, villagers have for the first time the possibility of gaining significant profit from
land and/or forested regions that they can claim. Opportunities for villagers to profit from
territorial claims, e.g., IPPKs, have exacerbated previous boundary disputes and sparked new
ones between villages, which often translate into conflicts between Dayak ethnic groups.
Although boundary disputes between villages existed prior to decentralization, the onset of
decentralization ratcheted up the possible profits and conflicts. Indeed, at least six villages
(Limberg [forthcoming]) used the temporary maps produced through the CIFOR activity to
justify claims to and negotiate with IPPKs. As one villager head noted, maps were
“negotiation tools with companies” (“alat negosiasi dengan perushaan”) and used “to
bargain with companies” (“tawar-menawar sama perusahaan”). While scholars debate the
extent to which Dayak communities traditionally demarcated and recognized territorial
boundaries (see for example Sellato 2001, Sirait et al. 1994, Fox 2002), it is clear that
boundaries – in terms fixed territorial boundaries -- have come to play a more important role
and figure prominently in the minds of Dayak villagers as their access to the value of
territories, forested and otherwise, has increased. Prior to gaining access to the value of
territory, Dayak villagers placed limited importance on boundaries. This is analogous to pre-
colonial kingdoms of Southeast Asia, where labor and not land was the scarce resource, and
hence territorial boundaries overlapped and shaded into each other.
This helps explain villagers’ comments about why there are boundary conflicts now and
not before. As one villager commented, “before there were boundaries but they were not that
clear.”115 This comment also implies that while there might have been boundaries, the rules
115 “batas sebelumnya ada…nga begitu jelas”
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and institutions governing them were at least flexible and/or overlapping. Another villager
echoed the earlier comment noting that “there were boundaries before but not black and
white [or in other words clearly demarcated and fixed].”116 Thus, the increased value of
territory for villagers has heightened the importance of boundaries, and conflicts and
negotiations over them, because boundaries of territory now translate into boundaries of
economic gain. Conversely, these comments imply a shift in the concept of the boundary,
from something flexible and less absolute to something fixed territorially.
Because of the different migration and settlement histories of Dayak ethnic groups
into the Malinau watershed, village territorial disputes are articulated as ethnic ones. More
specifically, with the increased value of territory, the dichotomy of “indigenous” (asli) versus
“migrant” or “newcomer” (pendatang) has become the core tension and lightning rod
between Dayak groups with respect to claims to territory, particularly forested regions. The
Merap and Tidung117 consider themselves to be the indigenous inhabitants of the mid/upper
and lower portions of the Malinau watershed, respectively. Thus, they claim the forested
areas and other territories as customarily theirs, using phrases such “traditional forest” (hutan
adat) and/or “traditional land” (tanah adat). Their ostensible indigeneity is the justification
for their claims, and equally as important the justification for delegitimizing the claims of
other Dayak groups who migrated to the region more recently and who they say have their
traditional lands (tanah adat) in their original villages.
116 “batas sebelum ada tapi belum hitam di atas putih.” 117 While the Merap are upland people who fall under the rubric of Dayak, the Tidung are Muslim coastal dwellers, who with decentralization and the increased political power of the Dayak identity now self-identify as a group as belonging to the Dayak category. Indeed, in 2003 the Tidung attended the meeting of the East Kalimantan Dayak Association (Persekutuan Dayak Kalimantan Timur), which is now a much more politically powerful group and chaired by the District Head of Malinau, Marthin Billa, who is Kenyah Dayak.
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In the Malinau watershed this most significantly affects the Kenyah who migrated
east to Malinau in the 1960s from the neighboring Bahau and Pujungan watersheds. The
Kenyah are extremely sensitive to this point of being referred to as “migrants” or
“newcomers” (pendatang) and having their claims to territory in the Malinau watershed
challenged. Their sensitivity to this issue is in part due to what they recognize as the political
power of claiming indigeneity. Indeed, when they migrated to the Malinau, the Kenyah
recognized the Malinau as being controlled by the Merap and requested permission from the
Merap Chief Customary Leader (Ketua Adat Besar) to settle in the Malinau. Conversely, due
to this recognition the Kenyah now incur the negative ramifications of being labeled
migrants, viz., potentially being dispossessed of territorial claims. Kenyah are particularly
concerned about this because of their large numbers in the Malinau watershed and their
dependence on making large swiddens for their livelihood.
Complicating this situation further is that the villages along the Malinau watershed
alternate between older and newer villages, thereby exacerbating territorial conflicts between
“indigenous” and “migrant,” or long-settled and recently-settled, groups (Limberg
[forthcoming]. Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s the New Order’s resettlement programme
resulted in Punan, some of whom are indigenous to the Malinau, moving from settlements in
the upper watersheds to the middle and lower reaches in villages already inhabited by others.
Thus, while some Punan can claim indigeneity and traditional territory in the Malinau
watershed, it is often much farther upstream from where they are settled currently118. Thus,
according the to Merap and Tidung, the Kenyah and to a lesser extent the Punan have no
118 Further, Punan claims to any territory are questioned by some Dayak in Malinau since they are traditionally hunter and gathers placing little if any importance on boundaries and defined territories. Indeed, some scholars have commented that Punan traditionally oriented themselves in the landscape according to hill ridges since these were their walking paths (Kaskija 2000).
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legitimate claim to forested regions in the Malinau and can only rightfully claim swidden
fields they have worked since their arrival, some of which are also contested as being on
borrowed land. In other words, the Merap and Tidung are attempting to exclude the Kenyah
and Punan from claiming any tracts of forest that could possibly be commercially valuable
and of commercial scale.
A Dayak Kenyah villager from Long Loreh lost rights to his two hectare cacao and
fruit garden he had cultivated for ten years because according to the Merap in Langap, the
village where the Chief Customary Leader of Malinau (Ketua Adat Besar) resides, the land
was only borrowed by him and was owned by a Merap villager. The Kenyah villager’s cacao
and fruit garden were destroyed, and the land was allocated by the “original” owner to a
Merap villager to use temporarily for swiddens. The real motivation for “re-claiming” that
patch of land, however, was that there was coal underneath, and a mining company had plans
to excavate in that region, which would mean substantial compensation for the “owner” of
the land. This Dayak Kenyah villager had no avenue of recourse.
At the village level, the predominantly Kenyah village of Gong Solok did not receive
any compensation from an IPPK operating in small watershed where the village is located
because, according to the Tidung, it was Tidung territory. The justification for the region
belonging to the Tidung was that certain Tidung had a long history of owning bird’s nest
caves in the area, which according to the Tidung, justified claims to surrounding forest.
The inter-ethnic tensions between Dayak groups is due to the deployment of an
“indigenous versus migrant” discourse by powerful actors, and not due to actual length of
residence in the region. For example, one long standing village, Paya Seturan, has had its
territorial claims squeezed by the two neighboring villagers of Langap and Tanjung Nanga,
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the former claiming indigeneity and being the home of the Chief Customary Leader of the
watershed and the latter being a relatively recently settled village but of significant size and
home to a member of the district parliament.
Conflicts among Dayaks, however, are not limited to disputes between ethnic groups,
but intra-ethnic and intra-village disputes have also been common (Wollenberg et al.
[forthcoming a]). For example, the Merap village of Laban Nyarit in mid-2004 prepared to
seize the heavy equipment of a timber concessionaire with whom they had brokered a deal
because the timber concessionaire had not fulfilled any of its promises during the six months
it had operated in the forested region claimed by Laban Nyarit. The timber company was
owned by Merap from the neighboring village of Langap. As the village head of Laban
Nyarit commented to me, this was a case of “Merap eating Merap” (“Merap makan Merap”).
Indeed, the lack of institutional arrangements and attendant social cohesion within
and between Dayak groups severely limits the effectiveness of CIFOR’s applied research
initiative, and some villagers are aware of this. As one villager commented, “if communities
could agree, all the villages would have an area…CIFOR facilitated communities to make
maps and gave input about the implementation of forest management.”119
Related to this last comment regarding villagers’ awareness that conflicts among
them work against their collective best interests is villagers’ awareness of their own sense of
agency with respect to whether, or to what extent, CIFOR related research activities are used
or adopted. In our conversations, villagers made explicit to me that they themselves had a
role in the lack of fulfillment of the expectations regarding CIFOR activities. With respect to
119 “Kalau masyarakat bisa sepakat, semua desa sudah punya wilayah desa…CIFOR mendampingi masyarakat buat peta and berikan masukan tentang pelaksanaan pengelolaan hutan.”
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why CIFOR’s suggestions had not been implemented, one villager noted that “it is our
weakness,”120 and another noted that “CIFOR does not have a responsibility to us, the
communities [we] have responsibility to ourselves.”121 More generally, villagers are aware
that their actions are not necessarily in their best interests. For example, in relating to me why
villagers did not use CIFOR’s research, which he considered useful and important, one
village head noted that it was like using electrical current to catch fish, which is prevalent in
Malinau – everyone is aware that it is destructive and shouldn’t use that method, but they do
because it’s easier. He continued with another analogy about Dayaks agreeing to broker
agreements to timber concessionaires to log their forests, even though they are fully aware of
their dependence on the forest. Thus, villagers do not merely displace blame onto others, but
also take some responsibility for the situation they find themselves in and the extent to which
the situation can change.
CIFOR’s “participatory action research” approach is, however, ambiguous and
confusing to villagers, particularly in an extremely politicized forested landscape such as
Malinau. Many villagers in Malinau have difficulty understanding the limits and boundaries
of CIFOR’s work. The boundaries between action and research are not clear for many
villagers, which leads to comments such as being left “in the middle of the road”122 by
CIFOR.
Yet, even with these misgivings and disappointments with CIFOR related activities,
villagers still engage CIFOR and participate in activities. It is the hope, trust and possibility
that maintain the relationship and collaboration between CIFOR and villagers. As one village
120 “kekurangan kita” 121 “CIFOR bukan bertanggung jawab pada kita, masyarakat bertanggung jawab pada kita.” 122 “ditengah jalan”
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head who was quite disappointed with the lack of results from CIFOR activities answered
when I asked him why he continues to join CIFOR activities, “who knows, maybe it will
succeed later.”123
4. Case Study of Articulation and Alienation: Setulang, Setarap, Sentaban and CIFOR
The relationship between three neighboring villages in the lower reaches of the
Malinau watershed – Setulang, Sentaban and Setarap – and CIFOR raises an interesting case
study of CIFOR’s interests articulating with those of a village and generating benefits for
both, yet at the same time partially alienating neighboring villages and exacerbating inter-
village tensions, thereby unintentionally working against CIFOR’s broader objectives.
Among all the villages that CIFOR works with in the Malinau watershed, Setulang figures
prominently because of the strong articulation between the village and CIFOR. An analysis
of this articulation and the broader context succinctly reveal the inter-village, inter-ethnic and
village-government relations within which CIFOR is embroiled. Moreover, this case study
illustrates the actualization of expectations that villagers in Malinau have for CIFOR – an
actualization that helps keep villagers interested in CIFOR – as well as the unintended
consequences that it engenders due to the politically charged landscape.
A village of 860 people (208 households), Setulang is ethnically homogenous,
consisting of Kenyah Oma’ Lung who migrated voluntarily in 1968 from their previous long-
term settlement of Long Sa’an, located in the upper reaches of the Pujungan River where it
meets the Bahau River, to their current location in the lower reaches of the Malinau River.
They migrated to the Malinau primarily to have better access to schools for their children and
to markets, where basic goods such as salt and sugar could be easily purchased. In 1974, a
123 “siapa tahu nanti berhasil.”
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written decree by the Regent of Bulungan (Bupati Bulungan) officially acknowledged
Setulang as a village (Iwan 2004).
Setulang also claims approximately 5,300 ha of intact, old-growth lowland
Dipterocarp forest, which was not part of the 1974 decree124. Setulang is the only village on
the Malinau that was approached by a small scale timber concessionaire (IPPK) that never
agreed to “partner” with a timber company – indeed eight times. The largest offer made to
Setulang was USD 300,000, which Setulang villagers consider an enormous sum, but still
rejected (Iwan 2003).
There are multiple reasons that Setulang never agreed to a timber concession deal,
including what was perceived as relatively low profits from logging compared to the loss of
goods and services from the forest such as clean water, the multitude of forest products for
building materials and consumption, and wild game. Setulang is also a relatively prosperous
village, commonly having a surplus of rice to sell in the market. Moreover, many of the men
have worked in Malaysia for timber companies and plantations. Additionally, in the 1970s
two logging companies operated around Setulang, and villagers became aware of the
deleterious effects logging had on the Setulang River, their source of fresh water, and the
damage caused to the forest (Iwan 2004).
One important catalyst in declining offers from IPPKs was a Setulang villager who
had started working as local CIFOR staff in January 2000, Ramses Iwan. Ramses has been a
key individual in village debates about whether to accept a timber concessionaire – villagers
were divided on the issue. Indeed, some influential villagers, including the village head, were
inclined to accept various offers of the timber companies. Yet, there remained a stronger,
more numerous contingent of villagers who did not want to accept offers (Iwan 2004). 124 This is not surprising given that during the New Order all forests were classified as state forests.
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Ramses was one of the villagers not enticed by IPPK offers and engaged in village
discussions, invoking CIFOR to leverage the position to not accept offers. He was integral in
fostering a mutually productive relationship between CIFOR and the village of Setulang.
Since the inception of this relationship in 2000, Setulang through CIFOR has gained
national and international acclaim for conserving the forested area it claims, which has
included taking direct action – in some cases seizing heavy equipment -- against three
separate timber companies that were perceived by Setulang villagers as encroaching on their
territory. In 2003 Setulang received the Kalpataru, the Indonesian National Environmental
Award, conferred by the President of Indonesia and the National Ministry of Environment.
Setulang was also one of 150 global finalists (out of 870 nominees) selected in the World
Water Council’s Water Action Contest in 2003, which focused on initiatives to resolve world
water issues and which led to a representative from Setulang attending and presenting at the
World Water Forum in Kyoto, Japan. Neither of these would have been possible without
CIFOR -- it was CIFOR that nominated Setulang for both awards.
CIFOR has also brought much national and international media attention to
Setulang’s efforts to conserve the forest area they claim. Setulang has been the focus of two
Indonesian network news television programs (TVRI and RCTI), as well as a German radio
news story and numerous national and international print media stories (Iwan 2004). The
most recent international print media story about Setulang’s efforts was reported by AFP in a
May 1, 2005 article entitled “In the heart of Borneo, a village that said no to the chainsaws”
(http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050501/sc_afp/indonesiaenvironment_0
50501210059).
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Moreover, through the link with CIFOR, the case of Setulang as forest protectors has
been presented in international conservation and development fora, at such events as the 10th
Meeting of the International Association for the Study of Common Property in Oaxaca,
Mexico and two community forestry conferences in the United States in 2004. Further,
Setulang’s efforts have been elaborated in an issue of IUCN’s journal Policy Matters (Iwan
2003) and also a chapter the forthcoming book Riding the Rapids of Malinau: Local
Governance, Forests and Conflict in Indonesian Borneo (Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming c]),
which is geared toward both practitioners and academics. The presenter at these events and
author of these articles is Ramses, the Kenyah Oma’ Lung villager of Setulang who is
CIFOR staff.
Also, since 2001, a steady stream of CIFOR-related national and international guests
has visited Setulang. The duration of their visits range from a few days to weeks, and the
purposes of these visits vary from conducting research and holding workshops to
appreciating Setulang’s cultural performances and forest area. Regardless of the purposes
however, they all convey status, recognition and pride to Setulang villagers, particularly
since guests normally lodge and eat in villagers’ homes.
In addition to the symbolic resources that Setulang accrues through CIFOR, villagers
have also gained both materially and technically from the articulation with CIFOR. For
example, CIFOR pays villagers for hosting guests and for the rental of outboard motors.
Additionally, CIFOR donated a computer to the village, used by those involved in Forest
Management Body125, and provided funding and training for villagers to conduct a forest
inventory.
125 The Forest Management Body or Badan Pengelola Hutan Taneq Olen Desa Setulang consists of a group of villagers from Setulang who are committed to organizing activities related to the forest that Setulang claims.
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The most recent symbolic and material recognition that Setulang has received with
CIFOR’s assistance is a one-year grant from the IUCN for Euro 17,200 (USD 21,734) to
implement conservation activities in the forested area they claim and resolve tenurial disputes
with neighboring villages (the latter is discussed below). This grant has a strong possibility of
being extended for two more years with additional funding. CIFOR researchers both
identified the grant mechanism and wrote the proposal with Setulang’s agreement126.
From CIFOR’s perspective, Setulang deserves recognition and support for its efforts
in conserving the forest area claimed, perhaps at the expense of, or backgrounding of, other
dynamics that at least some CIFOR researchers were aware of, such as inter-village tenurial
conflict (see following discussion)127. CIFOR’s support of Setulang’s efforts highlights the
shared values of CIFOR and Setulang, as well as the mutual benefit. For CIFOR, Setulang
embodies the exact constellation of village mobilization, community well-being and forest
conservation that the institution aspires to foster through its applied research. Indeed,
Setulang is a showcase village for CIFOR and is one of the few clear examples in Malinau
where CIFOR’s research and institutional priorities have gained traction.
However, the relationship between CIFOR and Setulang is similar to those between
CIFOR and other villages with respect to the lack of immediate tangible results from
CIFOR’s research and lack of fulfillment of villagers’ expectations vis-à-vis CIFOR’s
ostensible support. The clearest example of this is the ongoing discussion between CIFOR
and Setulang regarding environment service payments, initiated by CIFOR in 2001. At that 126 CIFOR does not receive any of the funding and contributes in-kind in the form of covering CIFOR scientists’ time and expenses. 127 Not all CIFOR researchers supported Setulang’s nominations for the National Environmental Award or the World Water Council’s Water Action Contest. Moreover, some CIFOR researchers felt that the emphasis on Setulang’s conservation efforts obfuscated certain actions by Setulang villagers that were inconsistent with the conservation representations. CIFOR as an institution, however, allowed these nominations to be made, and thus I refer to CIFOR here institutionally with the aforementioned qualification.
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time, the then Director General of CIFOR and other senior CIFOR staff visited Setulang and
raised the possibility of environmental service payments from international donors for
Setulang’s conservation efforts. The idea was that international donors might be interested in
compensating Setulang an amount comparable to what they would gain from an IPPK.
Villagers listened intently at the time and expectations grew, but as time passed and meetings
continued, villagers began to grow politely frustrated and pessimistic at the lack of
realization. Villagers, however, never disengaged from CIFOR for this reason, and indeed
accrued many other benefits. The closest approximation to the actualization of the
environmental service payments was the grant from IUCN, which was proposed initially by
CIFOR as an environmental service payment scheme. IUCN, however, required a reframing
of the original proposal due to, inter alia, tenurial conflicts between Setulang and
neighboring villages.
The two neighboring villages of Setulang – Sentaban downstream and Setarap
upstream – perceive Setulang to be quite different from, and indeed contradictory to, the
praise and recognition Setulang has received through CIFOR’s assistance. Villagers from
Sentaban and Setarap note that they do not understand why Setulang received the National
Environmental Award since Setulang opens large swidden fields, cutting down primary
forest in the process and crossing over agreed upon boundaries with Sentaban and Setarap.
According to these two neighboring villages, even though Setulang villagers do not damage
the forest they claim as theirs, they are definitively not conservationists, evidence for which
is their massive swiddens.128
Indeed, Setulang villagers themselves do not claim to be conservationists beyond the
area they claim as theirs. Many have experience working for logging companies in Malaysia 128 Setarap did enter into an agreement with an IPPK.
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(Iwan 2003, 2004), and in 2002 a group of 11 men from Setulang agreed to work as loggers
for a Malaysian timber company in Guyana, South America. They signed two-year contracts
and received net salaries of USD 300 per month. The Malaysian timber company Samling
specifically sought out Setulang men to work for them in Guyana because of their hard work
ethic when logging for the company in Malaysia. In discussing this with one Setulang
villager, he noted with a chuckle that “we conserve our [forests] and destroy [forests]
belonging to others” (“kita selamatkan yg kita punya, kasih hancur orang lain punya”)!
More fundamentally, the two neighboring villages argue that Setulang has no rightful
claim to the forest they claim as theirs since they are Dayak Kenyah migrants who arrived to
the Malinau only in the late 1960s. Setarap consists of mostly of Dayak Merap and Punan,
and Sentaban consists of Dayak Merap, Punan and Abai – all of whom claim much longer
residence, indeed indigeneity, in the Malinau watershed. According to Sentaban and Setarap,
the forest that Setulang claims belongs to Sentaban since the original boundary agreement
over forest area was between Sentaban and Setarap. Moreover, according to these two
villages there was originally no discussion or agreement of the boundary of forest area when
Setulang moved to the Malinau. Villagers in Sentaban note that Setulang’s settlement – not
forest area claimed -- in the Malinau was agreed to by the Chief Customary Leader as well as
villagers of Sentaban. Further, Sentaban and Setarap note that Setulang’s traditional forest is
in their original settlement in Long Sa’an on the Pujungan River.
According to Sentaban and Setarap, the main reason that Setulang has been able to
maintain its claim to the forest is that Setulang villagers are aggressive and threaten them. In
their retelling of attempts at negotiating boundaries with Setulang (starting in 1999 before
CIFOR’s involvement), Sentaban villagers invoke images of Setulang villagers threatening to
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take heads, intimidating them during meetings by arriving en masse, and showing aggression
toward Sentaban villagers. Indeed, many villagers in the Malinau watershed recognize the
strong social cohesion and collective identity of Setulang, which is characteristic of Dayak
Kenyah generally (Sellato 2001).
To date the conflict between Setulang and Sentaban persists, and officially the status
of the forested region that Setulang claims is ambiguous. Similar to all of the villages in
Malinau, Setulang has received no official documentation of its ownership or rights over the
forested area claimed, even though Setulang has received substantial recognition for its
conservation efforts, including the national environmental award, which was further
legitimized by the Malinau Regent and other senior district officials’ attendance and speeches
at a reception in Setulang to honor receiving the award. Indeed, as in other cases, the district
government is unwilling to resolve this conflict and make a decision with respect to the status
of the forested area claimed by Setulang. At best, the district government has arbitrated
negotiations between the two villages, but is reluctant to take a decision due to the potential
political ramifications.
The praise and recognition accorded to Setulang through CIFOR’s assistance in the
context of these inter-village conflicts is unfair according to villagers in Setarap and
Sentaban and has also exacerbated social envy between the villages. From the perspective of
all three villages, CIFOR has played a role in these inter-ethnic and inter-village tensions.
CIFOR’s support of Setulang has helped Setulang legitimize their claim to the forested area,
warranted or not. CIFOR has brought symbolic and material resources to Setulang in the
form of national and international praise, recognition and funding. And it is precisely these
resources that have in part, albeit unintentionally, heightened tensions and jealousy between
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villages, as well as engendered some ill feelings towards CIFOR from some villagers in
Setarap and Sentaban. Indeed, one Setulang villager informed me that after receiving the
National Environmental Award, problems and conflicts with neighboring villages only grew
worse.
The three villages and CIFOR recognize this problem, and it is hoped that the grant
from IUCN discussed earlier will assist in the resolution of these conflicts. Interestingly,
villagers from both Setarap and Sentaban noted that they would like to be nominated for the
National Environmental Award and that it would help ease tensions between villages and
also assuage ill feelings toward CIFOR.
C. Summary of Analysis of perceptions and relationships regarding CIFOR
In the preceding sections, I examined the role at the local level of CIFOR, a publicly
funded, international applied research organization that ostensibly should have local and
global influence. To this end, I described and analyzed the perceptions and relationships
between villagers, district officials and CIFOR in Malinau in the context of CIFOR’s applied
research activities that ostensibly attempt to improve sustainability of forests to help alleviate
poverty. My analysis demonstrates that these relationships and the role of CIFOR’s research
are anything but straightforward, and require continuous negotiation and compromise.
Further, the results of these negotiations and compromises are contingent upon a broad set of
factors beyond the formal institutional relationship between CIFOR, the district government
and villagers, and infrequently meet the expectations of various actors. The significance and
role of CIFOR’s research are embedded in the tenuous, negotiated articulation of perceived
interests and possibilities. It is clear that CIFOR’s influence, at least at the local level of
intervention, is more limited than CIFOR and villagers had hoped.
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This is perhaps surprising given that CIFOR is one of the 16 CGIAR Centers. Past
CGIAR activities such as the controversial and -- according to some scholars -- often
impoverishing Green Revolution implemented by the International Rice Research Institute
(IRRI) delegitimized long-standing, local knowledge and techniques of resource management
through a strict focus on modernization of agriculture and the articulation of agriculture as a
strictly technical process (Dove 1993; Dove and Kammen 1997; Lansing 1991; Marglin
1996; Yapa 1993, 1996).
That said, CIFOR’s presence and activities do provide a vehicle of articulation and
potential leverage to the actors the institution attempts to engage at the district level. As this
chapter has demonstrated, these articulations are established in a mire of contingencies, and
thus their formations and consequences are unpredictable. Indeed, the process of articulation
or collaboration is a fragile one.
One question remains unanswered, however: What does CIFOR do with the messy
reality of its activities in Malinau, with the constant need to compromise, negotiate and
maintain? CIFOR is a global applied research institute, which means that its research should
have much broader application and influence than at the local level. A report by Spilsbury
and Bose (2004) -- research staff in CIFOR’s Research Evaluation and Impact Unit – entitled
“Influencing the Global Forest Policy Agenda: An Evaluation of CIFOR Research”129
expresses the high level of importance that CIFOR places on extra-local influence. Spilsbury
and Bose (2004: 1) write that “CIFOR research projects attempt to achieve impact by
129 The report that I cite from is an internal, extended version of the report that will appear as an article in either Unasylva or Forest Policy and Economics. The journal article is a truncated version, excluding CIFOR specific sections.
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promoting the uptake of research findings across differing ‘impact pathways130’” and that
one of the key ‘pathways’ for CIFOR is to shape forest-related policies. They continue noting
that “an important strategy has been to inform policy audiences across the globe with
impartial, high quality science-based information and analysis in an attempt to influence
international, national and local debates, decisions and policy processes related to forests”
(Spilsbury and Bose 2004: 1). To this end “many…research outputs are intended to be of
international relevance and are often widely disseminated” (Spilsbury and Bose 2004: 1).
With this context, Spilsbury and Bose’s article (2004: 1)
“summarizes literature on the influence of research on policy, highlights key
organizations that act to shape the international forest agenda and explores the nature
and significance of citations, and other bibliographic information as evidence of
research influence.”
They then move to an examination of “CIFOR contributions to international forest-
related agenda through its influence on policy documents” through an analysis of “research
influence on organizations responsible for major financial flows to forest-related
development assistance” and “research influence on the key organizations that help shape the
global forest agenda” (Spilsbury and Bose 2004: 1). Through a bibliographic analysis
(citations, acknowledgements and author contributions), Spilsbury and Bose (2004: 23)
conclude, inter alia, the following about CIFOR’s influence:
130 “Impact pathway – a series of causal linkages between the production research outputs and changes in metrics related to mission-level goals. Often a pathway includes: production of a research output, uptake of the output, local adaptation/integration of the output, distribution of the locally adapted output derivative(s), implementation of the output derivative(s), generation of benefits due to implementation, and facilitated changes in mission-level metrics due to benefit generation” (Spilsbury and Bose [forthcoming]: 1).
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“Use and acknowledgement of CIFOR research findings was widespread among a
class of documents that influence both national and international polices and financial
flows to forestry initiatives. We examined 193 significant and secondary policy
documents with bibliographies from influential organizations and found a total of 405
CIFOR citations spanning a wide range of topics. The highest frequency of CIFOR
citations was found in documents produced by the World Bank, FAO, WRI, ITTO,
CBD and GEF suggesting that CIFOR helped to shape and support their opinions,
policies and, presumably, subsequent actions. These same organizations play a major
role in creating and sustaining policy narratives and are prominent in shaping the
global forest agenda.”
Given the importance that CIFOR places on the influence of its research on global
forest policy and the high level of influence it seems to have to date, it is important to
examine how CIFOR addresses the messy social reality of Malinau when CIFOR writes
about its research in Malinau to this global audience. I address this in the next chapter
(Chapter 5).
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CHAPTER 5
LOCATING CIFOR GLOBALLY: HOW CIFOR ATTEMPTS TO HAVE GLOBAL INFLUENCE AND
ADDRESS ITS ROLE IN MALINAU
I. Introduction
In this chapter, I examine the type of global influence that CIFOR attempts to have
based on its local level applied research in Malinau, and in doing so ethnographically ground
global-local linkages of knowledge. Further, I attempt to demonstrate that although CIFOR
has limited influence at the local or field level, the retelling or reporting of their local level
research experience provides compelling, persuasive (policy) narratives and prescriptions to
influence, in particular ways, the global community concerned with tropical forests and
forest-dependent people. CIFOR’s field research in Malinau and CIFOR researchers’ critical
reflections on their experiences are essential legitimizing vehicles to influence CIFOR’s
“interpretive community” (Mosse 2004)1 or “epistemic community” (Haas 1990)2 of
practitioners and academics. This may indirectly lead to CIFOR having more influence at the
local level through a refraction of CIFOR’s interests via international actors who can
influence institutional and governance mechanisms that affect Malinau’s forests and forest-
dependent people, e.g., international donor priorities and global finance institutions.
1 Mosse (2004: 646) notes that “development projects need ‘interpretive communities’; they have to enroll a range of supporting actors with reasons ‘to participate in the established order as if its representations were reality’ (Sayer, 1994: 374, cited in Li, 1999: 374).” 2 According to Haas (1990: 55), an epistemic community “is a professional group that believes in the same cause-and-effect-relationships, truth tests to assess them, and shares common values. As well as sharing an acceptance of a common body of facts, its members share a common interpretive framework, or ‘consensual knowledge,’ from which they convert such facts, or observations, to policy-relevant conclusions…Presented with incomplete or ambiguous evidence, members of an epistemic community would draw similar interpretations and make similar policy conclusions...An epistemic community's power resource, domestically and internationally, is its authoritative claim to knowledge.”
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To understand ethnographically these global-local linkages of knowledge, I discuss
how CIFOR addresses and represents the political-economic aspects of the institution’s
relationships in Malinau in their publications, which are geared toward the aforementioned
global epistemic or interpretive community. I then argue that it is through this particular
retelling that CIFOR articulates and legitimizes calls for change among those institutions
interested in international conservation and development. In doing so, my purpose is to
analyze how CIFOR addresses the unintended consequences of its applied research activities
and to demonstrate how CIFOR employs these unintended consequences to its benefit to
advance a particular agenda in the epistemic or interpretive community within which it is
located.
II. CIFOR writes about the politics of relationships and critically reflects on its role
A. CIFOR writes about power relations in Malinau
CIFOR has not shied way from addressing power relations between actors in
Malinau, nor the challenges or difficulties that researchers have faced in implementing their
applied research agenda in the context of this politically contentious environment. Indeed,
CIFOR researchers involved in Malinau have published or are in the process of publishing a
number of articles and books that are not only detailed analyses of the cultural politics in
Malinau, but also critical reflections of their applied research activities. Many of these
insights and reflections are quite similar to what I found in my conversations and interviews
with villagers and district officials (see Chapter 4). For example, a forthcoming book
authored by CIFOR researchers explicitly addresses power, ethnicity and governance issues
related to control of and access to forest resources in Malinau (see Wollenberg et al.
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[forthcoming c])3. This book and articles such as a forthcoming “Between State and Society:
Local Governance, Conflict and Forests in Malinau, Indonesia” (Wollenberg et al.
[forthcoming a]) to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Forestry Policy and Economics
deal explicitly with the political-economy and cultural politics of the struggle between local
government and villagers regarding control and access to forest resources. A quote from the
journal article, which is a truncated version of key aspects of the book, illuminates the types
of issues addressed:
“In this article we use the case of Malinau, East Kalimantan Indonesia to show how
decentralization has affected forest management and marginalized groups. We
specifically ask the question: ‘how have these changes led to emerging new political
orders?’…We document how new political alliances have emerged to make use of
these small-scale timber systems and discuss the resulting benefits from forests their
distribution and the types of conflicts that have emerged” (Wollenberg et al.
[forthcoming a]: 2).
B. CIFOR writes self-critical reflections of it experience in Malinau
1. CIFOR writes about the political role of research and the institution in Malinau
Other publications directly address the obstacles faced by CIFOR in Malinau --
CIFOR researchers do not obfuscate the difficulties faced in their relationships with villagers
and government officials. For example, in “Muddling Toward Cooperation: A CIFOR case
study of shared learning in Malinau District, Indonesia” (Wollenberg et al. 2004) published
in the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences’ (SLU) journal Currents 4 5, CIFOR
3 I am one of several authors of the book, provisionally entitled Riding the Rapids of Malinau: Local Governance, Forests and Conflicts in Indonesian Borneo.
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researchers critically reflect upon their action-research and facilitation in their ACM project
in Malinau, noting that they “sought to empower local communities to increase their access
and control over forest benefits and decisions” (Wollenberg et al. 2004: 21). This CIFOR
research team writes explicitly about their political agenda and awareness of the political
landscape in Malinau:
“This case examines how a CIFOR research team used informal, shared learning to
support more socially just decisions among groups that shared and often contested
claims to forest resources and responsibility for their management” (Wollenberg et al.
2004: 20).
They write further about the politically contentious landscape of Malinau. They note that
“local government is at ease with the rhetoric of civil society participation, but suspicious
and unsure of exactly how to do it” and that “the roles of district government and local
people in the forest remain as opaque as ever and struggles for control of the forest continue”
(Wollenberg et al. 2004: 20).
Not only is there explicit recognition of the political contentiousness and disparity in
power between villagers and the government, but also explicit recognition of the political
role of CIFOR researchers themselves, writing that “there is a need to engage people’s values
and politics” in the facilitation process (Wollenberg et al: 23). Moreover, they acknowledge
the political ramifications of their research, writing “[i]n response to the difficulties faced in
mapping and participation reforms, we modified our strategy and platform to be less
threatening to local government yet still contribute directly to economic priorities of local
4 According to Currents, the journal “is intended for a readership interested in rural development in developing countries.” 5 A more elaborate version of this article will appear as a chapter in the forthcoming book provisionally titled Adaptive Collaborative Management of Forests in Asia edited by R. J. Fisher et al.
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communities and the district” (Wollenberg et al. 2004: 22, italics added). Indeed, with
respect to the mapping activity, the ACM team makes explicit that they “purposefully
worked with communities rather than government or industry to empower villagers as a
group and build trust” (Wollenberg et al. 2004: 21). Lastly, these CIFOR researchers
comment on their political position as facilitators/researchers, which significantly differs
from formal and positivist notions of facilitation and research:
“Our goal has been not to facilitate collaboration so much as to create an enabling
environment for accommodating interest and their coordination, especially of weaker
groups. This is a messy, muddling process (Lindblom 1983). But it is also a reality of
political change” (Wollenberg et al. 2004: 23).
As another example, in the article “Do communities need to be good mapmakers?”
(Anau et al. 2003), which was published by CIFOR and circulated by information
clearinghouses such as Participatory Avenues (IAPAD)6, CIFOR researchers critically reflect
on their experience facilitating participatory mapping. In this piece, CIFOR researchers note
how their expectations of villagers -- who were eager to conduct mapping -- based on
existing participatory mapping literature were unfilled, viz., “we had hoped that villagers
could become self-sufficient in mapping” (Anau et al. 2003: 2), and “we were also
disappointed by the low proportion of community involved in decisions about mapping” (2).
Further, in analyzing why these expectations were unmet, these CIFOR researchers address
explicitly the difficulties in the relationship between villagers and CIFOR in this activity. For
example, they note that “communities may not have the time, interest or capacity to develop
the requisite mapping skills [and] [a]s in Malinau, they may prefer outsiders play a strong
6 See the following websites: http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/acm/download/pub/Do_Communities_Need.pdf and www.iapad.org/publications/ppgis/ Do_communities_need_to_be_good_mapmakers.pdf
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facilitating role” (Anau et al. 2003: 2). They also address the intra-community conflicts that
affected the CIFOR initiated activity:
“There was a general lack of adequate representation and accountability of leaders to
their constituencies. Internal conflict in the community was common where a few
select village leaders conducted negotiations in non-transparent ways” (Anau et al.
2003: 2).
Additionally, CIFOR researchers not only address inter-community conflicts in this
article, but also acknowledge that they did not attend adequately to institutional issues
beyond the level of communities thereby allowing participatory maps to fuel inter-
community conflicts:
“…as we learned, not seeking more participation from other stakeholders has its
costs…In Malinau, most communities treated the maps as an end in themselves
(despite efforts by CIFOR and local government to the contrary) without seeking
formal legal status from government or cooperation from neighbors or logging
companies. They then used the maps as evidence of their ownership and control over
the territories. Conflicts between older and newer villages became entrenched
because of a lack of clear policy from government authorities…boundary agreements
turned out to be highly fluid as there was no authority to approve or enforce
agreements.…Our experience in Malinau made us more aware that we spent too
much time on facilitating community participation in technical aspects and less on the
more unwieldy aspects that ensured accountability and ownership by the necessary
stakeholders” (Anau et al. 2003: 3-4).
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Another example of how CIFOR addresses the politics of relationships in Malinau
and critically reflect on their role is Wollenberg and Uluk’s (2004) paper “Representation:
Who speaks for whom in citizen-driven research,” which was presented at the 10th Meeting
of the International Association for the Study of Common Property in August 2004 in
Mexico7. In this paper, Wollenberg and Uluk (2004) examine how the “dual functions of
representativeness [‘standing in for’] and representation [‘on behalf of’] occur in practice”
using examples from CIFOR’s work in Malinau (Wollenberg and Uluk 2004: 1). They reflect
critically on the CIFOR ACM’s team “role as facilitators in bringing western scientific,
participatory development and democratic assumptions into these processes” (Wollenberg
and Uluk 2004: 1). In their critical reflections, Wollenberg and Uluk (2004) note that the
ACM team “always tried to stay aware of the implications of who participated and the degree
of responsible representation that occurred” (10), yet illustrate through examples that they
found themselves “erring toward representativeness rather than representation among
different groups” (11), even though they explicitly promoted representation with villagers
(11). Indeed, they are quite transparent about the normative aspect of their research,
commenting that “facilitating representation was not just a matter of reinforcing existing
norms….but rather making normative choices” (Wollenberg and Uluk 2004: 14).
Further, they not only write about the difficulties of promoting representation through
their activities, but also comment on how villagers’ statements to CIFOR and actions in
villages demonstrated the pitfalls of “development theater”: “It was fascinating…to see
villagers expressing criteria for good representation….[but] despite the explicit discussion of
such criteria, no villagers seems to carry these principles home and apply them” (Wollenberg
7 Eva Wollenberg initiated the ACM project in Malinau and is CIFOR’s lead scientist on the project, and Asung Uluk worked as an ACM team member for several years in Malinau.
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and Uluk 2004: 12). They are also explicit about CIFOR’s difficult political relationship with
the district government as well as other power-brokers and how they negotiated these: For
example, they note that
“given the necessity of working thorough existing village and government
authorities…we needed sometimes to make difficult diplomatic trade-offs between
prioritizing our relationship with these more powerful actors or taking actions that
enhanced the influence of disadvantaged groups” (Wollenberg and Uluk 20004: 13).
They go further in explaining their strategy:
“Our approach to this dilemma was to secure the long-term support of controlling
authorities, yet create the space to work with different entities within that authority
and independently in the short-term. To create this space, over time we learned to
work with a lower profile, often facilitating disadvantaged groups in independent
activities apart from more powerful groups” (Wollenberg and Uluk 2004: 13).
They are also explicit about their awareness of the power relationship between
external actors such as CIFOR and villagers. In their discussion regarding the most recent
inter-village community workshop that CIFOR organized in 2004, Wollenberg and Uluk
(2004) note that this workshop was remarkable because it was the first one where villagers
themselves facilitated the workshop, with coaching from CIFOR, yet some villagers noted
that they were not ready to be self-sufficient and requested that CIFOR continue to assist
villagers in organizing and conducting these meetings. In reflecting upon these statements,
Wollenberg and Uluk (2004: 15-16) comment that “these requests may reflect an interest in
CIFOR’s resources, an (unreasonable) belief in the superiority of CIFOR’s knowledge, or a
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(reasonable) distrust in the villages coordinating activities,” or more generally “to be
dependent on a patron.” They continue their reflexive mode, noting their concern that
“outside groups such as CIFOR at some level facilitate or drive projects with their
own research or social development agenda. A power divide normally exists between
the outsiders and local people, with the former taking the identity of the authority and
expert, whose knowledge local people see initially as superior” (Wollenberg and Uluk
2004: 16).
2. CIFOR writes about intra-institutional issues
CIFOR does not limit the discussion of the political-economic aspects of its applied
research agenda to relationships with government and villagers. CIFOR also critical reflects
on and writes about institutional obstacles in the international aid regime within which they
are embedded and that significantly debilitate the ability of applied research to be adaptive
and useful. For example, Wollenberg and Uluk (2004: 9) make explicit that their
“commitment to research that benefited disadvantaged local groups and was driven primarily
by local, rather than ‘scientific’ or donor priorities” was in part “compromised by needing to
fulfill CIFOR and donor mandates.”
In their book The Science of Sustainable Development: Local Livelihoods and the
Global Environment published by Cambridge University Press in 2004, Jeff Sayer, the
former Director General of CIFOR, and Bruce Campbell, the Director of CIFOR’s Forest and
Livelihoods Programme, devote a chapter to relating and reflecting on CIFOR’s history and
experiences conducting applied research in Malinau, eschewing a celebratory recounting of
CIFOR’s successes over its seven-year presence in Malinau. For example, Sayer and
Campbell (2004: 145) write about the debates among CIFOR scientists, with different
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perspectives and attendant disciplinary biases, regarding the nature and location of CIFOR’s
research in Malinau, and by implication the disparate assumptions of CIFOR scientists
regarding the role of science in natural resource management, e.g., controlled experimental
environments versus a heterogeneous, ill-defined area where stakeholder interactions could
be studied.
They also discuss the difficulties and disadvantages of scientists working as an
interdisciplinary research team in Malinau. Interdisciplinarity was initially hoped for, but
they found working in a multi-disciplinary mode more expedient (159). They note that this is
in part because “it is often impossible to formulate a single big problem or large-scale
hypothesis that an interdisciplinary team could reasonably tackle” (159). Equally as
significantly, they recognize that their expectation that “it would be possible for scientists
from different disciplinary backgrounds to work together to formulate hypotheses and design
data collection and analysis in an integrated, holistic way” (158) was misplaced since
“scientists ultimately have to focus on the specific component problems that their own
disciplinary backgrounds enabled them to address” (159). Further, they are aware that
“researchers will attempt to collect and manage data to fit the analytical models with which
they are familiar” (156), thereby acknowledging the subjective and partial nature of any
single discipline.
Sayer and Campbell (2004) also turn a critical lens on the donors that funded
CIFOR’s research in Malinau, noting how donor demands and attendant institutional
constraints limited collaboration among scientists, as well as the possible relevance and
usefulness that the research could have had. They write,
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“A major problem emerged, however, as an increasingly large proportion of the
research budget began to be targeted to priorities of individual donors. Scientists were
subject to pressures to deliver ‘component’ products to meet specific donor targets
and time frames. Donors did not want to buy into a large complex programme; they
wanted to be able to identify with a defined product. This made it difficult for the
different scientists to collaborate optimally…it was simply not efficient for different
groups to work together and to meet donor expectations” (152).
III. CIFOR advocates and articulates changes based on and legitimized by Malinau
field experience and through the vehicle of self-critique
It is clear from the publications discussed above that CIFOR reflects critically on its
role in Malinau and its position within multiple landscapes, explicitly addressing the
political-economic, cultural politics and institutional factors that have affected the
organization’s applied research activities in Malinau. Moreover, CIFOR also discusses how
various research initiatives have navigated these landscapes and attendant constraints. The
question then is why? What does this retelling achieve?
In this section, I discuss how CIFOR’s critical reflections on its work in Malinau act
as vehicles to articulate and advocate significant and particular changes in global institutions
and mechanisms related to international conservation and development. More specifically,
CIFOR researchers weave into the critical reflections of their own work calls for and
articulations of particular changes in how research is conducted, how international aid is
distributed and accounted for and how the global community concerned with sustainable
forest management and improved local livelihoods should engage those actors more
proximate to the forest. These calls for change are legitimized by CIFOR’s long-term field
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presence in Malinau, as well as the institution’s credibility as a seminal international applied
research institute on issues related to tropical forests (see for example Fairhead and Leach
2003). It is important to note here that the persuasiveness of their prescriptions is closely
related to the narrative style in which the retelling is done, viz., self-critical reflection that
employs a testimonial or confessional mode to “arrive at” prescriptions or recommendations.
This mode of “lessons learned” is much more palatable to the practitioner community than
the overtly critical stance taken by academics, which often engenders defensiveness among
practitioners, who are then prone to dismiss these critiques.
None of the publications by CIFOR researchers discussed above are limited to
critique, but rather instrumentally use those critiques to put forward a set of prescriptions or
recommendations on how conservation and development interventions -- research or
otherwise -- should be conceptualized, institutionalized and operationalized. The book The
Science of Sustainable Development by Sayer and Campbell, which contains a chapter on
critical reflections of CIFOR’s work in Malinau, articulates the most-broad reaching critique
and calls for change in international conservation and development. In the preface and
introduction of the book, Sayer and Campbell (2004) detail the dysfunctionality of the
current institutional arrangements and paradigms of the science and development of natural
resource management in developing countries. They argue that conventional agricultural
research and the dominant paradigm of a “deterministic, rational approach to rural
development” that is founded on the belief in science and administrative intervention are
inadequate to provide sustainable livelihoods for people living in rural tropical landscapes,
while ensuring the global environmental benefits they provide (26). Moreover, they
demonstrate in exacting detail how this dominant development paradigm and attendant
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delivery mechanism of the “development project,” or “development pathology” (16), are
incapable of dealing with the complexities of natural resource systems:
“it [the development project] allows development to be reduced to bite-sized
components for which donors can assume responsibility…However, the problem with
natural resources is that they are components of large complex landscapes. Diverse
interests impinge on them…Many development projects are trying to shoehorn the
complex and dynamic realities of a natural resource system into the constraints of a
time-bound, tightly planned, highly predictable system. This does not usually work”
(Sayer and Campbell 2004: 11-12)
They note that this same dominant discourse has impeded natural resource research:
“We acknowledge that much natural resources research has not been very useful, but
we attribute this to the way in which research has been funded and managed. Funding
constraints have forced researchers to operate within a deterministic, rational vision
of development. Research was expected to produce technologies ready for
widespread dissemination…The entire discourse about the role of technology in
development has, in our opinion, missed the point that technologies have to respond
to needs: they have to fit within the context of local development trends” (Sayer and
Campbell 2004: xiv).
In place of this “high-modernist” notion of science and development (Scott 1998),
Sayer and Campbell (2004) argue for a paradigmatic shift, indeed a Khunian revolution (26),
in the thinking and practice of natural resource research and development. They argue for a
“science-based approach to the integrated management of natural resource systems” (26).
This entails not only “research that both mobilizes existing knowledge and generates new
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knowledge” and “that treats all management as experimental and that deals with real-life
situations,” but also “action research…at a much larger scale than that usually practiced”
(xiii). They also advocate “closer partnerships between scientists and resource managers,”
asserting that “research must be a shared learning experience for scientists, local farmers,
fishermen, forest managers and the staff of government resource management agencies”
(xiii).
This is not to imply, however, that Sayer and Campbell eschew the political
dimensions of these relationships. Indeed, in a lead-up article to the book entitled “Research
to Integrate Productivity Enhancement, Environmental Protection and Human Development”
published in the journal Conservation Ecology in 2001, Sayer and Campbell (2001: 32) note
that the approach they advocate “must be based upon continuous dialogue and deliberation
among stakeholders” and that “this incorporates adaptive management as well as political
processes related to conflict among stakeholders.”
In essence, Sayer and Campbell (2004) are “calling for new ways of organizing
science in support of sustainable development in rural tropics” as well as “redefin[ing] roles
for government agencies, development assistance programmes and science” (xiii). They
emphasize that “scientists must not be detached observers from outside the system,” but
rather, “actors themselves” (xiii) and that this will require research organizations “to reflect
on their modus operandi and scientific culture and rise to the challenge of reorganizing for
maximum effectiveness” (26). A crucial component of this reorganization, according to
Sayer and Campbell (2004), is “linking modern science to traditional knowledge and
practice” (27) since “formal scientific knowledge and local knowledge must be combined in
an adaptive framework” (28). To emphasize the break with the dominant paradigm, Sayer
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and Campbell speak of “marriage guidance counseling” as “the model we need for the new
complex science” (2004: 19), and declare that “natural resource management is like jazz; it
requires constant improvisation” (2001: 32).
Essential to Sayer and Campbell’s line of critique and argument is their ability to
substantiate their assertions. For this, the retelling of CIFOR’s long-term applied research in
Malinau is absolutely critical. While they marshal existing literature to support their
arguments, the self-critique of CIFOR’s seven years of research experience in Malinau, as
well as similar case studies about the rangelands of southern Africa and Andean hillside
agriculture, has the effect of lending an extraordinary amount of credibility, legitimacy and
indisputability to their argument, regardless of whether CIFOR’s applied research is
“successful” or not. There is a slippage here – by virtue of being an applied research institute,
even if the application of their research does not result in the in intended outcome, e.g.,
improved local livelihoods or secure tenure does not result, CIFOR’s research is still
successful because they can write about the “lessons learned.” By being an applied research
institute, CIFOR can toggle between being scientists and practitioners and hence elide
“failure” of applied research interventions through the idiom of science.
CIFOR’s Malinau experience provides Sayer and Campbell essential ingredients to
craft a persuasive scientific narrative, viz., an abundance of primary data in the form of seven
years of continuous fieldwork to make an inductive argument couched in a balanced, critical
examination of CIFOR’s activities, which deflect suspicions of “spin,” or overly celebratory
self-assessments of CIFOR’s achievements. For example, in the introduction of their book
where they detail “dysfunctional development assistance projects” (11), Sayer and Campbell
(2004:12) invoke CIFOR’s Malinau experience as first-hand evidence of “the consequences
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of the application of strict project management in a research and development programme,”
concluding that “meeting donor needs for quickly attaining specific milestones came to
dominate over a participatory process of learning and experimentation” (12). Moreover, they
make explicit that the three case studies, of which Malinau is one, “illustrate different
approaches, elements of best practice, components of success and the problems inherent in
trying to use science to improve development and conservation outcomes” (20-1). And to
further dismiss any doubts about the authenticity of their experiences, observations and
analyses, they inscribe the three case studies under the rubric of “Realities on the Ground” in
the table of contents (Sayer and Campbell 2004: v, italics added).
As mentioned earlier, the Malinau chapter of the Sayer and Campbell book critically
reflects upon CIFOR’s experience implementing applied research in the district, detailing
both the evolution of CIFOR’s research activities, as well as the attendant institutional issues,
and the effects of the dramatic political changes in the district due to the fall of Suharto and
decentralization. Perhaps most compelling about the chapter are the reflections on the
unintended benefits of not following the conventional wisdom of international conservation
and development projects, viz., CIFOR had scientists dispersed in Malinau and lacked a
predetermined integrated research platform. Both resulted in a pluralism of views, an
adaptive framework and a better understanding of local or tacit knowledge (Sayer and
Campbell 2004: 152-3).
Sayer and Campbell (2004: 152) note that although “the initial intention had been to
build a single permanent field station,” CIFOR “opted for a number of more temporary field
locations” because of the diversity of research interests and needs of CIFOR scientists. This
decision, according to Sayer and Campbell (2004), had two significant unintended benefits:
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First, scientists were dispersed throughout the region and thus “observed the full complexity
of the system much more than if we had all operated out of a single location” (152). Second,
since scientists worked with and lived closely to villagers and logging company employees,
“they became much more sensitive to local perspectives than would have been the case if a
large monolithic residential research facility had been the focus of all the work” (152).
CIFOR also lacked a mechanism for integrating these multiple perspectives and
knowledges and was criticized by visitors as inefficient since there was only a weak shared
knowledge base (Sayer and Campbell 2004: 153). Sayer and Campbell (2004: 153) argue that
this actually benefited CIFOR’s work because
“the collective knowledge that we now have for the area is much richer and more
pluralistic than it would have been if a uniformity of vision had been more actively
sought at an early stage in the process.”
This, according to Sayer and Campbell (2004), was beneficial because it “meant that
collectively we had a pluralism of view about the problems and the role of research in finding
solutions” (153).8
To highlight further the benefits and usefulness of these two non-conventional
approaches, Sayer and Campbell (2004) bring attention to the negative consequences of the
8 Interestingly, Sayer and Campbell (2004) preface their discussion of the unintended benefits of neither having a permanent field station nor having a mechanism for integration with the rhetorical device of “in hindsight,” which has the effect of relating a sense of honesty, vulnerability, and experimentation, making their prescriptions even more compelling because they are not founded upon an implication of intentional planning of these benefits, which would convey dissembling at best and disingenuousness at worst. Indeed, the effectiveness of this technique for Sayer and Campbell (2004) is captured in a review of the book by a World Bank scientist: “Although clearly demonstrating the benefits of this evolution in research approach, the case studies provide a refreshingly frank self-critique, proving the truth of one of the authors’ main messages: we are only at the beginning of the road to finding solutions to the complex challenges of NRM in the real world” (Kiss 2005: 10, italics added).
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status quo of detailed planning and centralized facilities. For example, they note that during
a later period in Malinau when CIFOR sought out more targeted donor funding,
“donor requirements for rigid logframes led to greater efficiency and ease of
understanding to outsiders but to a programme that provided fewer insights and
innovations” (153).
With respect to single permanent field facilities, which is the norm for large
international projects, Sayer and Campbell (2004) note that they required “heavy up-front
investments in fixed infrastructure and in doing so obliged their scientists and technicians to
work in the same locality,” which they argue “precluded much of the flexibility that
subsequently proved of great value to CIFOR researchers” (153). They argue that with the
fall of Suharto, decentralization and all the attendant uncertainties, other large international
conservation and development projects in Indonesia, which invested heavily in facilities and
planned in great detail, ran into serious difficulties because
“they operated outside the system and they were unprepared for and unable to adapt
to the changes that occurred…they all found themselves pursuing visions for their
areas that were at variance with those of important local stakeholders” (Sayer and
Campbell 2004: 168-9).
Indeed, several internationally-funded field stations in Indonesia that fit Sayer and
Campbell’s description did incur difficulties in the post-Suharto period. The German-funded,
GTZ led community forestry project in West Kalimantan was effectively terminated in 1999
because of conflicts with certain actors in the region. Also, the USAID funded, Harvard
University led community forestry project outside of Gunung Palung National Park in West
Kalimantan was also terminated for similar reasons. In both projects, well-equipped field
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stations that had operated in “bubbles,” isolated from the surrounding social-political
realities, were unable to adapt to the political-economic transitions in the post-Suharto
period. Sayer and Campbell (2004) assert that their adaptive, flexible and pluralistic
approach enabled CIFOR “to deal with the full range of perspectives” on the complex issues
generated by decentralization such as IPPKs (162).
The chapter ends with a set of prescriptions phrased as “key lessons” based on
CIFOR’s experience in Malinau and that are grounded articulations of the conceptual shifts
they call for in natural resource management research and development more generally.
While readily acknowledging that CIFOR “has not solved either the conservation or the
development problems of the area,” Sayer and Campbell (2004) suggest that scientists
confronted by similar situations consider the following: “begin research in an open
explanatory manner,” “initial work must focus on learning and listening,” “the main benefit
from research may be to reduce uncertainties and inform choices,” “a continuing process of
learning and adaptation needs to be a feature of programmes,” and “major unanticipated
changes may be common” (169). These somewhat non-conventional recommendations are
based on Sayer and Campbell’s retelling of CIFOR’s Malinau story, the first-hand,
ethnographic flavor of which imbues their prescriptions with a sense of realness and
irrefutability. The objective and potential impact of their story is not lost on them. Sayer and
Campbell (2004: 164) make explicit that “we have developed these arguments at some length
because they are central to making decisions on the allocation of resources for research and
development on natural resource systems.”
Although a slight aside, it is important to note the relatively dramatic departure from
conventional CGIAR thinking that Sayer and Campbell (2004) are advocating. In the past,
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the dominant paradigm informing most CGIAR centers’ research focused on improving
germplasm to increase productivity and efficiency – it was reductionist science and an
assumed linear relationship between research and adoption characteristic of “high modernist”
thinking (Scott 1998).
That said, there are indications that the CGIAR itself realizes the problematic nature
of this dominant paradigm. Sayer and Campbell’s book itself “is based upon the work of a
task force that was established by the CGIAR to implement the recommendations of Maurice
Strong’s review” of the CGIAR in the late 1990s, which advocated an emphasis on integrated
natural resource management (Sayer and Campbell 2004: xiii). Also, Sayer and Campbell’s
2001 lead up article to the book published in Conservation Ecology subsequently received
the 2002 CGIAR Science award for an outstanding scientific article. Lastly, in 2004, the
interim Science Council of the CGIAR published the book Research Towards Integrated
Natural Resource Management, which includes seven case studies, each from a different CG
Center, similar to the Malinau case study in the Sayer and Campbell book, albeit in a less
dense and less self-critical fashion. For example, the Malinau case study in the CGIAR book
highlights the successes and achievements of a flexible, adaptive and pluralistic approach,
while de-emphasizing the institutional constraints such as donor requirements and intra-
CIFOR debates9. Although the extent to which the calls for a shift in how research is
9 The Malinau case study in Research Towards Integrated Natural Resource Management published by the CGIAR has a slightly different emphasis or focus than the Malinau case study in Sayer and Campbell’s book, published by Cambridge University Press, for several reasons. First, the CGIAR book is geared more toward practitioners and leans slightly more toward a promotion of CGIAR institutes and integrated natural resource management in them. Also, it is important to recall that for Sayer and Campbell changes in the institutional landscape, e.g., donor requirements, are central to their argument, whereas it is not for the CGIAR book. Moreover, the CGIAR book was published by the Interim Science Council of the CGIAR, which remains deeply embedded in a traditional CGIAR paradigm of science, technology and improved effectiveness and efficiency.
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conceptualized and practiced will be implemented or institutionalized remain uncertain, the
publications themselves perhaps indicate an institutional shift.
Publications by other CIFOR scientists have also used a strategy similar to that of the
Sayer and Campbell book, viz., to reflect self-critically on their work in Malinau as a vehicle
to articulate and advocate for changes in how research is conducted, how international aid is
distributed and accounted for, and how the global community concerned with sustainable
forest management and improved local livelihoods should engage those actors more
proximate to the forest. For example, in the article “Muddling Through Cooperation”
discussed earlier, Wollenberg et al. (2004) conclude the CIFOR ACM team’s self-critical
reflection of their work in Malinau with a qualified countervailing of conventional wisdom
followed by a set of qualified prescriptions. Wollenberg et al. (2004: 20) write,
“our experience leads us to question the desirability of creating formalized
multistakeholder learning mechanisms and common strategies on single platforms,
and instead to stress the value of informal interactions and working strategically with
different groups.”
They continue, noting the difference between their approach and others:
“In contrast to other participatory action research with communities and
resources…we have developed a more multi-pronged, informal and multi-scaled
approach to learning” (Wollenberg et al. 2004: 24).
They then go on to articulate a set of prescriptions in the practitioner vernacular of “our
major lessons”:
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“(1) working at multiple levels enables linking the needs of villagers and
policymakers… [and] trade-offs associated with working with one partner versus
trying to maintain a neutral position…need to be weighed carefully…
(2) facilitation strategies need to be flexible enough to respond to changing
opportunities…[and] it is helpful to create a learning culture among facilitators…
(3) informality allowed us to be flexible to capture opportunities and adapt our
strategies to fluid conditions…[and] having a continuous presence through our
resident field team made this opportunism possible” (Wollenberg et al. 2004: 23-4).
These prescriptions, however, are qualified; Wollenberg et al. (2004: 24) note that
they are not blueprint prescriptions and that “the selection of methods in any site is itself an
iterative and adaptive ‘muddling’ process.” That said, they do make explicit what they
believe the normative element or political purpose of research should be, and thus why their
research approach is significant:
“these sorts of approaches contribute to a more democratic and feasible way of
facilitating change. We believe these are the foundation of a civil science that can use
information to strengthen society” (24).
The implication here is that the values of democracy and “civil science” are at the
heart of what research is about, which is in itself a call for a shift in what research is and how
it’s conducted. Further, Wollenberg et al. (2004) articulate a shift away from the notion that
research, researchers and facilitators are or can be neutral towards one where each is an
integral component of a politically-charged, value-laden system.
Wollenberg and Uluk’s (2004) paper “Representation: Who speaks for whom in
citizen-driven research?” is another example of CIFOR self-critically reflecting on their work
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in Malinau to articulate and advocate for changes in how institutions plan and implement.
For example, in discussing how villagers facilitated the most recent inter-village meeting yet
expressed a desire for CIFOR to continue to assist them in these meeting, Wollenberg and
Uluk (2004: 16) caution their audience at the Common Property Conference, which is a mix
of academics and practitioners concerned with common property issues, that
“extreme sensitivity, explicitness about power relations and self-criticism is
necessary…to promote ‘good’ governance in appropriate ways as an outsider or non-
citizen.”
They go on to “reject that the principles of participation, representation and transparency are
everywhere applicable in their western form.” Indeed, while supporting the goals of
democratic governance and liberating social agendas, they find the “simplistic, formulaic,
and hegemonic promotion problematic” (Wollenberg and Uluk 2004: 16). In its place, they
suggest working from an understanding of the existing governance system and towards an
improved awareness among facilitators and representatives about how power and knowledge
intersect (Wollenberg and Uluk 2004). They close their critical self-reflection with a set of
tentative prescriptions to help promote better representation, which reads like an
anthropologist’s checklist for fieldwork and includes the following (Wollenberg and Uluk
2004: 17-18):
“1. Collect and analyze information about how representation works formally and
informally…
2. Use a scale of work or units of analysis that have existing or potential
constituencies and representatives.
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3. Use representativeness of different interest groups as a basis for representation. Be
clear about the categories across which representativeness is required, and identify
which ones have existing mechanisms of representation and which do not.
4. Promote improved representation in knowledge-producing activities…
5. Share choice of participants with existing representatives or authorities, such that
participants are accountable to them rather than the facilitator.
6. Acknowledge and actively work against the biases that promote elite’s or experts’
over citizen’s knowledge…
7. Critically question and debate different conceptions of desirable representation…”
IV. Analysis of how CIFOR’s articulation of change works
Thus far in this chapter, I have argued that CIFOR researchers’ critical reflections
advocate and articulate to the epistemic or interpretive community that CIFOR is part of a
particular way of conducting applied research and implementing conservation and
development interventions that shifts the paradigm of mainstream applied research and
intervention practice. It is perhaps here, in these critical reflections and suggestions for
moving forward, published for an international audience ostensibly concerned with
sustainable and socially just forest and natural resource management that CIFOR has more
influence and power compared to its presence locally in Malinau. In the following
discussion, I demonstrate how it is that CIFOR and its calls for change in those self-critical
reflections10 articulate with and have influence among the international conservation and
10 The self-critical reflections are publications that seem very much geared toward the international community of academics and practitioners engaged in conservation and development. They are published in English and in presses and journals associated with this community.
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development practitioner community, or what Fairhead and Leach (2003) refer to as
“Tropical Forest International.”11
A. CIFOR’s position and leverage in the international community
There are several “articulative elements” (Tsing 1999b) between CIFOR and
international conservation and development community and that make CIFOR’s
prescriptions compelling or convincing to this community. Perhaps first and foremost is that
within this community, CIFOR ipso facto has substantial legitimacy and cachet – it is part of
the CGIAR, was created to be one of the seminal knowledge institutes on tropical forests and
related livelihood issues, and epitomizes science and neutrality within this community
(Fairhead and Leach 2003). CIFOR’s work is used and cited by not only most major
international organizations such as the World Bank (Spilsbury and Bose 2004), but also by
the scientific community via peer reviewed journals (Angelsen and Aryal [forthcoming]).
Further, by virtue of being within the ambit of mainstream international organizations
concerned with sustainable development, CIFOR’s critiques and calls for change are
relatively more palatable or acceptable for this community than if they were coming from a
perceived outsider, inter alia, academia. Indeed, much academic scholarship already exists
that provides similar critiques and recommendations, yet is often dismissed as “academic,”
“theoretical,” or “overly critical” by practitioners. Because of the niche that CIFOR occupies,
the institution acts as a “boundary object” (Fujimura 1992) to help massage certain messages
into the mainstream practitioner community.
11 Fairhead and Leach (2003: 26-27) use the term “Tropical Forest International” to refer to the “increasingly de-centered, de-territorialized form of global governance” related to the forests and biodiversity and “the nexus of international conventions, the United Nations and other international organizations, multilateral and bilateral donors, trans-national corporations, international NGOs, international research centers and the research community more widely.”
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B. CIFOR’s use and refashioning of mainstream discourse: boundary objects
CIFOR translates or articulates critiques of conventional wisdom and practice and
calls for change in a vernacular that the practitioner community is comfortable with. Indeed,
from the earlier analysis of CIFOR publications that are critical self-reflections, it is apparent
that CIFOR researchers use terms that are part and parcel of the conventional wisdom of this
community and then redefine and tailor those terms to countervail conventional wisdom. For
example, Sayer and Campbell (2004) critique the collection of “integrated natural resource
management” approaches in their book, and in doing so refashion the concept to imbue it
with the shift in thinking and practice they advocate. Importantly, they do not dismiss or
discard the idea or the term/jargon, but rather use “integrated natural resource management”
as a boundary object12. In initiating their critique of existing approaches, Sayer and Campbell
(2004) appeal to the collective sense of “wanting to do good,” as well as the collective sense
of disappointment and frustration felt within this community. These are important entry
points because they do not attribute blame or malicious intent and also foster a sense of
inclusiveness and collective identity, but at the same time convey the failure of these
approaches, which is critical for their own agenda. They write,
“Huge amounts of money have been invested in various approaches to achieving
integration in natural resource management…Many attempts to integrate complex
sets of knowledge and the interests of diverse sets of actors into a common
framework have yielded disappointing results. The desire to achieve integration
persists but our seeming inability to translate theories of integration into practical
12 Boundary objects are “objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites….The have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable” (Star and Griesmer 1989: 393). Boundary objects can be ideas, things, people or processes.
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achievements on the ground is leading to widespread disillusion. In frustration, we
abandon one set of integrative buzzwords and replace them with others. What is
surprising is not the improvement of integrative methods over the past 40 years –
rather it is their fundamental similarity. The words have changed but the paradigm
remains the same” (Sayer and Campbell 2004: 4).
Once they convey the sense of failure and crisis in a palatable fashion, they make
possible the refashioning of the concept to include their calls for a shift in the way research
and development are thought about and practiced:
“The lack of progress in achieving integration has led many to question its usefulness.
Many have argued that the idea of integration is conceptually appealing but is
impossible to achieve in practice…Another view, and the one we will explore in this
book, is that the processes, tools and concepts that could underpin a new integrative
science are not widely understood and not fully embraced, and that fundamental
aspects of the way development science is organized are creating obstacles to change”
(Sayer and Campbell 2004: 5).
In “Muddling Through,” Wollenberg et al. (2004 and [forthcoming b]) effect a similar
partial countervailing of conventional wisdom and refashioning of accepted jargon with
respect to “adaptive collaborative management.” Through a retelling of their experience in
Malinau, Wollenberg et al. (2004) indirectly critique “formal models of adaptive
collaborative management” such as “formal multistakeholder forums” by demonstrating their
inappropriateness in the Malinau context. At the same time, Wollenberg et al. (2004)
maintain the use of the term “adaptive collaborative management” – indeed, in the name of
the project itself – and imbue it with an “informal, embedded approach focused on
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incremental strengthening of communities” (Wollenberg et al. 2004: 20). In essence,
“adaptive collaborative management” is the quintessential boundary object (Fujimura 1992) -
- there is enough play in the concept and enough common ground in the way Wollenberg et
al. (2004) articulate their version to allow what Wollenberg et al. (2004) call for to remain
within the acceptable boundaries of the mainstream practitioner concept of “adaptive co-
management.” Indeed, this is captured succinctly in a chapter of a forthcoming book on
ACM, which is an expanded version of the Wollenberg et al. (2004) article. In that chapter,
Wollenberg et al. (forthcoming b) locate their approach as part of, but significantly different
from, other ACM approaches. They write,
“The authors of this report were part of a larger program at CIFOR called ‘Adaptive
Collaborative Management (ACM),’ hence we refer to ourselves as the ACM-
Malinau team. Our activities in Malinau pre-dated the other studies in this volume
and so were organized with different purposes and questions than these other studies.
We nevertheless shared concepts and methods in Bogor, and developed fruitful
synergies” (Wollenberg et al. [forthcoming]: 3)13
C. CIFOR’s long-term presence in Malinau: The cachet of “being there”
CIFOR’s long-term field experience in Malinau and other locations is an essential
element in CIFOR’s prescriptions coming across as convincing and expert to the
international conservation and development community. CIFOR’s long-term fieldwork –
“being there” -- in part legitimizes critiques of conventional wisdom and the positions
advocated by CIFOR researchers. For example, as mentioned earlier, Wollenberg et al.
13 With respect to different purposes and questions, Wollenberg et al. (forthcoming b: 5) write the following: “Different from other cases in this book, we did not seek to test ACM approaches to understand their effectiveness. We also did not develop indicators and monitoring systems with different stakeholders, nor promote collaborative management per se.”
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(2004) critique formal ACM processes through a retelling of their long-term fieldwork
experience in Malinau. The first-hand, long-term field experience also conveys a sense of
mastery or expertise, which is critical for the reputation of CIFOR and CIFOR researchers,
and conversely, for the acceptability/palatability of CIFOR researchers’ prescriptions. The
sense of expertise and power that “being there” conveys is captured succinctly in a review of
Sayer and Campbell’s (2004) book. The book reviewer, A. Kiss of the Social and
Environmental Unit of the World Bank, writes in the first sentence, “Jeffery Sayer and Bruce
Campbell bring literally a world of experience from the front lines” (Kiss 2005: 9, italics
added). Further, the indisputability or legitimacy of the case studies in the book is
emphasized when she notes that they are grounded in “three complex ecological settings in
which the authors have extensive personal experience” (Kiss 2005: 9, italics added).
V. Summary of Analysis and Conclusion
In this chapter, I analyzed the type of global influence that CIFOR attempts to have
based on its local-level applied research, ethnographically grounding the idea of global-local
linkages of knowledge. To this end, I discussed how CIFOR represents its experience in
Malinau to a broader audience, viz., how it addresses these disconnects or challenges in
publications geared toward its “interpretive” (Mosse 2004) or “epistemic” (Haas 1990)
communities and what those particular representations of its experience attempts to achieve
among the community of practitioners and academics involved in international conservation
and development.
CIFOR researchers’ retelling and reporting in publications of their local-level
research experience in Malinau and articulating these experiences through a particular self-
reflexive mode provide compelling, persuasive (policy) narratives and prescriptions to their
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global “epistemic” or “interpretive” communities. Essential to the traction of these narratives
and prescriptions is the telling of the difficulties, challenges and constraints that CIFOR has
encountered in Malinau. CIFOR researchers’ first-hand experience of “being there” also
lends further legitimacy to its prescriptive comments and suggestions. In employing this
self-reflexive mode, CIFOR attempts to carve out a different space for international aid,
research, science culture, and conservation and development policies and practices that
underscores the need for the broader practitioner community to account for and
accommodate local variation. The emphasis on the need to be adaptive and flexible is
unusual for a CGIAR institute (see for example Marglin 1996), and yet by virtue of being a
CGIAR institute CIFOR has the legitimacy and authority to advocate for these changes in the
mainstream conservation and development community. These publications indicate not only
an awareness of the non-linear and political relationship between research and practice, but
also a call to embrace these dynamics in the practice of research and development
intervention.
The extent to which these prescriptions will be institutionalized at CIFOR or
elsewhere depends greatly on whether significant institutional and inter-institutional changes
can take place. There is potentially a performative aspect to these “lessons learned” in which
there are many nods of understanding and agreement, yet little institutional change occurs to
enable the application of these prescriptions -- the history of aid in the forestry sector in
Indonesia could be considered a case in point14. Further, some scholars argue that even if the
necessary institutional changes occurred, the practice of these prescriptions or policies would
be significantly different than what CIFOR researchers would intend from the prescriptions
because “the things that make for ‘good policy’ [prescriptions in this case], -- policy which 14 See Chapter 6 and Chpater 7 for a detailed discussion regarding forests and international aid in Indonesia.
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legitimizes and mobilizes political support – in reality make it rather unimplementable within
its chosen institutions and regions” (Mosse 2004: 1). I address these issues in the following
two chapters (Chapter 6 and Chapter 7).
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PREFACE TO CHAPTER 6 AND CHAPTER 7
In this chapter (Chapter 6) and the next (Chapter 7), I describe and analyze the
relationships between, and incentives and logics of, aid-related forestry institutions at the
national level in Indonesia, as well as the relationship and dynamics between aid-related
forestry institutions and central government agencies including, but not limited to, the
Ministry of Forestry. To understand these institutional relationships, incentives and logics, I
examine the origin and evolution of (1) forestry as an agenda item at the annual Consultative
Group on Indonesia (CGI) meetings, which are the annual diplomatic meetings between the
international donor community and the Indonesian government, and (2) the Donor Forum on
Forestry (DFF), which was created by the CGI in 2000, and its relationship with other
forestry-related institutions.
Conceptually, in Chapters 6 and 7 I examine the tension between, on the one hand,
the “order” (Mosse 2004, 2005) that maintains international attention and aid in the
Indonesian forestry sector in the face of inaction and the lack of progress, and on the other,
the “disjuncture” (Mosse 2004, 2005) of knowledge, policy and practice both within and
between forest-related institutions, which in turn perpetuates the lack of progress on reforms
agreed upon by international donors and the Indonesian government. More specifically, I
examine how the “order” or “master metaphor” (Mosse 2004, 2005) of forestry reform
agreeable to both the international community and Indonesian government at the highest
levels of diplomatic relations was crafted and maintained to justify aid-interventions. I also
analyze how this master metaphor evolved through the active refashioning by both donors
and government to address the reality that the commitments agreed upon in the master
metaphor of forest reform were not being met. Further, I examine the structural and
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institutional dynamics that explain the lack of progress on the agreed upon commitments and
the ineffectiveness of aid-related forestry interventions in Indonesia, and consequently the
disjuncture or disconnect between knowledge, policy and practice, as well as how these
disjunctures are maintained.
It is important to locate CIFOR in the broader landscape of institutions or interpretive
community within which it operates in Indonesia. CIFOR does not work in isolation, and
integral to understanding the factors that influence the use of CIFOR’s research-based
recommendations and prescriptions in Indonesia or lack thereof is the broader institutional
landscape within which the institution operates. In other words, understanding the
relationships, incentives and logics of aid-related forestry institutions in Indonesia and their
engagement with other actors such as government reveal whether and/or the extent to which
CIFOR influences and is influenced by (informs and is informed by) these other institutions.
An unfounded assumption is the linear knowledge-to-policy-to-practice model, e.g., the
assumption that if CIFOR makes an evidence-based recommendation regarding forest policy
and practice in Indonesia, it will be implemented by the Indonesian authorities and supported
by the larger community of aid-related forestry institutions. As previous chapters have
demonstrated and the following chapters will, this is clearly not the case, and hence in
Chapters 6 and 7 I explain the basis for how CIFOR engages with aid-related forestry
institutions in Indonesia, as well as its global interpretive community, discussed in Chapter 5
and further elaborated in Chapter 8. The extent to which CIFOR’s prescriptions will be
institutionalized at CIFOR or elsewhere heavily depends on whether significant institutional
and inter-institutional changes can take place.
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More specifically, my contention is that the bureaucratic logic of each aid-related
forestry institution and the actors they engage takes precedence over the publicly agreed
upon commitment to collaborate and coordinate. At the same time, these institutions maintain
a public discourse or appearance of “striving” or “trying” that is sufficient to keep aid
flowing. Evidence of this is the approximately USD 60 million/year for the past five to seven
years that Indonesia has received through bilateral and multilateral grants, while the forestry
sector continues to generate revenue of over USD 4 billion through practices that violate the
commitments made by government with respect to reform in the forestry sector. Related to
the disparity between the revenue generated by the sector and international aid to forestry,
this dissertation generally and Chapters 6 and 7 specifically examine the reasons for the
Indonesian government’s involvement in aid-related forestry interventions, particularly
considering that they potentially threaten a USD 4 billion industry.
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CHAPTER 6
FORESTRY AND THE CONSULTATIVE GROUP ON INDONESIA (CGI): CRAFTING AND
MAINTAINING THE MASTER METAPHOR OF FORESTRY REFORM IN INDONESIA
I. Introduction
In this chapter (Chapter 6), I discuss and analyze how and why forestry was elevated
to the highest levels of diplomatic negotiations between the international donor community
and the government of Indonesia, viz., the annual CGI meetings, and how an agreed upon
“master metaphor” (Mosse 2004) of forest reform was fashioned by the donor community
and government. Further, I examine how this master metaphor evolved over time and was
actively refashioned by both donors and the Indonesian government, as well has how the
master metaphor incorporated the concomitant lack of progress on the agreed upon
commitments. To this end, I discuss and analyze the official donor and government
statements made at annual and mid-term CGI meetings from 2000, when forestry first
became a CGI agenda item, through 2003, at which time the deforestation rate was
significantly higher than it had been in 2000 and the general situation in forestry was
undeniably worse. In short, I show how the master metaphor of the Indonesian forestry
sector’s problems and solutions is created, maintained and refashioned among international
donors and the government, while the situation in the forest indicates a trajectory
diametrically opposed to the aims of forestry reform agreed upon.
My analysis demonstrates that there is a significant performative element to CGI-
related evaluations and assessments of the forestry sector reform in Indonesia, as well as calls
for reform and coordination among donor and government agencies and between donors and
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the government. Indeed, in the last portion of this section of the chapter, I discuss and
analyze an evaluation of the Indonesian forestry sector that preceded forestry becoming a
CGI agenda item. In doing so, I demonstrate how the inaction that resulted from forestry
reform being a CGI agenda time was not only predictable, but also how very similar
assessments and recommendations had been made in the past to no avail. Assessments and
evaluations, as well as their attendant recommendations, are not instruments to achieve their
ostensible goals of improved sustainable and equitable forest management, but rather
vehicles to recruit for and maintain master metaphors. They help maintain attention on
Indonesia’s forests in the global and national arena and are an important aspect of the
narrative that supports aid-related forestry in Indonesia.
II. The CGI and Forestry as a CGI agenda item
A. The CGI and its importance
Forestry issues in Indonesia first appeared on the CGI agenda in the July 1999
meeting in Paris, at the urging of international donors. One senior donor representative noted
that according to colleagues who were in attendance at the CGI “the only topic that received
more attention was the terrible situation in East Timor” (Walton nd). That said, for the
government of Indonesia forestry was not a priority issue. According to the World Bank
Indonesia mission’s environment specialist, “government representatives could not
understand why the donors were so upset about the forest destruction but agreed, in order to
move on to other agenda items, a high-level seminar on forestry to be held with donors and
officials” (Walton nd). Thus at its inception, forestry was a donor driven agenda item – the
values regarding Indonesia’s forests dramatically differed between the international donor
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community and the government. The government, however, could not ignore the issue since
it had drawn the attention of the CGI, which is significant.
The CGI is the group of bilateral and multilateral donors that provides foreign
assistance to the Indonesian government in the form of grants, loans and projects. According
to Vikram Nehru (2000), at that time the Lead Economist of the World Bank office in
Jakarta, the CGI consults “with government and each other on Indonesia’s development
priorities and the external financing the country needs to meet those priorities.” According to
Nehru (2000), the CGI’s key objective “is to better understand Indonesia’s development
policies and programs, and to improve coordination between donors and government, and
among donors themselves, so that external aid is used as effectively as possible and in the
nation’s best interests.” Each CGI member pledges according to the government of
Indonesia’s requests and their respective nation’s policies. At the October 2000 CGI, Japan,
ADB and the World Bank accounted for almost 90% of the pledges (Nehru 2000).
The annual CGI meetings represent the literal and symbolic face-to-face discussion of
what the donor community and Indonesian government have mutually determined as
important for the development of Indonesia, an accounting of what has and has not been
achieved, followed by a pledging of future funding in the form of grants and loans,
conditionalities and achievements. In addition to the formal annual meeting, which is
scheduled so that CGI pledges can inform parliament when finalizing Indonesia’s annual
budget, mid-term review meetings are also held to report on progress.
The first CGI meeting was held in Paris in 1992 at the request of the Indonesian
government. There was a predecessor to the CGI, referred to as the Inter-Governmental
Group on Indonesia (IGGI), which had been the Indonesian donor forum since 1967. The
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Indonesian government dissolved the IGGI in March 1992 because it could not accept the
Dutch government, “which Jakarta saw as using development assistance to intervene in the
internal affairs of Indonesia. Jakarta was upset with Dutch pressure and criticism of human
rights violations in East Timor” (Bahagijo 2004).1 The only difference between the CGI and
IGGI is the exclusion of the Dutch government.
Prior to 2000, the CGI meetings were exclusive affairs between international donors
and senior Indonesian government officials and always took place outside of Indonesia. The
World Bank has traditionally organized and chaired the CGI forum, as well as being one the
largest providers of loans, together with Japan and ADB2. Unsurprisingly, the Bank also has
more leverage and influence than bilateral donors and UN agencies operating in Indonesia
(Bahagijo 2004).
Since 2000, the organization of the CGI meetings has changed significantly such that
they are now held in Indonesia, invite a number of NGOs as observers and have working
groups (Bahagijo 2004)3. CGI meetings are typically two day events, with much press
coverage in Indonesia both before and after the event. The first day is formally referred to as
the “Pre-CGI meeting” and “is devoted to gathering inputs and reports, both from
government and donors, including working groups” (Bahagijo 2004). At the December 2003
“Pre-CGI”, there were six working groups: Forestry, Decentralization, Overseas 1 On November 12, 1991 the Santa Cruz Massacre occurred. Indonesian troops fired on a peaceful memorial procession to the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili that turned into a pro-independence demonstration. Over 270 East Timorese were killed in the massacre, which was filmed by two international journalists and sparked the international solidarity movement for East Timor (http://www.etan.org/timor/SntaCRUZ.htm). 2 The January 2005 CGI meeting in Jakarta was the first to be chaired by the Indonesian government. This came after the presentation at the December 2003 CGI of a study by Bappenas (National Development Planning Body) (2003) drawing attention to the donor driven process in terms of the topics being discussed at the CGI and recommending that the CGI meetings should be led by GOI instead of the World Bank (Bahagijo 2004). 3 It is not entirely clear why 2000 was a turning point for the organization of CGI meetings, but mostly likely the decision was influenced by the post-Suharto reformasi ethos of transparency, accountability and inclusion of civil society organizations in governance affairs.
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Development Assistance (ODA) Effectiveness, Supreme Court Reform, Poverty Reduction
and Health. The second day is the official CGI Meeting, which is chaired by the vice-
president of the World Bank and co-chaired by the Coordinating Minister for Economic
Affairs (Bahagijo 2004). This meeting “discusses the official statement and official reply,
and comments from Indonesian government delegates…[and] agrees on the amount pledged
by donors, based on requests by [the] government of Indonesia” (Bahagijo 2004).
Opinions vary with respect to the extent to which donors or the government drives the
agenda at the annual meeting between the CGI and the government of Indonesia. According
to Nehru (2000), a World Bank official,
“the CGI meeting does not impose any conditions on the Indonesian Government.
But the purpose of the CGI meeting is for donors to assess whether the government’s
policies are conducive for development and thus warrant international financial
support. So there is undoubted pressure on the Indonesian Government to meet these
expectations… While the CGI meeting itself does not impose conditions on the
Indonesian Government, individual lenders or grantors may very well link their
financial support to certain government actions. The World Bank and the Asian
Development Bank, for example, regularly link their project aid to effective
implementation, and require key policy reforms before disbursing their adjustment
loans. These conditions are negotiated in advance – and are designed to ensure that
the funds are used to meet the development priorities of the country.”
Others, unsurprisingly, look more critically at the donor community’s motives and
intentions. For example, Bahagijo (2004), who is a representative from the International
NGO Forum on Indonesia (INFID), notes that the “World Bank, as the lead agency or chair
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of the CGI, basically controls the process and the decision making.” Bahagijo (2004)
continues noting that “the Bank can choose which analysis is supported and which issues are
deemed important” and that the CGI is “a forum on what type of economic analysis and
economic policy is being supported and opposed.” Thus, for Bahagijo and others, the CGI
has been strongly donor driven, particularly by the World Bank and IMF, and has not
allowed discussion of issues such as debt relief. Thus, for Bahagijo and others the “voice and
influence of both the Indonesian government and people” must be increased in the CGI
(Bahagijo 2004). Indeed, a number of Indonesian NGOs have called for the dissolution of the
CGI altogether (see for example Joint Statement by NGOs on pre-CGI meeting in Indonesia,
April 23-24, 20014).
B. Forestry as a top tier issue at the CGI
Regardless of one’s analysis of the CGI and its relationship to the government, the
CGI is undeniably important for Indonesia, and for forestry to have become an agenda item is
to elevate the perceived problems related to forestry to the highest levels of
intergovernmental political dialogue. Moreover, since the CGI addresses at most five agenda
items at its annual meetings, forestry as a CGI agenda item means that it was given priority
over a host of other internationally significant issues in Indonesia. Several converging factors
seem to explain why the international donor community raised forestry as a particularly
important issue at the 1999 CGI in Paris5. Perhaps most critically, the fall of Suharto in May
4 According to this joint statement, Indonesian NGOs want to dissolve the CGI for several reasons: First, although providing aid to the forestry sector, CGI member countries have encouraged and facilitated large-scale deforestation by supporting pulp and paper industries (which by and large rely on illegally source materials) through export credit agencies, e.g., Europe, Japan and the US. Second, the CGI has neither investigated nor taken action regarding the clear and multiple cases of corruption where government officials misappropriated international aid (grants and loans). Lastly, the CGI’s policies such as market liberalization will only worsen poverty in Indonesia and not alleviate it, while also further indebting the country. . 5 The first CGI in the post-Suharto period was in Paris on July 29-30th, 1998.
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1998 and the ensuing era of reformasi allowed both international and national critics of
Indonesia’s forestry practices to voice their concerns publicly. Further, during 1997-1998
forest fires ravaged over five million hectares of Sumatra and Kalimantan. The haze created
an international incident between Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore and firmly situated
Indonesia’s forests in “crisis” in the international gaze. Moreover, with the use of GPS/GIS
technologies, it was clear that many of those responsible for the fires were large plantation
companies, but none were prosecuted or penalized. Moreover, in early 1999 the German-
funded Social Forestry Development Project (SFDP) in West Kalimantan, which had been
operating since 1990, was effectively terminated because certain local level actors did not
feel they were benefiting from the project and thus burned down the field station and chased
out staff. At that time, Germany held the presidency of the European Commission and thus
raised forestry as an issue at the 1999 Paris CGI. Additionally, recently released forest maps
showed that for the 12-year period ending in 1997 Indonesia had lost on average 1.7 million
hectares per year, which was nearly twice the deforestation rate that most people had
estimated in the early 1990s (Walton nd).
A key institutional instrument for donors to raise forestry in the CGI meeting was the
inclusion of forestry policy reforms as conditionalities in the January 1998 IMF loan package
to Indonesia. These conditionalities, one of which was the production of more accurate forest
maps, set the precedent for and leveraged the position of the donor community to engage the
government on forestry issues. The full set of IMF conditionalities related to forestry is as
follows:
• Removal of restrictions on foreign investment in palm oil plantations
• Removal of the ban on palm oil product exports and replacement with an export tax
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• Reduction of export taxes on logs and rattan to a maximum of 20% ad valorem
• Creation of new taxes on activities involving exploitation of timber resources
• Increase of timber royalties charged to forest concessions, implementation of an
auction system to allocate new concessions, and allow transferability of forestry
concessions and de-link their owners from processing for new concessions.
• Elimination of the Indonesian Plywood Association (APKINDO)’s monopoly over
plywood exports.
• Transfer of control over all government-owned commercial forestry companies from
the Ministry of Forestry to the Ministry of Finance
• Incorporation of the reforestation fund into the national budget and use money in the
fund only for reforestation purposes.
• Increase the proportion of market value of land and buildings assessable for tax
purposes to 40% for plantations and forest. (World Bank 2000)
While it is debatable whether the IMF conditionalities related to forestry issues actually
incentivized reform toward sustainable and equitable forest management (Barr 2001), they
did allow the international donor community, particularly the World Bank, which had been
absent from the forestry in Indonesia since 1994, to involve itself in the political-economic
elements of forestry in Indonesia in a way that was not possible during the Suharto regime.
Indeed, the way that the definitive 2001 World Bank report on Indonesia’s forests describes
how forestry went from a IMF conditionality to a CGI agenda item is telling of how the
donor community had implicated itself in post-Suharto forestry politics:
“There was, nevertheless, a sense that change was neither moving fast enough nor
reaching deep enough to stem the destruction of the forests. Reports of illegal logging in
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national parks were confirmed. The bill that became the new Law on Forestry (Law No.
41/1999) was rushed into hearings in the DPR (National Assembly) despite complaints
from NGOs, donors, and even MoFEC’s [Ministry of Forestry and Estate Crops] own
Komite Reformasi [Reform Committee] that the agreed-on prior consultation with
stakeholders had not occurred. In light of these concerns, the World Bank placed forestry
on the agenda of the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI) for the first time ever6, at its
annual meeting in Paris in July 1999. A memorandum on the sector, prepared jointly by
the European Commission, Germany and the United Kingdom, was tabled at the meeting,
and it prompted extensive discussion by the donors. The outcome was a proposal by the
Head of the Indonesian delegation for a high level seminar on forestry, with a report to be
submitted to the next CGI meeting, in 2000.” (World Bank 2001: 6)
III. Analysis of CGI statements and their evolution
A. Coalescing the master metaphor: The “Removing the Constraints” seminar
After the international community raised forestry as a critical issue at the 1999 CGI in
Paris, and the Indonesian government was persuaded of its importance, an agreement was
reached to bring together representatives from government, donors and other stakeholder
groups at a high level event. This manifested in the January 2000 seminar in Jakarta
“Removing the Constraints: Post-consultative group meeting on Indonesia Seminar on
Indonesian Forestry,” the results of which were presented at the February 2000 CGI in
Jakarta.7 The seminar was organized by the World Bank and BAPPENAS and opened by
Mark Baird, who was then the World Bank Country Director for Indonesia, and Kwik Kian
6 Placing forestry on the CGI agenda had not been attempted before. 7 The seminar was originally planned to take place in October 1999, but it was postponed because the Indonesian presidential election was unexpectedly moved up to October 1999, and it made more sense to conduct the seminar with the new government.
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Gie, the Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs at that time. Also, the then Minister of
Forestry Nur Mahmudi Ismail gave the keynote. Participants included senior government,
NGO, and donor representatives, as well as senior university researchers. Indeed, this was a
high profile event, which focused on “a series of short, impactful illustrations of the problems
in the forestry sector, delivered by acknowledged Indonesian experts,” that “received
extensive advance publicity in international and national media, and almost 200 people
attended” (World Bank 2001: 6)8.
Indicative of the post-Suharto reformasi (reform) ethos, the presentations at this
seminar did not shy away from the political-economic dimensions of the forestry sector in
Indonesia. They addressed topics that would have been extremely sensitive to present and
discuss publicly during the Suharto regime. The first half of the full-day seminar focused on
illustrations of the problems plaguing the forestry sector. For example, a representative from
the MOFEC9 showed that recent maps indicated a much higher deforestation rate over the
past decade than originally estimated, and the then head of WWF Indonesia, Agus Purnomo,
presented on the corporate debt held by companies in the forestry sector, which was part of
an entire sub-session on overcapacity and debt in the forestry sector. The second half of the
seminar focused on possible solutions or “promising new directions in forest management.”
Forest management by communities and traditional user groups figured prominently, with
separate presentations on “forest boundary mapping by local communities,” “sustainable
forest management under adat,” the government sanctioned community forestry program
8 In addition to the World Bank funding the event, CIFOR, ICRAF, GTZ, EU, DFID, WWF Indonesia and the Ford Foundation helped identify speakers, prepare presentations and covered the cost of their travel to Jakarta. 9 Since the fall of Suharto, the Ministry of Forestry (MOF) has moved through various reorganizations, each with an attendant name change, which has included being called the Ministry of Forestry and Estate Crops (MOFEC). It has reverted to the Ministry of Forestry (MOF).
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known as HKM, the “social forestry development project” in West Kalimantan led by GTZ,
and “natural forest management in S. Kayan, E. Kalimantan.”
In addition to the topics of the presentations being progressive, the public framing of
the event also demonstrated a shift away from the technical aspects of forestry, which had
been the dominant paradigm of forestry aid in Indonesia, toward one that emphasized the
institutional, governance and political-economic reforms needed in the forestry sector. For
example, the World Bank Country Director for Indonesia Mark Baird noted in his opening
remarks that
“the forestry sector is a microcosm of the challenges that Indonesia’s people,
government, and economy face today. Technical issues of natural resource
management need to be tackled, for sure, but the more fundamental concerns that
affect many sectors must be tackled on the way to any solution in this one” (Baird
2000).
The World Bank Country Director also commented on the problems plaguing the
forestry sector, being quite specific in framing those problems as institutional and political-
economic (Baird 2000, emphases added):
• “Corruption is evident in illegal logging and was well-known in the nontransparent
way in which access to forest resources was awarded in the past.
• Improved governance and judicial reform are critically needed if sustainable forest
management is ever to be achieved
• Those involved in banking reforms and corporate restructuring will have to concern
themselves with forestry….
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• And…there are important concerns of social equity – of the role of local communities
in forest management, and of the rights of those communities to share in forest
benefits – that link with efforts to alleviate poverty and raise the standard of living of
all Indonesians.”
Further, as a lead-up article to the seminar, on January 14, 2000, Thomas Walton, then
senior environmental specialist at the Bank mission in Jakarta, wrote an op-ed piece for the
International Herald Tribune entitled “Is There a Future for Indonesia’s Forests?” that not
only highlighted the seminar internationally, but also called for a “radical departure from
‘business as usual,’” which according to Walton required significant changes in the
institutional and political-economic dimensions of forestry in Indonesia. For example, with
respect to the causes of the crisis in the Indonesian forestry sector, Walton notes the
following:
“The list of causes is long…forest fires in 1997-8…many of incendiaries [sic] were
large companies…but none received more than a slap on the wrist from the Soeharto
government…permits to convert forest for mine, plantations and settlements, have not
respected the official forest boundaries….logging incentives have not been strictly
regulated….perverse incentives exist…illegal logging has been rampant…and
authorities look the other way….the illegal logging is directly related to expansion of
the country’s wood-processing industries…decisions affecting access to the forest
have largely excluded two groups of stakeholders – rural communities and traditional
forest dwellers – that might be inclined to manage forests well if they could realize a
secure flow of benefits from doing so…”
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With respect to addressing these causes, Walton delineates eight elements of a
National Forest Program for the government to formulate and that emphasize institutional
and governance reform particularly within the government itself (IHT, emphases added):
“1. an interagency, multistakeholder body responsible for forest policy
2. a freeze on conversion of natural forest for any purpose until the national forest program is
in place and a transparent mechanism for forest use decisions is functioning.
3. a system to broaden and guarantee access to forest benefits for forest-dwellers and local
communities, through ownership or secure, long-term rights of use
4. environmental education and public awareness programs to build a local and national
constituency for forest conservation and sustainable management
5. incentives and penalties to improve concession management, including some form of
performance bonding and independent inspection
6. rigorous and consistent enforcement of the laws concerning illegal logging, burning, and
encroachment.
7. renewed commitment to conserving Indonesia’s world class biodiversity heritage through
establishment of a national network of parks and protected areas that can be effectively
managed in partnership with local communities and other stakeholders
8. aggressive replanting programs to return damaged forest land to productive use and relieve
industry pressure on natural forest, at the same time generating rural employment and
income.”
The emphasis on institutional, governance and political-economic reforms to resolve
Indonesia’s forestry problems was indeed the explicit framing of seminar. The background
document to the seminar that contextualizes the event notes: “The Indonesian forestry sector
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is currently subject to a thorough reform process. This process is driven by a new socio-
political context in which civil society plays a more important role than in the past” (World
Bank 2000). After a brief account of the importance of Indonesia’s forests, the achievements
in reform to date and the persisting problems, the document articulates the solutions to these
problems primarily in terms quite similar to Baird’s opening remarks and Walton’s
recommendations (World Bank 2000, emphases added):
“Major donor agencies recommend that the following elements be taken into account
in the approach to achieve structural improvements in the Indonesian forestry sector.
• Building up a transparent, participatory and consistent decision making process
regarding land use planning and dispute settlement
• Promotion of rehabilitation and reforestation activities on degraded lands
• Rendering management sustainable in all permanent production forests
• Promotion of a consultative process on policy reforms
• Making use of experiences from donor projects
• Reorganization and strengthening of the main function of the forest administration
• Setting of incentives and removal of disincentives for sustainable management at
macro-economic levels.”
B. The master metaphor materializes and evolves
1. The Platform of the master metaphor
Following the January 2000 high-level seminar on forestry, at the February 2000 CGI
in Jakarta, Untung Iskandar, the Director of Research Development in the Ministry of
Forestry, articulated the government and Ministry’s position on the forest sector in Indonesia.
He affirmed the government’s commitment “toward pursuance of sustainable forest
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management,” acknowledged that “Indonesia’s tropical forests constitute the lifelungs [sic]
of the world,” and further assured the international community that “it is our long term
commitments to put our forest resources back to their functions, ie [sic] as a ‘life supporting
system’” (Iskandar 2000).
After noting that Indonesia’s forests “have been under heavy pressures to support the
nation development [sic]” and reviewing the main issues discussed at the January 2000
seminar, Iskandar re-affirmed the government’s commitment noted in the Letter of Intent
with the IMF that an Interdepartmental Committee to address Forestry issues (IDCF) would
be established and that the National Forest Program (NFP) would be elevated to a new
interministerial level. The purpose of the IDCF was “to coordinate multisectoral actions to
return the forests to sustainable management” (World Bank 2001: 27). The IDCF was
charged with two key tasks: “to ensure the complete development of the NFP, and to
coordinate and support the immediate actions that the MoFEC agrees need to be taken to
address urgent issues raised at the Post-CGI Seminar [on forestry in January 2000]” (World
Bank 2001: 27). The intention of the NFP was to be an “Indonesia-specific policy, strategy,
and action plan to achieve sustainable use of forest resources, formulated in a transparent
manner and in consultation with all stakeholders” (World Bank 2001: 27). Given that many
forest related issues fall outside of the authority or responsibility of the MoFEC, both donors
and the Ministry recognized that preparing the NFP required the involvement of many other
government agencies and non-government actors. Thus, the government “proposed that the
NFP would go forward under a temporary statutory body to be established within 60 days by
Presidential Decree (KepPres), and that this body would involve representatives of all
stakeholders at district, provincial and national levels” (World Bank 2001: 27).
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In addition to the IDCF and NFP commitments, the Ministry agreed to take
immediate action on the following eight points based on the January 2000 forestry seminar
(Iskandar 2000, emphases added), all of which were confirmed by the Minister of Economic
Affairs in his capacity as the head of the Indonesian delegation:
“1. To invite cooperation and coordination of other ministries to impose strong
measure against illegal loggers especially those operating within national parks, and
closure of illegal sawmill
2. To speed up forest resource assessment as basis for NFP formulation
3. To evaluate the policy in conversion forest and put moratorium on all forest
conversion until NFP agreed
4. To downsize and restructure wood based industry to balance between supply and
demand of raw material and most importantly is to increase competitiveness
5. To close heavily-indebted wood industries under control of IBRA and linking
proposed debt write off to capacity reduction
6. To connect reforestation program with the existing forest industries and those
under construction
7. To recalculate real value of timber
8. To use decentralization process as a tool to enhance sustainable forest
management”
These eight points of immediate action plus the IDCF and NFP commitments map
onto and reaffirm the recommendations made during the high profile January 2000 forestry
seminar, as well as those made by the international donor community, indicated by Baird and
Walton’s respective comments discussed earlier. Indeed, the Ministry’s statement at the
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February 2000 CGI gives a definitive, tangible form to the master metaphor (Mosse 2004,
2005) or standardized package (Fujimura 1992) of forest reform, particularly since it is the
government’s formal articulation of its agenda, thereby bringing together the ostensible
commitments of both the government and donor community. In short, both the government
and donor community have been recruited to buy into this master metaphor. Baird’s broad
concerns discussed earlier perhaps best capture the key themes of the master metaphor that
would carry and maintain forestry as a key issue at ensuing CGI meetings, viz., corruption,
governance and judicial reform, banking reforms and corporate restructuring, and social
equity (Baird 2000). These four elements formed the broad contours of the master metaphor
that the international community and GOI publicly agreed upon through the Ministry’s
statement at the February 2000 CGI. Moreover, this master metaphor or standardized
package not only has an institutional history in IMF and World Bank structural adjustment
conditionalities, but also was legitimized by and negotiated in a high-level, multistakeholder
seminar in the spirit of reformasi.
Although the Ministry’s statement is the moment where the master metaphor of forest
reform in the CGI materializes – having at that point recruited both international donors and
the Indonesian government -- at the onset there was concern among the donor community of
whether and/or how the master metaphor would be translated into practice. Thus, to allay this
concern, the Donor Forum on Forestry (DFF) was created:
“The donors asked the Government to attach some target dates to the key actions.
They proposed (and GOI accepted) to have a small group of donor agencies establish
a ‘forum’ to assist GOI in carrying out its proposed actions and monitoring progress
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leading up to the next CGI meeting. Accordingly, the CGI Donor Forum on Forestry
has been established” (World Bank 2001:27).
2. An analysis of the evolution of the master metaphor
In this section, I analyze the formal statements made by the donor community and
Indonesian government at CGI meetings with respect to progress, or lack thereof, in the
forestry sector. I should note here that these formal statements are not responses to each
other; in other words, the donor statement is not necessarily a rejoinder to the Ministry of
Forestry statement and vice versa. Based on my experience with the preparations for the
December 2003 CGI, the DFF and Ministry exchange drafts of formal statements prior to the
CGI. In the following analysis, I examine how the substance of the statements evolved on the
donor side as well as the government’s side.
Perhaps the most consistent theme in both donor and government statements at the
CGI with respect to the forest situation in Indonesia is the lack of progress, results and
achievements in meeting commitments expressed by the government, which could
potentially destabilize the master metaphor. How the donor community and government
incorporate this perceived failure or lack of progress into the master metaphor is instructive
with respect how each side attempts to maintain recruitment and stabilize the master
metaphor.
a. Donors and the lack of progress
At the October 2000 CGI, after reviewing the history of forestry in the CGI and the
government’s commitments, the donors noted that “progress is generally slow and there are
few concrete results to date [since the February 2000 CGI]” and that “the DFF and the
international community as a whole remains concerned over the large gap that exists between
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stated aims and actual achievements” (Donor Statement October 2000). The document goes
on to specify that “the IDCF has neither been truly active or operational since its
establishment,” that “the process of drafting the NFP is delayed and the composition of the
special working groups falls far short of the promised stakeholder representation,” and that
“the level of illegal logging appears to be increasing” (Donor Statement October 2000). As a
concrete step to remedy this lack of progress, the donor statement “calls upon GOI to present
a plan of action within one month of the [October 2000] Tokyo CGI meeting” (Donor
Statement October 2000). Thus, in this statement, which came eight months after GOI’s
declaration of commitments to reform in the forest sector, the donors clearly articulate the
lack of progress on GOI’s commitments, while also providing an avenue of recourse for the
government.
In the April 2001 mid-term review CGI meeting, the progress report jointly carried
out by the government and donors notes that the action plan was drafted by the IDCF and
made public, yet it “did not incorporate an instrument to objectively measure achievements
on these commitments” (Donor Statement April 2001). The joint statement continues with a
comment from the donors similar to their October 2000 statement: “progress from the
donors’ viewpoint…in terms of results in the forest….[is] there have been no tangible
improvements…donors are of the opinion…very few tangible results have been achieved”
(Donor Statement April 2001).
Again similar to the October 2000 statement, the donors make recommendations:
“donors believe that the indicators [to the action plan] will be a useful tool to assess in terms
agreed by all parties” and “law enforcement has to be endorsed from the highest political
level” (Donor Statement April 2001). Perhaps most revealing about these recommendations
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and the ones from October 2000 is that they lack any repercussions if they are not fulfilled. In
short, donor statements do not have teeth. Although the IDCF created an “action plan,” it
lacked indicators, making it action-less. Yet, the donors did not reprimand or penalize GOI
for this or any of the other multiple instances of the lack of progress on commitments.
Indeed, this begs the question of what instruments the donor community possesses and/or is
willing to employ to reprimand GOI for non-compliance. The answer is very few if any at
all, as I elaborate in the rest of the chapter.
The donor statement at the November 2001 CGI meeting differs little in substance
from former ones, primarily noting the worsening situation in both the natural and
institutional environments:
“…the lack of recognition of land rights, access and tenure…inequitable distribution
of those [sic] revenues…there is unfortunately little on the ground evidence of having
made an impact at resolving it…illegal logging has increased, forest based industry
restructuring has not started, and policy initiatives towards sustainable forest
management…have yet to be implemented” (Donor Statement November 2001).
Notable about this donor statement is how these comments are incorporated into the master
metaphor. While acknowledging the worsening situation, this donor statement, like previous
ones, attempts to maintain recruitment and stabilize the standardized package of forest
reform by explicitly locating the lack of progress away from the Ministry of Forestry and
onto other government institutions, which it does not specify. The statement notes that the
problems in the forest sector are complex, “as they do not fall under the authority of one
institution,” and thus
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“it is unsurprising that the efforts the MOF has made….over the past two
years…success has been very limited because this institution simply does not have
the authority and resources to address them single-handedly” (Donor Statement
November 2001).
The donor statement once again provides impotent recommendations, which are to “consider
the revitalization of the IDCF” (Donor Statement November 2001). And once again there are
no concrete reprimands or penalties, only the proclamation that what is needed is a “process-
driven, multistakeholder approach supported by strong leadership and political will at the
highest level” (Donor Statement November 2001).
At the June 2002 CGI mid-term review meeting, the donor statement only reiterates
what was noted at the November 2001 meeting: With respect to reform in the forest sector,
“revitalizing the IDCF was considered a necessary part of this process. This statement
still stands…the donors would like to bring emphatically to the attention of the
Government that the IDCF has never been fully operational since its establishment,
and we again strongly recommend that this situation be corrected” (Donor Statement
June 2002).
The only difference in the June 2002 donor statement from previous ones is noting new
threats to forest management, viz., the debt restructuring policies of IBRA with respect to
heavily indebted forest industries and strip mining in protection forests. On the issue of debt
restructuring, the donor community sent the Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs --
copied to several other high level government agencies including IBRA -- a donor forum
position paper entitled “Issues involved in restructuring the forest industry and forest sector
debt” with a cover letter from the World Bank signed by the Acting Country Director at the
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time, Vikram Nehru. It seems that the letter and recommendations were ignored. IBRA sold
the debt owed by these industries at extreme low rates and mostly to the government itself,
thereby not only bailing out these industries but also re-incurring the debt.
The substance of the donor statement at the January 2003 CGI meeting strays very
little from previous statements, although the tone is stronger and comments more specific.
After reiterating the need for a multistakeholder, process-driven approach to resolving the
problems in the forestry sector, the donor statement asserts that “today, there appears to be
little change other than an increase in the amount of illegal logging that is taking place,
despite the high profile forestry has been given in the CGI” (Donor Statement 2003). The
assumption here is that the attention of the CGI should in itself motivate reform. Indeed, the
international donor community and government have ostensibly agreed on an agenda with
respect to forest reforms. Yet the commitment of the government to reform is suspect, and
international pressure and conditionalities are evidently insufficient to foment change.
The January 2003 donor statement again praises the Ministry of Forestry, highlighting
the Ministry’s “sole efforts” that “should be congratulated,” while blaming other agencies
for their lack of support, which “detracted from some of the valuable initiatives that have
been undertaken by the Ministry of Forestry” (Donor Statement January 2003). In particular,
the donor statement notes that the “lack of consideration of timber supply in IBRA’s ongoing
debt restructuring and asset sales directly counteracts the Ministry’s efforts” (Donor
Statement January 2003). The donor statement continues commenting on the “lack of interest
and apathy within other agencies, and at worst, as calculated and counterproductive moves
within government and associated institutions” (Donor Statement January 2003). To
substantiate these claims, the donor community appended a list of MOF initiatives and the
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obstacles incurred in moving them forward. Further, after noting that the “lack of an active,
interagency forum is regarded as one the principal reasons why there would appear to be
little change in the ‘business as usual’ scenario,” the donor statement attempts to focus
responsibility on the Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs, who chairs the IDCF. The
statement asks “the Coordinating Minister to clarify his position with respect to the IDCF and
the measures that he will be taking to ensure that there will be an interagency forum” (Donor
Statement January 2003)10. The donor community bitingly answers its own question in the
closing of the statement, noting that “it is perhaps appropriate in summing up, by reflecting
on the comment made by the President of Indonesia, at the Johannesburg Summit [in 2002],
‘The lack of political will’ is the root cause of continued environmental degradation” (Donor
Statement January 2003).11
The donor statement at the June 2003 CGI mid-term review meeting only reiterates
the statement from January 2003, noting again that “the need for effective interagency
dialogue has been the main theme….for the CGI over the past one and a half years and the
current situation would endorse maintaining this position” (Donor Statement June 2003). The
only unique aspect of this statement is to confirm that
“the best opportunity to manage debt in the forest sector in a manner that would
contribute to achieve sustainable forest management has been lost” by IBRA’s selling
Rp. 19 trillion of the Rp. 22 trillion in forest industry debt it held (Donor Statement
June 2003).
10 To the best of my knowledge, there was no response to this question from the Coordinating Minister. Although it seems improbable that one person could rectify the lack of progress in the forestry sector, the position of the Coordinating Minister did figure prominently in the plans for reform, particularly since this position was charged with the chairing the IDCF. 11 It was after the January 2003 CGI that Indonesian NGO/Civil Society Groups called for a review and evaluation of the work of the DFF.
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Moreover, half of the debt sold was to state-owned Bank Mandiri, which “effectively means
that the government has bought debt twice for no real apparent, economic, social or forest
management advantage” (Donor Statement June 2003).
The December 2003 CGI donor statement on forestry reiterates previous statements.
Indeed, it even acknowledges this:
“DFF statements since 2001 have discussed key issues in the forestry sector in the
context of GOI’s stated priorities and commitments to the CGI. Today, the issues
remain the same, and this year’s statement emphasizes the same point as was made in
the previous years: support from other sectors concerned is essential to promote
progress” (Donor Statement December 2003).
The closing of the donor statement succinctly captures the experience to date: “There has not
been meaningful progress for Indonesia’s forests since it became a CGI issue three years ago.
The priorities and commitments and pledges so far have had a limited impact on the reality in
the field.”
An analysis of the evolution of the donor statements at CGI meetings with respect to
forestry brings out several key points. Although every donor statement clearly expresses
frustration and disappointment with the lack of progress, the donor community incorporates
the frustration and disappointment into the master metaphor, and thus maintains recruitment
for it. Maintaining recruitment for the master metaphor in forestry was important for donor
community for multiple reasons and motivations.
First, forestry vis-à-vis other priority items at the CGI meetings became a relatively
lower priority, and hence the donor community was unwilling to risk improved collaborative
efforts with the government in other sectors for the sake of forestry. With respect to agenda
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items, it is important to recall that the period between 1999 and 2004 was full of transition
for Indonesia: Gus Dur was elected president and then ousted, replaced by Megawati; East
Timor seceded, and violence instigated by the Indonesian armed forces ensued; a civil war
was raging in Aceh; and ad hoc decentralization processes created extreme tensions between
central and regional governments. Further, in the Ministry of Forestry itself there were four
ministers during this period, each with his select group of senior Ministry officials, as well as
the change from the Ministry of Forestry to the Ministry of Forestry and Estate Crops and
then back again. Moreover, there was a massive personnel shift from central government
forestry offices to regional ones and the liquidation of the Regional Ministry of Forestry
Offices (KanWil).
Second, it is not entirely clear what the donor community could do to leverage its
position beyond stating its disappointment. Indeed, international aid projects in the forestry
sector could have been halted, but as one expatriate technical expert noted to me, “stopping a
project is not easy.” In short, it is in no one’s interest to stop a project. Further, international
aid projects in the forest sector are grants, not loans, and thus the Ministry in no way depends
or relies on them.
Third, the commitment of donors themselves to reforming Indonesia’s forest sector is
suspect vis-à-vis other political and economic ties between donor nations and Indonesia, e.g.,
broader industry and trade relations, as well as geo-political concerns. For example, although
Germany pulled out technical assistance from the forestry sector in Indonesia in 2002
because of their disappointment with the lack of commitment after 10 years of technical
assistance, Germany in no way changed broader trade relations with Indonesia, which would
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have been a much more significant indicator that Germany took seriously Indonesia’s forest
crisis.
Returning to the donor statements, they also consistently emphasize that a cross-
sectoral approach and interagency forum are critical, neither of which actually came to
fruition in a functional manner. Interestingly, starting with the November 2001 statement,
donors not only displaced responsibility from the Ministry of Forestry onto other government
agencies, but also lauded the Ministry for the activities it had initiated. Moreover, donor
statements since November 2001 progressively specify the government elements outside of
the Ministry that are either not supporting or actively contravening forest reform efforts, e.g.,
IBRA and Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs. Even given these quite specific calls
for accountability, at the end of the day business does indeed go on as usual.
b. GOI and the lack of progress
The ways in which the government addresses the undeniable lack of progress on
agreed upon reforms in the forest sector are instructive with respect to how it attempts to
recruit for and stabilize the master metaphor, while addressing and/or incorporating this fact.
At the October 2000 CGI meeting, the Minister of Forestry (2000) in his formal speech
expressed awareness that “the errors of past experience must not continue in the future” and
noted the establishment of the IDCF, but admitted that “we are not satisfied with the progress
to date. It has been difficult to generate high level coordination.” He ended his speech with a
list of proclamations of what would be done, thereby maintaining engagement in and
stabilizing the master metaphor.
At the April 2001 CGI meeting, the Ministry in the joint review carried out by the
government and donors noted that the action plan requested at the October 2000 CGI was
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completed, thereby demonstrating that the government had achieved something concrete,
albeit only on paper: “the action plan was drafted by the end of November and formally made
public by the IDCF in December” (Donor Statement April 2001). This statement reiterates
the commitment of the government, noting that “the coordinating minister…resolved to work
on the four of the most urgent issues: illegal logging, forest fires, restructuring industry,
forest inventory/mapping” (Donor Statement April 2001).
At the November 2001 CGI meeting, by which point Megawati had taken the office
of the Presidency and installed a new cabinet, including a new Minister of Forestry, the
government12 articulated its efforts in terms of decrees and agreements, as well as some
actions taken against government officials and companies found involved in illegal logging
and forest fires, respectively. Moreover, the government statement mentions the drafting of a
“national forest statement,” which was to be the precursor to the NFP. The statement also
recognizes that “there is clear need [sic] for a multi-sector approach to overcome forestry
problems, [and] therefore IDCF needs to be revived,” which resonates with the statements of
the donor community (Government Statement November 2001). There is, however, no
mention of how this is to be operationalized, only a statement of the obvious:
“The IDCF needs to further improve its existing action plan…All relevant
government ministries and relevant stakeholders….must commit themselves to
implementing these agreed upon actions, which should be clearly supported in the
annual program budget” (Government Statement November 2001).
12 At this CGI meeting, there was not a statement specifically from the Minister or Ministry of Forestry. Comments on forestry were part of a more general government statement entitled “The Government of Indonesia: Position Paper on the Justice Reform, Fighting Corruption and Forest Management Reform.”
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In short, this statement from the government conveys to the donor community – once again --
that the government is in agreement with the donors on the problems and solutions, and that
although progress has not been sufficient, concrete actions have been taken.
At the June 2002 mid-term review of the CGI, the Minister of Forestry Muhammad
Prakosa added another dimension to and reinterpreted the master metaphor of forestry
reform. He displaced blame and responsibility from the Indonesian government to the
international community, particularly developed countries. This tactic was similar to that of
former Prime Minister Mahatir of Malaysia, who similarly displaced blame onto developed
countries and Northern NGOs in rebuttal to the heavy criticism of Malaysia’s logging
practices and disregard for the livelihoods of forest dependent communities during the 1980s
(Dove 1998).
Although refashioning the master metaphor, Prakosa remained firmly within its
boundaries. After reiterating the government’s five priorities with respect to forests, Prakosa
commented that the problems and constraints of forest-based industries are complicated,
requiring a “comprehensive assessment of timber based industries” and a “joint effort
between MOF, and the Ministry of Industry and Trade and IBRA” (Minister Statement June
2002). On a related point, he noted that the IDCF had not been effective, but that he was
committed to working with other ministries to make it so.
Most importantly, he reinterpreted the global concern over illegal logging and illegal
log trade of Indonesia’s forests, which until that point laid blame and found root cause in
Indonesia and Indonesia’s corruption and poor governance. Prakosa articulated Indonesia’s
illegal logging and illegal log trade problem as being partially caused by the complicity of
developed, consuming countries. He noted the need for and “urged international cooperation
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to curb illegal logging and illegal log trade,” citing a recently signed MOU on the issue
between the UK and GOI, as well as the Asia Forestry Partnership, which is a dialogue forum
that came out of World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg in
2002. Prakosa closed his speech with a backhanded reprimand of donor countries that they
were contributing to and complicit in Indonesia’s illegal logging problem, while also
reminding donors of the multiple and often incommensurable incentives of their own
governments and bureaucracies:
“we would welcome additional bilateral and multilateral agreements to control illegal
timber trade like the one just signed with the UK. And just as I am trying to work
with my colleague the Minister of Industry and Trade to ensure that new investment
in forest industry is not considered without regard to availability of sustainable timber
supply, I would request CGI donors to do the same. Please establish good
communications between the agencies of your governments that are concerned with
sustainable development and those that issue export credit and promoted investment
in industrial expansion.” (Minister Statement June 2002)
At the January 2003 CGI meeting, the Minister once again noted the ineffectiveness
of the IDCF, but described other joint initiatives similar to those he mentioned at the June
2002 CGI. As a further concrete action, the Minister noted the MOF’s “soft landing policy,”
in which the “level of timber production has been step-wisely reduced to 6.89 million m3 by
2003” (Minister Statement January 2003). At the same time, he noted that there had been no
progress with respect to restructuring forest-based industries, and specifically implicated
IBRA as non-cooperative and counterproductive: “Restructuring the wood-based
industries…has been hindered by IBRA’s debt restructuring and asset sales,” which “has
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been undertaken without considering timber sources as essential elements” (Minister
Statement January 2003).
Analogous to his June 2002 statement, but much stronger in tone, the Minister not
only implicated the CGI member countries as contributing to and being complicit in
Indonesia’s forest crisis, but also rhetorically asked to what extent donor administrations
were willing to take actions:
“both timber producing and importing countries must have the same vision and
standard to curb the illegal logging and associated trade. Strong actions by both….are
all we need…I request (or perhaps I should demand instead of request) to all
representatives from CGI member countries that are present here to make statement
publicly at the end of this CGI meeting saying that all CGI member countries will not
receive or import illegally cut timber and associated products. I believe, if
materialized, this statement will definitely have tremendous impacts to help us
combat the forest crimes. Otherwise, we all here are doing ‘business as usual’”
(Minister Statement January 2003).
In articulating Indonesia’s forest crisis in these terms, the Minister is not only
implicating the global community, but is also stabilizing the master metaphor of forest
reform by demonstrating that the obstacles to forest reform do not solely lie with the
government of Indonesia and that action needs to be taken at the global level before actors
stop supporting this metaphor. In essence, the Minister is buying not only time, but also an
avenue of recourse for the government – should the donor community no longer buy into
master metaphor of forest reform, it cannot be blamed solely on the government of Indonesia,
but rather it is the responsibility of the global community as well.
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The June 2003 statement from the Ministry of Forestry also incorporated a new
stabilizing element in the master metaphor of forest reform. Instead of merely noting the lack
of interagency cooperation or the need for it as previous statements had, this statement makes
explicit that “difference in perception, vision and mission about illegal logging among related
institutions and also existing laws and regulations are constraints that should be solved”
(Ministry Statement June 2003). The statement goes further in specifying the different
perceptions of relevant government agencies with respect to forest industry restructuring:
“some related institutions need to solve the problem namely Ministry of Forestry,
Ministry of Industry and Trade, State Minister of State-owned Enterprises cq. IBRA
under coordination of the Coordinating Minister of Industry, Finance, and Economic.
Each related institution has their own different visions:
a. the Ministry of Forestry concern is to preserve forest resources
b. the Ministry of Industry and Trade concern is to improve productivity and export
of forest products.
c. IBRA concern is to maximize debt recovery that is restructured into the banking
system” (Ministry Statement June 2003).
This was the first statement in which the Ministry made explicit and public differences and
struggles between government agencies, as well as how those differences were obstacles to
cooperation. Although in the past the Ministry or Minister noted the lack of interagency
cooperation, this was the first time that the lack of cooperation was attributed to intra-
governmental struggles and different priorities and incentives of relevant government
agencies.
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The December 2003 CGI statement from the Ministry further elaborated on inter-
agency differences and indeed even portrayed the Ministry as being victimized for trying to
carry out its duty:
“Declining government income from forestry sector due to the implementation of
‘soft landing policy’ is still considered as if Ministry of Forestry is not committed to
national economic growth” (Ministry Statement December 2003).
This statement also explicitly notes that after reflecting on the obstacles to reform in the
forest sector, “governance issue become [sic] one important issue in forestry development”
(Ministry Statement December 2003). Besides this, however, the December statement strays
very little from previous ones.
An analysis of the evolution of government statements at CGI meetings with respect
to forestry brings out several key points. First, all of the statements acknowledge that
progress and/or fulfillment of commitments does not meet the expectations agreed upon. One
of the key reasons consistently sited in these government statements is the lack of
interagency coordination and cooperation. Moreover, the Ministry’s statement become
progressively more specific in laying blame and responsibility onto other agencies such as
IBRA and the Ministry of Industry and Trade, while emphasizing the sole efforts of the
Ministry of Forestry itself to meet the reform commitments.
The other key aspect of the government’s statements is the move from focusing on its
own shortcomings and attempts to articulating the donor community as complicit and/or
contributing to Indonesia’s forest crisis, which Minister Prakosa first articulated at the June
2002 CGI meeting. Indeed, by articulating the obstacles to Indonesia’s forest reforms as in
part international, Prakosa remained within the master metaphor of forest reform in
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Indonesia, while also refashioning the underlying causes and solutions as being in part
beyond the control of Indonesia and in the control of donor countries. It is through the
articulation of responsibility for the lack of forest reforms in Indonesia in terms of agencies
beyond the Ministry of Forestry and indeed in terms of nation-states beyond Indonesia that
the Ministry is able to maintain the master metaphor of forest reform. The Ministry deflects
the element of “failure” or “lack of progress” through this discursive tactic of emphasizing
those elements outside of the Ministry that are inextricably linked to Indonesia’s forest crisis
and hence reform, and thus maintaining interest in, or recruitment for, the master metaphor in
the face of business as usual.
c. Overall analysis of donor and government statements
Examining both donor and government statements made at CGI meetings since
forestry became a priority agenda item at the 1999 CGI brings out several key analytical
points. First, evident from these CGI meeting statements is the active maintenance of the
master metaphor of forest reform commitments agreed to by both the government and the
international community at the February 2000 CGI. This active maintenance is articulated
not only in terms of the recounting of agreed upon priorities and tallying off achievements,
but also providing legitimate and authoritative reasons for not achieving the commitments. In
doing so, both sides safeguard against the destabilizing of the master metaphor that both
parties have agreed to.
It is perhaps the recruitment for the master metaphor that begins to destabilize it
(Mosse 2004, 2005). For example, as both the Ministry and donor community maintain the
master metaphor by broadening the scope of the causes to other agencies, they must also
recruit these other agencies to support the master metaphor of forest reform. It is here that
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support breaks down, and it is here that neither the donor community nor the Ministry of
Forestry can coerce or leverage support for the master metaphor of forest reform from these
other agencies. For example, both the donor community and Ministry of Forestry implicate
the Coordinating Minister of Economic Affairs in the lack of progress on forest reform, and
consequently attempts to recruit him into supporting the master metaphor. The Coordinating
Minster, however, has little to gain from buying into the master metaphor of forest reform –
other issues are of much higher priority and interest. As Mosse ( 2005: 9) notes,
“common narratives or commanding interpretations are supported for different
reasons and serve a diversity of perhaps contradictory interests….the problem is that
this diversity and multiplicity of interests (and needs to be met) itself destabilizes and
militates against coherence.”
This is precisely what we see when the donor community and Ministry refashion the
metaphor to emphasize other agencies within the Indonesian government, as well as the
political economies of timber consuming nations – the master metaphor of forest reform is
safeguarded because the obstacles are broader than and/or beyond that originally anticipated
in the master metaphor, and thus the master metaphor is refashioned. That said, recruitment
among these other agencies and institutions has not been forthcoming, thereby working
against coherence of and support for the metaphor (Mosse 2005). The broader analytical
point of this discussion of the evolution of the master metaphor is that there is a significant
performative element to CGI-related evaluations and assessments of the forestry sector
reform in Indonesia, as well as calls for reform and coordination among donor and
government agencies and between donors and the government. Moreover, both the donor
community and Ministry of Forestry have been able to incorporate potentially destabilizing
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elements into the master metaphor itself through recruitment of other actors and factors. The
performance then is in the maintenance of the appearance of order in light of the messy social
reality or disjuncture.
IV. Evaluations and Assessments: An analysis of the 1998 IMF forestry conditionalities,
the relationship to the CGI experience and institutional amnesia
In this section of the chapter, I discuss and analyze an evaluation of the Indonesian
forestry sector that preceded forestry becoming a CGI agenda item. I pay particular attention
to Seymour and Kartodihardjo’s (2000) evaluation of the implementation of 1998 IMF and
World Bank conditionalities related to forestry reform. In doing so, I demonstrate how the
inaction that resulted from forestry reform being a CGI agenda time was not only predictable,
but also how similar assessments and recommendations had been made in the past to no avail
and evidently not taken into consideration when forestry became a CGI agenda item.
As this analysis shows, assessments and evaluations, as well as their attendant
recommendations, are vehicles to recruit for master metaphors that provide “an authoritative
framework of interpretation” and are “produced ‘by engaging with a series of other logics,
forces, chemistries’” (Mitchell 2002: 51, cited in Lewis and Mosse 2006: 4). Assessments
and evaluations help maintain attention on Indonesia’s forests in the global and national
arena through the “order” they create with respect to elements of social reality that could
potentially fail or not support previously articulated master metaphors or policies. In other
words, assessments and evaluations are narrative tools to (re)translate master metaphors so as
to incorporate or account for elements of an unwieldy social reality. It is through the
(re)translating or (re)composing achieved through, for example, evaluations that different
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institutional logics of various actors and of policy versus project can co-exist and “protect the
autonomy of policy and practice” (Lewis and Mosse 2006: 5).
Seymour and Kartodihardjo’s analysis of the January 1998 IMF conditionalities
related to forestry is relevant to the preceding discussion of forestry issues in the CGI in
several ways. These conditionalities and their implementation (or lack thereof) were the basis
for forestry being raised as a key agenda item at the 1999 CGI meeting (Sheng and Cannon
2004; World Bank 2001; Seymour and Kartodihardjo 2000). Perhaps more importantly, the
lack of enforcement of forest sector conditionalities in the January 1998 Letter of Intent
(LOI), which was negotiated with the IMF as part of the IMF’s bailout package, is extremely
instructive for understanding the CGI experience with forestry discussed earlier.
Seymour and Kartodihardjo (2000) provide an excellent analysis of “how the World
Bank, in collaboration with the IMF, attempted to address some of the structural issues in the
forest sector through adjustment lending mobilized in the wake of the financial crisis” that
devastated Indonesia starting in 1997 (83). First, in their analysis of the history of the World
Bank’s involvement in the Indonesian forestry sector, which started with lending in 198913,
Seymour and Kartodihardjo (2000) note that the Ministry of Forestry terminated lending in
1994 because
“the World Bank and the Ministry had reached an impasse on policy reforms being
promoted by the World Bank, particularly those that would harm the interests of
politically powerful concession holders…In particular, Mohammed “Bob” Hassan,
13 Bank initiated lending in the forestry sector in 1989 focused on inventory, research plans and development of the forest sector via improved timber concession management and plantation development. The Ministry terminated lending just prior to the implementation of “improved concession management systems, including mechanisms for inspection and audit and royalty collection” (Seymour and Kartodihardjo 2000: 86).
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Indonesia’s most prominent timber tycoon and a close associate of President Suharto,
is said to have blocked reform of concession management” (86).
This effectively meant that when the IMF requested the World Bank to prepare
structural reform conditionalities for the January 1998 LOI, the Bank had been absent from
the Indonesian forestry sector for over three years. Further, Seymour and Kartodihardjo note
that
“[a]ccording to participants interviewed for this [their] study, the IMF team invited
World Bank staff to contribute…on extremely short notice, precluding the possibility
of conducting any new analysis or consultation with concerned stakeholders. Indeed,
when asked why stopping a notorious million-hectare rice project that threatened
swamp forests in Kalimantan was not included among the conditions, a World Bank
official confessed, ‘I didn’t have a file on it that day.’ Forest sector elements added to
the package were selected from among those already on the shelf from the sector
review completed by World Bank staff in 1995” (91). 14
Regardless of how spontaneous, irrational and/or nonsensical the process of
formulating the conditionalities was, it mattered very little, since “by late 1998, many of
these conditions remained unfulfilled” (92). Indeed, Seymour and Kartodihardjo (2000) note
that “early on, there were signs that reform would be more apparent than real, as limitations
on the government’s political will and capacity to meet IMF conditions emerged” (93) and
that the Ministry of Forestry “appeared to focus on fulfilling the letter of the IMF agreement
rather than the spirit of the objectives” (93). With regards to this latter point, some officials in
the Ministry felt that the Bank and IMF had erred in focusing on specific measures instead of
14 In addition to the IMF-GOI LOI, the World Bank refined and reinforced forest-related conditionalities through two structural adjustment loans (91).
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“clarifying objectives to be reached and leaving the means by which to meet them more
flexible” (95). Taking this point into consideration, the World Bank provided the Ministry
flexibility in implementing reforms, which
“may have inadvertently signaled to the Ministry that the conditionality was being
relaxed. At minimum, it was difficult for observers to distinguish between the World
Bank’s encouragement of conscientiousness and its tolerance for foot dragging” (95).
Seymour and Kartodihardjo (2000) further analyze the “reformation without any
changes” that occurred in the forestry sector after the downfall of Suharto in May 1998. They
note that the Ministry had established a “Development Reformation Committee composed of
representatives from the Ministry itself, NGOs, universities and businesses” whose mandate
was to “make recommendations to the Minister regarding the Ministry’s vision, mission and
organization, as well as with regard to key legislative and regulatory frameworks” (96). Yet,
“recommendations of the Reformation Committee were somehow removed from the
regulations and draft legislation that emerged from the Ministry’s internal decision making
processes” (97). Further, Seymour and Kartodihardjo (2000) note that “compliance with the
letter of commitments was undermined by deviations from the spirit of the commitment”
(98).
In addition to attempting to work with the Ministry, the World Bank also initiated
dialogue “with a broader group of stakeholders on a more comprehensive reform agenda”
realizing that “a consensus on a forestry policy reform agenda among relevant stakeholders”
was necessary (98). In doing so, the World Bank attempted to address social justice concerns
and preconditions for reform such as filling gaps in data and developing performance criteria
in their sectoral adjustment loan after the fall of Suharto. While the Bank acknowledged and
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attempted to operationalize the connection between forest sector reform and improved
governance, “the World Bank’s success in promoting compliance with these commitments
[with the Ministry] was mixed” (99).
In sum, Seymour and Kartodihardjo (2000) conclude that “the slow and uneven pace of
reform can be traced to many factors, some of which were under the control of the World
Bank and the IMF” (105). They note the following factors (Seymour and Kartodihardjo
2000: 106):
“First, the initial package was inconsistent and incomplete…the World Bank had not
been substantively engaged in the forestry sector for the four years prior to the
crisis….Second, the original forest policy conditions contained in the January LOI
were articulated in terms of specific measures rather than desired outcomes, were
associated with unrealistic deadlines, and in some cases reflected a lack of
understanding of the Indonesian policymaking process….the articulation of
conditions in terms of specific measures allowed the Ministry of Forestry to comply
with the letter of the conditions while undermining the spirit…Third, the initial focus
of the WB and the IMF on efficiency-oriented reform, without explicit attention to the
social justice aspects….compromised the initial ownership of the reform
program….Fourth….the WB’s attention to governance issues in the reform itself…is
essential to empower domestic constituencies for reform”.
Seymour and Kartodihardjo (2000: 106) sum up their analysis of the Indonesia case as
follows:
“the Indonesia case demonstrates the limitations of the adjustment instrument to
promote change in the forest sector. In 1995, the World Bank’s own assessment of its
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experience with project lending in the forest sector in Indonesia concluded that ‘the
need to deal comprehensively with institutional constraints is a major lesson which
arises from experience with this project’ (World Bank 1996, p. iv). Four years later, it
is clear that institutional constraints continue to be the major obstacle to reform,
despite the significant political and economic changes that have occurred in the
interim.”
I have discussed and summarized Seymour and Kartodihardjo’s analysis at length
because for the most part it preceded the CGI forestry experience (the final draft being
published in 2000), yet it seems that very little of their analysis and recommendations was
incorporated into the strategies of, or even considered by, donors in engaging the government
on forestry issues in the context of the CGI starting in 1999. In short, the “institutional
constraints” noted in the 1995 World Bank assessment that Seymour and Kartodihardjo
highlight as a “major obstacle to reform” in their analysis of implementing structural
adjustment instruments in 1998 persist throughout the donor experience with forestry reform
in the context of the CGI. That nearly 10 years later quite similar obstacles or “institutional
constraints” are being articulated in the CGI is evidence for the intrinsic gap between policy
and practice that Mosse (2004, 2005) notes is due to the disparate institutional worlds and
logics that policy and practice inhabit. For example, Seymour and Kartodihardjo’s analysis
makes clear that powerful individuals and institutions related to government did not consider
forest sector reform important, and thus the actual reform achievements were limited,
although government representatives were adept at maintaining the discourse of reform. The
preceding analysis of CGI meeting statements on forestry makes it abundantly clear that
virtually the same dynamics are at play as discussed in Seymour and Kartodihardjo’s (2000)
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analysis. That during a 10-year period policy prescriptions and recommendations did not
substantively affect practice and that social reality did not substantively affect policy implies
a co-existence, yet autonomy, between the two (Lewis and Mosse 2006).
V. Conclusion
In this chapter, I analyzed how forestry became a top-tier priority for both
international donors and the Indonesian government and examined how the order or “master
metaphor” (Mosse 2004, 2005) of forest reform was mutually crafted and articulated in
official documents. I also analyzed how this master metaphor evolved through time as the
lack of progress on commitments became impossible to ignore. In doing so, I attempted to
show how the master metaphor was maintained by both donors and the government and
incorporated the concomitant lack of progress on agreed upon commitments. In attempting to
stabilize the master metaphor of forest reform in the face of a potentially destabilizing
element, viz., the indisputable lack of progress on agreed upon reforms, both international
donors and the Indonesian government over time refashioned the master metaphor to include
other actors and factors, which had the effect keeping the master metaphor viable and
justifying continued engagement in trying to achieve reforms. That said, the inclusion of
other actors and interests and attempts to recruit them to support the master metaphor had the
opposite effect of further destabilizing the master metaphor. In other words, as causes of and
responsibility for Indonesia’s forest crisis and lack of progress on reforms were located in the
multiple policies of multiple ministries of multiple countries, support for this interpretation
became more difficult to recruit for because it required the buy-in from so many diverse
interests and actors. As Mosse (2005: 10) notes, “the coherence and order of a successful
project is always vulnerable; interpretations can fail.”
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CHAPTER 7
THE DONOR FORUM ON FORESTRY’S ROLE AS BROKER: INSTITUTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS,
INCENTIVES AND LOGICS THAT EXPLAIN THE DISJUNCTURE IN INDONESIAN FORESTRY
REFORM.
I. Introduction
In Chapter 6, I discussed and analyzed how and why forestry was elevated to the
highest levels of diplomatic negotiations, viz., the annual CGI meetings, and how an agreed
upon “master metaphor” (Mosse 2004) of forest crisis and reform was fashioned by the donor
community and GOI. Further, I examined how this master metaphor evolved over time and
was actively refashioned by both donors and the Indonesian government, as well has how the
master metaphor incorporated the concomitant lack of progress on-the-ground.
In this chapter, I discuss and analyze the Donor Forum on Forestry (DFF), which was
created by the CGI in 2000 to assist GOI in carrying out its proposed actions and monitor
progress and is responsible for drafting the donor statement for the annual CGI meetings,
i.e., the donor’s articulation of the master metaphor. I examine the DFF’s history and
evolution, relationships between members of the DFF, and how the DFF relates to other
forest-related institutions such as government agencies, international organizations, and
Indonesian NGOs. In doing so, I try to understand the institutional relationships, incentives
and logics that explain the disjuncture1 in Indonesian forestry reform. The DFF is an
1 Lewis and Mosse (2006) explain that “order can be understood as the ‘ideal worlds’ that development actors aim to bring about…[and] disjuncture comes from the gap between these ideal worlds and the social reality they have to relate to” (Lewis and Mosse 2006: 2).
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intensive case study and a window through which to examine the broader landscape of
forestry institutions.2
More specifically, in light of the DFF’s crucial role in the co-production of the master
metaphor for the annual CGI meetings, I examine the DFF’s position as a “broker” or
“translator” (Mosse 2005) in these institutional relationships. Mosse (20005: 9) clarifies the
following about the relationship between master metaphors and brokers or translators:
“common narratives or commanding interpretations are supported for different
reasons and serve a diversity of perhaps contradictory interests….This is possible
because of the productive ambiguity that characterizes development policy’s ‘master
metaphors.’ But it also requires the constant work of translation (of policy goals into
practical interests; practical interests back into policy goals), which is the task of
skilled brokers (managers, consultants, fieldworkers, community leaders…) who read
the meaning of a project into the different institutional languages of its stakeholder
supporters, constantly creating interest and making real.”
According to Mosse (2005: 125), “brokering requires the fostering of close and trusting
relationships between key individuals in different parts of the system,” and to this end the
broker must have certain qualities:
“an ability to exploit ambiguous insider/outsider positions to create space and give
actors in organizations a room for maneuver that is formally denied. The
broker/mediator is a person of constantly shifting size and institutional position”
(Mosse 2005: 125).
2 The data for this chapter comes from documents and interviews (over 50) conducted during the fieldwork period (2002-2004). I conducted interviews with bilateral/multilateral project staff, representatives of donor agencies posted in Indonesia, senior central government officials and NGO representatives.
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In addition to these protean qualities, Mosse importantly notes that the influence or power of
the broker cannot be assumed – “brokers at institutional interfaces are as vulnerable as they
are necessary in aid projects” (Mosse 2005: 188). As I demonstrate in this chapter, DFF
plays precisely this role vis-à-vis other institutions and possesses these attributes, viz.,
shifting in size and institutional position, speaking in “everyone’s name, or no one’s” (Latour
1996: 44-5, cited in Mosse 2005: 125), and necessary, yet vulnerable.
As noted earlier, the DFF was created in the context of the CGI3: At the February
2000 CGI meeting, donors were concerned about the whether/how the government would
operationalize its commitment to forestry reform and thus
“proposed (and GOI accepted) to have a small group of donor agencies established as
a ‘forum’ to assist GOI in carrying out its proposed actions and monitoring progress
leading up to the next CGI meeting. Accordingly, the CGI Donor Forum on Forestry
has been established” (World Bank 2001: 27).
The DFF itself describes its history and function as follows:
“The DFF (Donor Forum on Forestry) was created in 2000 within the context of the
CGI (Consultative Group on Indonesia) as a dialog partner for the Government of
Indonesia in implementing commitments on the Forestry sector. It has, so far, been
very successful in that it has enabled common donor agreements and monitoring 3 The closest predecessor to the DFF was the Consultative Group on Indonesian Forestry (CGIF). The CGIF was active from 1993 to 1999. It began as a government initiated donor-government dialogue and donor coordination initiative. Several factors contributed to its demise. First, the issue of forestry was raised to the level of international donors (the Paris Club) in 1999, thereby moving government interest away from the CGIF to the Paris Club and CGI. Second, with the creation of the DFF, donors involved in the forestry sector now had another forum to focus its energies. Third, GTZ has been involved in CGIF for several years, and a leadership change in the GTZ project most closely associated with the CGIF affected GTZ’s interest and role in the CGIF. GTZ began to play a more prominent role in the CGIF and, unconsciously or not, “projectized” the CGIF to make it more inclusive, bringing Indonesian NGOs into the dialogue. However, NGO and GoI interpretations of “dialogue” substantially differed to the point of NGO disengagement and GoI persistence of its established agenda. In making CGIF more of a project, GTZ created a set of outputs and objectives to be met by the CGIF that the active members of the CGIF did not necessarily consider as top priorities of the CGIF. Additionally this “projectizing” took partial authority of the CGIF from MoF, thereby losing MoF’s sense of ownership.
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procedures to be agreed to prepare for donor inputs at CGI meetings. DFF meetings
have also been used as a forum to discuss forest policy related topics beyond the
confines of the CGI. The paper on Forest Finance is a case in point. This has led some
to believe that the DFF could gradually be expanded to encompass a wider donor
coordination mandate. The latter expectation has not materialized” (DFF Terms of
Reference 2003).
As a “dialog partner for GoI,” the status and legality of DFF as an entity is unclear –
there is no governmental decree acknowledging its legal existence, and the forum itself does
not have a charter or by-laws. Moreover, in examining the minutes from the first DFF
meeting on March 8, 2000, vagueness of the DFF’s role and position prevail. The meeting
minutes note the following functions of the DFF:
• “facilitating consultation and dialogue,
• encouraging GOI through the IDCF to address the urgent, intersectoral issues affecting
the forests,
• elevating the National Forest Program process to the interministerial level,
• supporting those in and outside [at the then named] MoFEC that are working for forestry
reform,
• educating IDCF members about what each of us4 is already doing to assist with the [then]
eight urgent actions identified in the MoFEC’s presentation at CGI in February 2000,
• providing technical assistance, normally through our various existing programs, on
questions on which the IDCF or MoFEC would like assistance.”
4 Although not explicit, “us” and “our” in these minutes seem to refer to donors engaged in the CGI process, thus excluding donors such as Ford and NGOs that provide funding in the forestry sector such as TNC, CI, WWF, etc.
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These functions assume a certain authority of the DFF and a productive working relationship
between the DFF and various Indonesian government agencies, but as discussed in the
analysis of annual CGI statements, the relationship is anything but that. These relationships
and the de facto authority of the DFF – or lack thereof -- will be elaborated upon in this
chapter.
The minutes of the meeting also note that “the group will be called the ‘CGI Donor
Forum on Forestry,’” which links the DFF to the CGI, but does not distinguish between the
DFF and the CGI Working Group on Forestry. The CGI Working Group on Forestry (CGI-
WG), on paper at least, is a multistakeholder group that discusses forestry issues at the
annual CGI meetings and is chaired by the EU, whereas the DFF is chaired by the World
Bank. The Working Group is also supposed to include the Ministry of Forestry and civil
society organizations, but as will be explained later the Working Group does not really exist.
The minutes continue with an important remark:
“The Forum does not seek to become a permanent body and sees the months between
now and the Tokyo CGI meeting (in 2000) as the time in which its work will be most
important. Its first priority is to have the IDCF established and operating, since that is
strategically important to both the NFP and the eight urgent actions.”
In 2004, the DFF still very much existed albeit in an ad hoc fashion. It is clear from the
minutes of this first DFF meeting that the key functions of the DFF gravitated around
supporting the IDCF, moving the NFP and priority points forward, and framed itself in terms
of the CGI.
What was unclear then and continues to be unclear are the legality of the DFF, the
“institutional muscle” or instruments by which the DFF engages and monitors GOI, the
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criteria for membership, and DFF’s relationship with the CGI-WG on forestry. Moreover the
minutes assume a certain importance or authority of the IDCF, NFP and CGI that are not
well founded. As I discuss in this chapter, the ambiguity in the status and position of the
DFF is precisely what gives DFF its potential influence and makes DFF a resource to those
actors it attempts to engage, albeit in a fragile and tenuous fashion. Within a particular
institutional landscape, the DFF, by virtue of its ambiguity, can be different things to
different actors, which helps recruit for the master metaphor of forest reform.
In its day to day functioning and work, the DFF consists not of embassy staff or
diplomatic corps of donor countries, but rather primarily of “technical assistance experts,” a
self referential term, as well as an official descriptor of their capacity or function. They are
expatriates that are paid through bilateral or multilateral projects or agencies that have
international cooperative agreements with the Government of Indonesia through the Ministry
of Forestry. Their official function is to provide technical assistance or expertise to the
Ministry to carry out the said project. Given their ambiguous insider/outsider status, these
individuals are particularly well placed to act as the brokers or translators in the master
metaphor of forestry reform (Mosse 2005).
The regular members of the DFF consist of the following individuals:
(1) Environment specialist of the World Bank Indonesia office
(2) Coordinator of DFID’s MFP
(3) Forest Economist of DFID’s MFP
(4) Technical Assistant for Forestry Sector Development Strategy, JICA
(5) Director of EU funded Forest Liaison Bureau
(6) Deputy Director of EU funded Forest Liaison Bureau
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(7) Chief of Party of the USAID funded NRM project
(8) Deputy Chief of Party of the USAID funded NRM project
(9) Chief Adviser, GTZ Strengthening the Management Capacities in the Ministry of
Forestry
The DFID, EU, GTZ, and JICA projects have direct cooperative agreements with the
Ministry of Forestry and thus these projects are ostensibly in part accountable to the
Ministry. The USAID funded NRM project has its direct cooperative agreement with the
National Development Planning Agency (BAPPENAS), with the Ministry of Forestry as a
formal partner; thus NRM reports to BAPPENAS and not the Ministry of Forestry, which
individuals at NRM noted as significant. The World Bank had been absent from the forestry
sector from 1994 until the IMF bailout loans and WB structural adjustment loans starting in
1998. In addition to this core group, representatives from embassies or bilateral aid agencies
intermittently attend DFF meetings, particularly as the annual CGI meetings approach.
For lack of a better name and acknowledging that they themselves are by and large
not representatives of donor agencies, this core group refers to themselves half jokingly as
the “usual suspects” or the “sixth floor club.” The “sixth floor club” refers to the fact that the
majority of them have offices on the sixth floor of a particular building in the Ministry of
Forestry (Block 7), which is where the Ministry places the offices for all of the international
aid projects. Indeed, the elevator directory in this building refers to the sixth floor as the
“EXPERT’ floor. That this core group is uncomfortable referring to itself as donors is
indicative of their ambiguous identities.
While the status and position of these “usual suspects” as members of the DFF are
ambiguous, it is important to distinguish how they are ambiguous, or in other words, to
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understand the various identities the “usual suspects” can assume. Eyben’s (2003)
ethnography of the donor community in Bolivia is helpful in this regard. According to Eyben
(2003: 7), “in the world of international relations and development practice,” we can think of
three types of communities – “the international community, the development community and
the donor community.”5 She notes that while the “boundaries of the international community
are fuzzy and disputed….firmly and undisputedly…within those boundaries is a sub-
community that describes itself as the donor community” (Eyben 2003: 7-8). The donor
community, according to Eyben (2003: 8)
“is composed of donor professionals, employed by government
departments…international organizations such as the World Bank and…UNDP and
international NGOs such as CARE and Oxfam….[they] distinguish themselves from
their fellow bureaucrats working as diplomats (who are part of the wider international
community).”
With respect to the development community, Eyben (2003: 8) notes that it is
“more inclusive and heterogeneous than the donor community… [and] extends to all
development NGOs, global advocacy organizations and academics studying
‘development.’”
More specifically, Eyben (2003: 9) carves out the following space for the donor community:
“One way of considering the donor community and its capacity to influence, is in
terms of Latham’s description of social sovereignty (2000, cited in Eyben 2003).
Social sovereignty is more restricted in its powers than hegemony and, unlike
hegemony, does not necessarily entail the formation of an integrated political or
5 Eyben (2003: 7) uses “community” to mean “an association in which membership is characterized as being exclusive, of long duration and with members united by sentiment with shared values, norms and practices.”
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social order….we may see the donor community possessing social sovereignty over
the domain of development practice, that is practice which is viewed by themselves
and others as pertaining to development as a concept. Thus donors establish the rules
for other actors, state and non-state, who engage with donors in development.”
While distinguishing between the international, donor and development communities, Eyben
(2003: 9) makes explicit that all three are “inter-locking communities” that “operate at the
local (country) level and trans-nationally.” Moreover, for any given member of the donor
community at the country level, Eyben (2003: 11-12) explains that this individual is
“placed at the nexus of three overlapping circles or sets of relationships, norms and
practices that influencer her action and, through her mediation, impact upon each
other…such a person [is] in a highly ambiguous situation, standing at the cognitive,
cultural and political boundaries of three different structures and histories…[viz..] the
global donor community…the local ‘recipient’ space where we resided…[and] ‘back
home.’”
Eyben’s lucid description of the landscape of international development provides an
institutional context within which to place the DFF and better understand the various spaces
that members of the DFF can be perceived to occupy. It is important to note, however, that
the role of the members of the DFF does not precisely map onto the role of Eyben’s donor,
“whose identity is established and maintained through giving, that is making gifts to others”
(Eyben 2003: 10). The core group of the DFF – the “usual suspects” – self-identify first and
foremost as experts tied to bilateral or multilateral projects, although at times they are
perceived by others as donors. This core group, however, is part of all three communities
Eyben describes.
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II. Perceptions of the DFF by the “usual suspects”6
A. The “usual suspects” perception of the DFF
The core group – the “usual suspects” -- agrees that the DFF was created in the
context of the CGI meeting in 2000 to monitor the achievement of the then eight
commitments in the forestry sector made by MOF, as well as to coordinate among donors to
assist MOF in achieving these commitments. The core group also agrees that the DFF has
been unable to fulfill its mandate for various reasons.
One of the core members noted that the DFF was created to “monitor commitments
under CGI [priorities]” and that “it became a forum for major donors and projects to
coordinate…[and] develop a position paper.” With respect to donor coordination, another
core member noted that he and others saw it as vital since separately “we cannot possibly
have a strong impact with the little money, resources…[we] want to effect
leverage…therefore a relationship with…those with more power…[and] influencing other
bodies” is important.
And indeed, several of the core members noted improved collaboration and
coordination among donor projects. One core member who had worked for an international
forestry project in Indonesia for nearly a decade recalled that as late as 1997, there was “little
communication among projects and between projects and diplomats” and that “before [there
was] vicious competition for meetings [with government].” With the DFF, he noted, there
was “more communication” and “some narrowing of statements to MOF.” He highlighted in
particular a joint analysis conducted by the core group and others in 2002 on Indonesian
6 The World Bank representative, who chaired the DFF and was considered a key figure in organizing DFF meetings by other DFF members, left Indonesia in mid-2003 for another post and was not replaced until mid-2004, which meant there was effectively a one year gap in World Bank participation in the DFF. During this period the DFF was co-chaired by the EU-FLB and JICA with intermittent involvement of Bank officials.
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forest industry restructuring, overcapacity of forest industries, and related finance and debt
issues, all of which led to a position paper and set of recommendations to the Ministry of
Economic Affairs and IBRA.
Another core member also noted that donor statements and commitments were more
harmonized and that there had been a “few areas of co-funding” that were “small,
convenient, [and] within the realm of what we can do on our own…10,000 to 50,000 USD.”
He referred to this as “technical coordination [that] happens between the cracks [of
individual bilateral projects].” That said, he also noted that he “cannot say all donors
coordinate for [the then] eight priorities.” Moreover, he noted that the DFF doesn’t have “full
coordination because no [involvement] of Ford, CIFOR [and others]” and that “real
coordination requires a broader group.”
While recognizing the gains made through the DFF, the core group was of the
opinion that the DFF had by and large failed to fulfill its mandate. One core member
observed that although the DFF was supposed to “help the donor community identify donor
conditionalities within the CGI, we could not do that…forestry doesn’t carry enough weight
among donors.” While he acknowledged that the DFF increased awareness, it did not lead to
impact; he gave the example of the DFF analysis in 2002 demonstrating that IBRA should
not sell the debt owed by forest industries in Indonesia because it would bail out companies
that sourced their raw materials unsustainably and illegally. IBRA ignored the DFF analysis
and recommendations and sold the vast majority of the debt to the government itself.
According to another member of the core group, “the purpose of the DFF in many ways was
set up to create the paper [for the] CGI” and that “the DFF was supposed to monitor what is
happening, but is not.”
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In reflecting on the origin and evolution of the DFF, another of the core group noted
the following:
“donors raised the issue and then they disappeared…[the issue was ] left to the
experts…[in the] 1999 and 2000 CGI…the political momentum was there at the
CGI…donors [were] strong and the CGI committed…then we the donors and experts
failed to make use of the momentum…[we] should have sat together and separate and
with GOI for support programs…but did not…[we] sat on existing projects…we did
not unite. Experts were left alone and not prepared for the political job…[there was]
little participation from the embassies…embassies should have brought in political
experts.”
From these comments we can glean that the perceived “failure” of the DFF is very
much a failure to maintain recruitment of the other actors involved, e.g., GOI and the donor
community. Mosse (2005: 184) notes that “failure is produced by the cascading effect of
individuals disconnecting the fate of their ambitions from the fate of a project.” And indeed,
this is precisely what the core member of the DFF means when he says “donors raised the
issue and then they disappeared.” In that individual’s comments, as well as others, we also
see that the core members refer to themselves as “experts” and distinguish themselves from
“donors.” As discussed earlier, the position and status of the core members of the DFF is
ambiguous and multiple, and in this context, they draw attention to the fact that although they
acted as brokers between institutions, they lacked the political power of “donors” to influence
the practices of GOI at an intergovernmental level.
In commenting on how the DFF functions, a member of the core group noted that the
DFF’s activity is linked to the CGI meetings, which are held twice a year – the annual and
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mid-term meetings. He noted that it’s a “peak and crash” of activity every six months and
that afterwards everyone “forgets what the issues are and [there is no] follow-up.” Then six
months later the DFF “starts sweating again.” Another concurred noting that the DFF is like a
“spring [coil] that tenses up toward the CGI.”7
With respect to who attends DFF meetings, one of the core members noted that the
“donors are not really there…[and when they do come] donors are there for political
reasons.” He reiterated that regular participation in the DFF consists of “the sixth floor club
with others coming in and out” and that it is “not a donor forum…[but rather] project guys
with energy that do the writing [of the CGI statements].”
Further, he noted that the informality of the DFF and meeting procedures is
problematic: “the DFF is a forum…no one [is] in charge, no institutional structure, by-
laws…[there are] huge process violations.” As an example, he noted that for the June 2003
CGI meeting, the donor statement was changed after the event because MOF found certain
language unacceptable. Further, he noted in preparing a DFF statement for another CGI
meeting, one of the core members who had been involved in the drafting of the statement
was informed at an extreme late juncture by his agency’s home office not to sign the
statement and indeed to denounce it due to heavy lobbying by an environmental NGO based
in that country. In the end, this led to last minute changes in the statement to the
disgruntlement of the other core members. The core member who related these incidents to
me summed up his experience in the DFF observing that “in the end, each donor is left to
their own devices” and that a failure of the DFF was not to follow procedures internally more
7 In her ethnography of the donor community in Bolivia, Eyben (2003: 15) notes a similar situation: “Before the annual Consultative Group meetings between donors and government, the like-mindeds would prepare intensively to achieve a common position at the meeting.”
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rigorously. This individual’s comments indicate the negative aspects or “vulnerabilities”
(Mosse 2005) of the broker role of the DFF and its flexible and informal organization.
The informal and consensus based nature of the DFF led another long-term core
member to note that the DFF was “settling for mediocrity” and that “nothing is hard hitting”
in the donor statements. In commenting on the reasons for this, this individual asked
rhetorically, “Is it realistic for donor representatives to make a position paper?” Reflecting on
the decision making processes of the DFF, he noted that “foreign policy differs in each
country….therefore a unified position is often weak.” He further explained that the paper
“starts as a solid first draft, [and then] the negotiation waters it down to something that is
mediocre” (cf. Riles 1998). He noted that the end result is not really a DFF position paper
and “ends up being a debate between the usual suspects.” Indeed, another concurred adding
that “each donor flies its own flag…[it is] difficult to make everyone happy without diluting
down the statement.” This is unsurprising given that the donor paper presented at the CGI
meetings is the donors’ articulation of the master metaphor of forest crisis and reform in
Indonesia and thus is necessarily vague, general and ambiguous (Mosse 2005).
Similar to other core members regarding the origins of the DFF, the individual who
mentioned that the DFF was “settling for mediocrity” noted that it was set up “to make
progress and highlight issues [that] feed into donors and the CGI” and that initially it seemed
a way to address the issue of “how could technical people in donor projects work with MOF
and other sectors?” He commented that in the beginning there was an assumption that “the
CGI process [was] so significant that it would make [forest] issues look important.” Indeed,
his initial assumption of the DFF was that “it can reach beyond MoF…[that] diplomatic
people can take forestry to the next level, [that] they are interlocutors to the broader
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landscape [of institutions].” His experience with the DFF, however, led him to conclude that
“since 2001, we’ve been kidding ourselves that the CGI is a place for forestry reform.” In
reflecting on the ad hoc evolution of the DFF he noted that “in the beginning [the DFF was]
not seen as permanent…[but now] perceived as a permanent institutional process,” and that
its purpose and benefit were not clear. He noted that if the purpose of the DFF was to “work
with MOF to resolve problems,” it was unnecessary since projects “don’t need DFF…[there
is] no reason to use DFF to work with MOF.” Further, he noted that if the “DFF [is] about
the CGI process and forestry,” the “CGI cannot accomplish [that]” since it is more of a
ceremonial “event.”
In sum, it is clear that this core group of the DFF perceive the DFF as not having
achieved its original mandate beyond minor improved donor communication and marginal
international project collaboration. The reasons for this perception implied in their comments
are intimately related to the DFF’s relationship with, on the one hand, (1) the CGI and donor
agencies of respective members and, (2) on the other, the Ministry of Forestry. The following
portion of the chapter focuses on these two sets of relationships.
B. The “usual suspects” perceptions of the CGI and their relationship with their respective
donor agencies
1. A case of dual identities
In the core group’s comments regarding the reasons for the DFF’s perceived failure,
the relationship between this core group and their respective donor agencies in the context of
the CGI figures prominently. More specifically, many of the core members of the DFF
perceive their institutional position in the DFF, and consequently their drafting of the DFF
statement for the CGI, as debilitating the DFF as well as their own project work. It is
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important to recall one core member’s comment regarding how the DFF evolved after the
initial political commitment from the donors at the 2000 CGI meeting: “Experts were left
alone and not prepared for the political job…[there was] little participation from the
embassies.” In other words, according to this individual and other core members, the “usual
suspects” or “technical experts” de facto became the DFF because the diplomatic corps or
embassy representatives of donor countries did not actively engage in the DFF once it was
established. This presents an interesting variation on Mosse’s (2004) notion of brokers. The
core members of the DFF are well-positioned to act as brokers because of the ambiguous
identities, yet were reluctant to be brokers and were failed by other actors in part because of
the lack of clarity of their identities.
According to many of the core members their being the DFF de facto is problematic
because they are officially seconded or linked to the Ministry of Forestry. Moreover, they do
not have the diplomatic status to be a donor representative. For example, one noted that
“if you look at the organizational chart…[I am] part of the secretary general [of the
Ministry], not the government [of my donor institution]….but at the CGI, [I am] on
the side of [my government].”
On a related issue of their position vis-à-vis the Ministry and donor governments, another
core member noted that “we [technical experts] don’t have the mandate, authority, or
experience to engage in high level policy such as the CGI.” And thus, according to another,
“the problem is we [technical experts] get lost…[it is] difficult for us to wear two hats.”
The “two hats” he refers to is, on the one hand, officially being technical experts
seconded to the Ministry via international government-to-government agreements and, on the
other, de facto acting as a proxy for donor countries via their participation in the DFF and
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drafting of the DFF statement for the CGI annual meetings. Similarly, another core member
noted that in the “double role of individuals” there are “ambiguities, constraints, conflicts.”
He continued noting that the “double role” of “donor and projects” are “two distinct
positions” – the donor “exercises persuasion, leverage, as a project cannot” since in a project
the individual is “assigned to the loyalty to a master [viz., the Ministry of Forestry]. Echoing
this point, another core member in assessing this awkward double role noted that “MOF is
right…you [the technical experts] come to help us and you turn around and criticize us [in
the DFF statements]…therefore DFF has negative influence.” He concluded that “we [the
technical experts] overstepped our welcome, therefore we were pushed back.”
Moreover, several of the core members noted that their participation and work in the
DFF is either not within or a low priority in their individual Terms of Reference (ToR) or job
description, which focuses much more on the implementation of their respective bilateral
projects. One noted that “the DFF is beyond everyone’s job description” and it “needed more
active diplomatic participation.” Another noted that his participation in the DFF was outside
his ToR, while three others noted that their ToRs made general reference to supporting the
CGI, and not specific reference to preparing the DFF statement. Two others who are
contractors to the same aid agency noted that their “ToRs do not explicitly mention DFF or
pay 20% attention to the DFF.”
The core members remarked negatively on the lack of participation of the diplomatic
corps of their respective donor countries in the DFF and in the CGI Forestry Working Group
at the CGI meetings. One asked rhetorically “who are the donors? What do we mean by
donor forum?” He continued explaining that “diplomats represent government…technical
people [are] running the programs…one problem [is that] diplomats don’t come to [DFF]
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meetings.” In distinguishing between “technical people” and “diplomats,” this individual
implies that “technical people” are somehow divorced from government and politics and do
not have leverage in those arenas, which is not the case. As Eyben (2003: 28) observes, “the
donor community used development discourses that allow its members to dress up the moral,
the value-laden and the ideological as ‘technical.’”
Another core member flatly noted that the “diplomatic group needs to increase
participation.” Yet another concurred, commenting that the “role of diplomats in the Working
Group is not clear” and that “the Working Group doesn’t work because the only meetings of
the Working Group are for the CGI statement.” This individual also rhetorically asked
“can we get buy in from the embassy in the CGI Working Group on Forestry? No!
[And that] raises the question of whether the CGI Working Group should exist at all.”
A World Bank consultant who was responsible for organizing the December 2003 CGI
observed that the “group of donors at embassies are not engaged… [there are] no leaders,
champions”.
The frustration of this core group with respect to their ambiguous institutional role in
the DFF and the lack of participation from the diplomatic corps was conveyed in a core
member’s comment that “the ‘usual suspects’ are not invited to [the CGI]…although they
prepare the paper…the ‘usual suspects’ are not officially the same as the DFF.” Another
noted that although a commitment had been made at the December 2003 CGI to follow up on
forestry issues, and he had contacted many institutions including the IMF and World Bank,
“the CGI was not followed up,” which was “frustrating.” Indeed, the World Bank consultant
who was a key organizer of the December 2003 CGI noted that “embassy staff de facto defer
to contractors [the technical experts]” and that although this is “good for information sharing
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among technical experts and that [brought] technical experts closer to dialogue…[it] does not
take the dialogue where it needs to go.” One of the core members noted that the director of
natural resource issues at his donor’s international aid office in Indonesia entrusted him and
the other expatriate involved in the bilateral project as representatives at DFF meetings, but
with the understanding that they are technical and not diplomatic representatives, and thus
did not have decision making authority. This DFF core member also rhetorically asked “who
is the DFF?” noting that “it is not clear.” Another commented that there are “always
questions of who are members of DFF.”
The reality of the institutional arrangements and functioning of the DFF is in stark
contrast to what the name – the Donor Forum on Forestry – implies and indeed what other
actors, such as the Indonesian government and NGOs, assume that the DFF should be. This
only adds to the perceived failure of the DFF to fulfill its mandate. As one core member
noted, “the CGI has inflated the DFF, therefore many think that the DFF can do more that it
does….[but actually] it’s a lot of hype in many cases.” Another noted that because of the
assumption that donors are unified, that donors learn and that the CGI process is effective,
“the DFF’s image is bigger than life,” and this perception held by the Indonesian government
and NGOs only “led the DFF into a position that the DFF was bigger, stronger [than it
actually was]…therefore [it] failed miserably.”
2. Institutional incentives of donors
While the ambiguous position of the “usual suspects,” or the core members of the
DFF, in some ways strengthens the DFF’s brokering role, in other ways this lack of clarity
works against brokering, particularly in light of the incentives and practices of the diplomatic
corps and other official representatives of donor countries, who ultimately “failed” the DFF
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(Mosse 2004), or in other words prioritized other issues over the DFF and forest reform in
Indonesia. In examining the comments from the core group regarding institutional
incentives, practices and relationships of donors calling for reform and participating in the
CGI, there seems to be marginal institutional incentive and interest among the diplomatic
corps and other official donor representatives to engage in processes related to forest reform
such as the DFF. This has contributed to the disjuncture between, on the one hand, the
institutional logic and practices of international aid-funded projects and, on the other,
fulfilling the mandate of the DFF.
In reflecting on the history of forestry issues in the CGI and its origins in the IMF and
World Bank conditionalities, one core member of the DFF noted that the “CGI became a
conditionality thing [that] the IMF never enforced…therefore the framework failed.” He
concluded that “the CGI is formal pronouncement…not a confrontational forum.”
Commenting on the lack of donor commitment to forest reforms, this individual rhetorically
asked given that international “export-import banks make loans…how serious are donors?”
Another individual agreed that “conditionalities don’t work,” while at the same time he
thought that the CGI and conditionality process was the reason they, the members of the core
group, were “systematically excluded from the policy process [of the Ministry].”
When asked about their own institutional incentives to participate in the DFF as well
as their respective donor institution’s incentives, the core members’ comments highlighted
that often other incentives and other institutional practices take precedence over donor
coordination and collaboration and fulfillment of DFF functions. Besides the DFF being by
and large outside of their individual job descriptions, the core members commented on
institutional incentives and practices that were not necessarily supportive of the DFF
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mandate. For example, when asked why donors do not penalize the government of Indonesia
for not complying to their commitments through, for example, halting disbursement of funds,
one core member noted that “to stop a bad project is not easy…[there is a] chain effect.” In
this case, this individual worked for a EU-funded project and he noted that “a sanction by
one country of the EU is all of the EU.” Another noted that with respect to donor
coordination, projects take one year to design and assess, and thus coordinating project
activities among different donors was institutionally difficult, whereas coordinating
statements was much easier. He noted that all “projects have a scope of work” and that “all
donors have these constraints,” and thus it was “a question of whose job is this…to
coordinate across sectors.”
Further, this individual noted that within any given aid agency, there is “no
institutional incentive to coordinate, collaborate” and that it “falls between the cracks.” He
gave an example of the donor institution he was working for funding not only a sustainable
natural resource management project, but also IBRA, which ultimately wrote off the debt of
many of the forest industries that were sourcing raw materials unsustainably or illegally.
Asked whether these institutional incentives and practices experienced at the project or field
level by core members of DFF could be fed into donor policies and practices to improve
them, he flatly noted “members of DFF do not influence ministries of foreign affairs [or other
government departments]” and that in the case of his project the influence was “nil.”
With respect to incentives for coordination within a donor agency, another core
member noted that the Indonesian mission of that donor country included not only an
international aid representative in charge of the natural resource portfolio, but also an
embassy staffer representing the department of foreign affairs on science, technology and
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environment issues whose responsibility was to brief the home office. There was no
institutional link to ensure communication between these two individuals since each came
from a different government department, even though their offices were both within the
embassy complex. It was also pointed out that with respect to institutional incentives, the
head of the aid mission in Indonesia was accountable and responsive to directives from the
metropole and not necessarily the realities in Indonesia, and thus if the two were not in
accordance, the implementation of the metropole’s directives took precedence -- in short the
aid director’s “tenure is measured by indicators of success [mandated by the metropole].”
On a related topic regarding the metropole’s influence on field projects, a core
member of the DFF in charge of a bilateral project noted that with the change in
administration in his home country, the management of the international aid agency also
changed and “therefore, [now] less money, more emphasis on results.” He continued noting
that previously there was “less emphasis on monitoring, outputs…now [the emphasis is on]
number of hectares effected, number of people trained” and that “money [was] tighter and
requirements on work tighter” with a demand for “specific activities replicated.” It was a
“turn back to traditional indicators,” and the current indicators, which emphasized outputs
and products, did not help what his project was attempting to achieve. Mosse (2005: 188)
describes a similar situation in the rural development project in India when DFID changed its
global policy:
“DFID construed the complex effects of a change in the relationship between donor
patron and project client as operational failure. But in reality, project operations and
field practices – what project staff actually did – changed little in the shift from
success to failure.”
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These core members of the DFF also commented that often the institutional
incentives and practices related to international aid-projects were not conducive to achieving
the mandate of the DFF. For example, one observed that in his agency internationally posted
personnel changed every two to three years and that a “three year project is not enough
time…need 5-10 years” to establish an effective policy dialogue mechanism. In her
ethnography of the donor community in Bolivia – a community in which she was an active
participant – Eyben (2003: 28) concludes something similar:
“It is difficult to learn and to assume a long-term vision in a local donor community.
Each individual is operating in a short-time frame related to an average residence of
three years in any country and she want to see herself as having ‘made a difference.’
In many instances she is also under pressure to disburse.”
An example of the debilitating effect of personnel change is the one year gap between
the departure of the previous environment specialist at the World Bank in Indonesia, which
chairs the DFF, and his successor. Compounding this problem, during the interim the World
Bank did not defer chairmanship to another organization, but rather intermittently and
inconsistently chaired DFF meetings and appointed individuals whose understanding of the
forestry situation in Indonesia was limited.
C. The “usual suspects” perceptions of their relationship with MOF
The core group generally agrees that the relationship between members of the DFF
and the Ministry of Forestry is not productive. That said, some view this relationship as
having been better or worse in the past. This difference of opinion depends on individual
member’s perception of the ideal working relationship between them and the Ministry, e.g.,
whether their mandate is to work with the Ministry as the Ministry sees fit, or to work
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towards the goals stipulated in their project mandate, regardless of whether this may conflict
with the interests of the Ministry. As one core member caricatured it “within the DFF, [there
are] bilaterals that work like NGOs and others who pat the feathers of important people.”
Indeed, some members of the core group commented that “we were not sensitive enough as
advisors [to MoF]” and thus “MOF blames experts.” Others, however, see the Ministry and
government as more responsible for the lack of progress. One member rhetorically asked,
“how does the international community express frustration that the government made
commitments and got billions and did not follow through?” He continued remarking that
“donor support…confirms the status quo...[it] confirms pusat’s [the central government’s]
belief in its own importance.”
In the context of the multiple, rapid, and dramatic political economic changes in
Indonesia since the fall of Suharto in 1998, it is perhaps not surprising that the members of
this core group have significantly different opinions on how international aid-related forest
related projects should engage with the Ministry. It also important to recall that for the
Ministry the post-Suharto period has been one of constant transition – there have been six
Ministers of Forestry during the period between 1998 and 2004, and with each Minister there
has been change in senior level personnel in the Ministry. Indeed, one core member noted
that during this period it has been difficult to find a person in the Ministry to consistently
meet with. Another noted that in 2001, he “didn’t even know who to go to for a meeting” and
that in mid 2002 there was “absolute paralysis in the Ministry of Forestry.”
That said, the core members agree that the Ministry has not been active in engaging
the DFF in coordinating international aid projects in the forestry sector. “Donor coordination
should be done by the Government of Indonesia,” remarked one core member. Another noted
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that the Ministry’s department of international cooperation (Kerjasama Luar Negri) “should
say here is our program” but does not. Yet another observed that in the Ministry “capacity
and willingness [are] lacking.”
Indeed, the core members agree that since forestry became an agenda item at the CGI
in 2000, the Ministry has engaged members of the DFF in a limited fashion. One core
member reflected that after a joint action plan was drawn up in 2000 based on national level
workshops, there was “no partner, no implementation” and that “the DFF should report to the
CGI that nothing is happening and that it [the CGI] should pressure the government of
Indonesia” by implementing conditionalities, but instead it has only “raised the pitch of
rhetoric.”
The inaction of the Ministry specifically and government generally on the National
Forest Plan (NFP) that the government committed to at the 2000 CGI is indicative of this
perceived lack of engagement. On this issue, one core member noted that there is “no country
led coordination” and that “if it is talked about, it comes from donors.” He continued noting
that the NFP should be the overarching framework, but that the chair of the IDCF (the
committee that oversees and is responsible for the NFP), the Coordinating Minister of
Economic Affairs, is “not interested” and that the Ministry of Forestry had “no interest in the
NFP” even though it was mandated by Presidential Decree (KepPres 80/2000). Indeed, the
MOF counterpart to the bilateral project assisting the NFP process never came to the project
office, and the NFP working group was never active because of the lack of interest.
In addition to this perceived inaction, core members of the DFF also perceive the
Ministry as periodically defensive and opposing reform. For example, in June 2003 the
Ministry halted the DFID funded Multi-stakeholder Forestry Program (MFP) for more than
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six months and called for a joint review of the program because the Ministry perceived
MFP’s activities to not be in accordance with priorities of the Ministry or the bilateral
agreement between DFID and the Ministry. The Ministry felt that MFP was advocating for
and supporting Indonesian NGOs promoting land tenure reform in the forestry sector so that
the rights of forest dependent communities to forest resources would be recognized. While it
was acknowledged that MFP could have been more sensitive to the Ministry’s position,
particularly given the bilateral agreement between MOF and DFID, according to one member
of the core group of the DFF, DFID “did not realize how strongly pusat [the Ministry] would
oppose MFP working directly in the regions…[that] the attitude toward otda
[decentralization] was negative…[and] blamed local governments.” According to this
individual, the senior levels of the Ministry perceive “the crisis is such in forestry that there
is no time for democracy…therefore recentralize and then go to decentralization more
slowly” and that the Ministry’s vision “proclaims only the top can manage forests properly.”
He further remarked that “donors have achieved nothing with MOF…MOF even set up a
parallel process for restructuring industry.” After the Ministry mandated review, MFP
became a traditional bilateral project with government staff at MFP to approve proposals for
grants to Indonesian NGOs. In short, it was noted that “MFP evolved from a free
independent operator to more traditional business, project” and that “MFP has not had impact
on the bureaucracy.”8
The USAID-funded Natural Resource Management (NRM) project also incurred a
defensive response from the Ministry. This project, which has its bilateral agreement with
8 DFID signed a bilateral agreement with the Ministry to implement MFP because DFID previously had a strong network in MOF, and it was believed by some that DFID could create change in MOF from within. The review was perceived less as an actual assessment and more as diplomatic vehicle to increase MOF’s role in the remainder of the project, which runs through 2006.
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BAPPENAS, supports decentralized sustainable natural resource management. To this end, it
worked with the district government of Kutai Barat in East Kalimantan on multistakeholder
strategic forest planning by providing training, facilitation and a framework for the strategic
plan. The district government then developed and approved a district forest regulation that
the Ministry considered in violation of the Basic Forestry Law (UU 41/1999). The Ministry
criticized the NRM project for supporting this “illegal” activity, even though NRM did not
create the plan or write the regulation. Moreover, according to NRM staff, over the 18-month
period of training and facilitation in Kutai Barat, Ministry personnel visited the district two to
three times; it was a transparent process. Further, even though the district forest regulation
was approved in November 2002, the Ministry only made an issue of this in March 2003,
which was approximately the same time that the Ministry fell under heavy scrutiny over a
regulation (PP 34/2002) it had passed that many perceived as an attempt to recentralize
control over logging and other permits. Indeed, at that time Indonesian NGOs and others had
petitioned for and were granted a judicial review of the regulation. In the end, the NRM
project did not concede to the Ministry’s accusation and did not request the district
government to retract the district regulation, but it did agree to facilitate better
communication and cross visits between the district government and Ministry.
These two examples, as well as the inertia of the NFP, demonstrate how the core
members of the DFF became implicated in the power struggles between the central and
district governments, as well as power struggles between various central government
agencies. Moreover, from the perspective of this core group the Ministry has minimal interest
and/or ability to move forward the reforms in the forestry sector that the government had
committed to at the 2000 CGI. At the same time, the core group also perceives the
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commitment of their respective donor agencies as less than optimal due to the institutional
incentives, logics and practices of these bureaucracies. In sum, the DFF was failed by both
donor and GOI agencies, and the ambiguous, informal institutional reality of the DFF was a
liability instead of an asset with respect to brokering between institutions.
III. Perceptions of the DFF by central government agencies9
A. The Ministry of Forestry’s perceptions of DFF
Senior officials at the Ministry of Forestry have high expectations for what the DFF
should do and how the relationship between the Ministry and DFF should be, while also
being dissatisfied by the day-to-day membership of the DFF and generally disappointed by
the reality of the DFF. With respect to expectations of the DFF, senior MOF officials want
the DFF to be the MOF’s voice (swara) in the international community, defending and
explaining the position of the MOF and GOI to the international community. As one senior
MOF official noted, the DFF should “represent the institution above them….[they]
communicate the limits of MOF to [for example] the World Bank, embassies.” This official
also noted that “if a person can understand us, please give us input…we want to be
understood.” Indeed, for MOF specifically and GOI generally international aid and donor
engagement in the forestry sector are vehicles to leverage credibility and legitimacy
internationally.
9 The following section of the chapter is based on interviews (approximately 10) conducted with senior central government officials who rank either just below or two levels below the Minister in the Ministry of Forestry, the Ministry of Environment, the Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs, and the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas), all of which ostensibly participate in the Interdepartmental Committee on Forestry (IDCF), which all of these agencies concur failed miserably. The failure of the IDCF was in large part due to these various central government agencies having differing institutional incentives with respect to forests. See Chapter 6.
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From the perspective of senior officials at the MOF, however, the DFF has not
achieved what the MOF expects of it. On an operational, day-to-day basis the MOF sees that
the DFF consists of expatriates who work for bilateral projects and are ostensibly technical
assistance experts seconded to the MOF. From the perspective of senior MOF officials, it is
not clear how this technical staff, lower in the hierarchy than they are, can also represent the
donors. In other words, with respect to the Ministry’s hierarchy, how can those that serve the
Ministry, viz., ranking below the Director General level, also be the Ministry’s international
counterpart, i.e., donor representatives? These comments from the senior Ministry officials
reveal both the positive and negative elements of the ambiguous and informal reality of the
DFF. That the DFF consists of seconded technical expert expatriates is beneficial with
respect to brokering and translating between institutions because they understand the
practices, logics and culture of the Ministry better than most of the international community.
At the same time, when the DFF does not achieve what Ministry officials expect, Ministry
officials blame the ambiguity of the membership of the DFF for the lack of progress.
One senior official noted with respect to the CGI and the unclear role of technical
project people and diplomatic staff, “the technical level [and] policy level in the CGI [are]
mixed and unclear…do technical people inform embassy people as well? In the CGI, the
embassy people represent and support their own countries.” This official continued
commenting that there is “a problem of technical people and decision makers’
communication” and that the diplomatic corps tend to speak in terms of “feathery words” or
“fluff” (kata bersayap). He recommended that there needs to be increased “informal
discussions between embassies and the government to brief about the situation…[it] provides
understanding and communication [that] cannot happen at the CGI.”
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Senior MOF officials were also critical of the positions of some of the individuals
who made up the core group of the DFF, i.e., the bilateral project expatriates. Specifically,
these senior government officials were critical of those members of the DFF who were
“policy” as opposed to “technical” oriented. One senior official noted that the weakness of
DFF is that in the DFF there are two levels – technical and policy – and that communication
between MOF and DFF was “not smooth” (nga lancar) because of this, or more specifically
because technical people were “good with us” (baik sama kita) and the policy people “had
different thoughts” (pikiran lain) and “thus did not connect” (jadi nga nyambung). The
distinction between technical and policy is informative because it is really a distinction
between those that accommodate the wishes of Ministry and those that the Ministry feels has
created problems for them. The distinction has much less to do with the actual different in
functions of “technical” versus “policy” staff, which none of the Ministry officials or project
people could articulate, and much more to do with supportive versus critical from the
perspective of the Ministry. This resonates with Eyben’s comment that “those we
[international donors and development community] encounter in the local community may
actually encourage us to stay in the realm of technical discourse as a means of managing a
relationship where they can keep a certain distance from us” (Eyben 2003: 28).
Related to this last point, those individuals attached to bilateral projects that focused
on the forestry sector through a framework of good governance, poverty alleviation and
decentralized management were considered by senior Ministry officials as policy and thus
“had different thoughts.” Indeed, one senior MOF official mapped onto the distinction
between technical and policy staff the distinction between knowledge and ignorance of
forests and ecosystems. She noted that those promoting tenure reform and rationalization of
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forests “lacked an understanding of the forest” (kurang pemhamanan hutan). This individual
noted that in these discussions of tenure sustainable forest management is not considered and
that the government releasing authority over Indonesia’s forests would not alleviate poverty.
As this official noted, “in Indonesia, if [we] give forest to community, [they] will sell.”
According to this official, the DFF members who advocate this type of tenure reform “lack a
background regarding ecosystem functions.” And indeed with respect to the national social
forestry program, those members of DFF who raised issues regarding tenure, according to
this official, were those who did not have a natural resource background. In doing so, this
senior official calls into question the knowledge and expertise of any individual who raises
policy or tenure issues.
An important analytical point from these comments from senior government officials
is the unstated assumption that if DFF members “understood” the Ministry better, then there
would be no difference of opinion between the Ministry and the DFF. Conversely, another
assumption is that if DFF members do not agree with MOF, the reason is that that DFF
member does not understand the Ministry and/or forestry. The fundamental assumption from
officials’ comments is that if an individual “understands,” then undoubtedly he/she will have
the same position as the Ministry. This is what Ministry officials expect will be
communicated to the international community by the DFF, viz., the Ministry’s position,
which is not to be questioned.
Senior MOF officials noted the lack of understanding in highlighting their
disappointment concerning two incidents where bilateral projects were involved in or
supportive of demands perceived by MOF as not in accordance with the Forestry Law and
other related MOF policies. They referred specifically to the DFID funded Multistakeholder
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Forestry Programme (MFP) and the USAID funded Natural Resource Management (NRM)
project, both of which were discussed in an earlier section of the chapter. With respect to
MFP, senior MOF officials perceived MFP as inappropriately advocating for tenure reform,
and hence the Ministry called for a joint review of MFP after a conflict occurred between a
senior Ministry official and Indonesian NGO representatives at the 2003 national MFP
meeting funded by MFP. According to the senior MOF official, the national meeting showed
that after two years of implementation “real multistakeholder processes” were not in place,
evinced by the hostile interaction between the Ministry and Indonesian NGOs. From the
perspective of this official, Indonesian NGOs – funded by MFP -- were calling for ownership
over forests without considering the necessary pre-conditions and also the fact that there was
“no local reform.”
With respect to the USAID-funded NRM project and its facilitation of forest policy
development in the district of Kutai Barat in East Kalimantan, from the perspective of senior
Ministry officials, USAID facilitated the process by “their design” (design dia) and was in
conflict with the Basic Forestry law, and therefore the Ministry admonished the project about
its activities. Indeed, one senior official referred to USAID’s involvement as “manipulation”
to push for US priorities and position on decentralization. He also noted that all donors are
similar in this regard, and thus the DFF “needs to be sensitive because this kind of thing
creates instability.” In addition, senior officials commented negatively that these projects
went directly to the local level “forgetting the upper levels [with whom they have official
relationships]” and thus were “confused” or “out of order” (galau).
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B. MOF’s negative perception of the international aid agenda
The perception of senior MOF officials regarding the conflicts between the Ministry
and the two bilateral projects is indicative of a broader awareness and critical understanding
of MOF officials towards international aid-funded forestry initiatives. Comments made
during interviews regarding donors and international aid clearly indicated this. One senior
official noted that donors “often have an agenda” (sering mereka punya agenda), that “the
DFF often blames the government instead of building the country” (DFF sering salahkan
GOI dari pada membangun negara) and that “priorities in donor countries are different than
the government of Indonesia” since “donors have their own constituencies.” He continued
noting that “MOF feels that projects are [for] their [the donors’] needs.” Moreover, he
mentioned that at the CGI meetings the Indonesian contingent is particularly “disturbed by
the way diplomats comment on matters….most diplomats jump to conclusions and
emphasize the negative side…[and] forget that this is hard in their own country.” He noted
this attitude is particularly difficult to take from donor countries that are critical but do not
provide aid to the forestry sector. He further commented that “therefore many Indonesians
say forget it.”
Another concurred, commenting that members of the DFF had a personal agenda that
was part of their institution’s foreign policy agenda. He continued noting that the differing
foreign policy agendas of respective donors created competition within DFF and made it
such that MOF could not coordinate the DFF. For example, he noted that many donors
“insisted on East Kalimantan” as a location for projects because of politics in home countries
(insist KalTim…karena politik disana). Additionally, he commented that sometimes foreign
“experts” who came with projects were not qualified and that it would be better to use local
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experts. In a slightly more conspiratorial tone, he added that some donors use Indonesia to
experiment with Western notions such as poverty. Thus, the possibility of multiple
objectives, ulterior motives and/or hidden agendas among donors constitutes an important
element of how Ministry officials understand the international aid community.
In addition to this critical understanding of donor motives and incentives, senior MOF
officials also commented on other disincentives or barriers in the implementation of bilateral
projects. One senior official noted that the disparities in salary and benefits between
expatriate “experts” and their Indonesian government counterparts were not conducive to
productive collaborations.10 These disparities are particularly difficult for Indonesian
government counterparts when the counterpart is thought to end up carrying out most of the
work because the “expert” lacks the skills or knowledge to do so. In addition to these benefit
and salary disparities, this same senior MOF official acknowledged that segregating the
bilateral project expatriates onto one floor separate from the rest of the Ministry was a barrier
to coordination and collaboration.
C. Other central government agencies’ perceptions of the DFF
Thus far, the discussion has focused exclusively on the perceptions of senior MOF
officials regarding the DFF. Senior officials from other central government agencies with
connections to forestry through the IDCF also have particular expectations and perceptions of
the DFF, which are inextricably linked to those agencies’ relationship, or lack thereof, with
the Ministry of Forestry. Although they may only be familiar with the DFF in name and may
not understand its role, other central government agencies have high expectations of the DFF
with respect to coordination. One reason for this, according to one senior government
10 Somewhat ironically, it was BAPPENAS that established the compensation scales for civil servants involved in international aid funded projects.
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official, is “because [there is] no hope for the government.” Indeed, perhaps the most
instructive aspect of conversations with non-MOF officials regarding the DFF was their
remarks regarding the government and inter-agency relationships, both of which were
primarily negative and critical. These inter-agency struggles and conflicts contributed to
government departments’ failing, or not supporting, the DFF.
For example, one senior official at BAPPENAS when asked about the role of the DFF
noted that the problem of coordination should actually be addressed by BAPPENAS, but that
BAPPENAS had lost that authority, as well as other inter-agency decision making powers
and control over annual budget allocations11. Senior government officials did not limit their
comments to noting the loss of authority in their own agencies, but instructively, they
commented quite critically about other agencies and were forthcoming about conflicts
between agencies. For example, one senior non-MOF official noted that Minister of Forestry
felt defensive or cornered (dipojokan) because he did not have allies in the Ministry (nga ada
kawan didalam). He continued noting that corruption, collusion and nepotism (KKN12) was
still strong within the MOF (KKN didalam dephut….kuat) and that for the Minster there were
“many enemies within the Ministry…[and that it was] still rotten inside MOF” (banyak
musuh didalam selimut…masih busuk didalam MOF). Another senior non-MOF official
noted that the reasons for the lack of progress in forestry was that “problem solving at MOF
11 He noted that with reforms in government since the fall of Suharto in mid 1998, BAPPENAS and other executive branch agencies had lost substantial control of budgetary decisions to the legislature (DPR). He further commented that with this shift in authority it was unclear what agency should be responsible for coordination and that consultation between agencies was minimal. He added that BAPPENAS’ loss of authority and power was not merely due to changing regulations and indeed there is “no official regulation decreasing the control, power [of BAPPENAS], but [at the] political level…realities.” In short, BAPPENAS’ loss of power over the past few years has very much to do with that agency’s prominent role during the Suharto regime and centralized governance. In the era of reformasi and decentralization, it was politically unacceptable for BAPPENAS to maintain a position of authority. Indeed, this BAPPENAS official noted that now BAPPENAS “could not involve itself in the middle of projects” (ngak boleh ikut campur didalam proyek). 12 “KKN” is the Indonesian acronym for korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme or corruption, collusion and nepotism.
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was lacking” and “MOF internal politics” was hindering the process (problem solving kurang
di MOF…MOF internal politics). The critique of MOF was also extended to the agency’s
institutional incentives. For example, one senior non-MOF official noted that projects from
the government such as a national forest inventory are of no interest to MOF because MOF
prefers to issue concession permits. Further, he noted that MOF has no interest in annual
budget allocations because the vast majority of their operating budget comes from the
reforestation fund which is outside the national budget. His comments emphasize how
independently MOF operates and the lack of institutional incentive in MOF to coordinate
with other agencies. Indeed, he flatly noted “[there is] no one in MOF who is coordinating
with other sectors” and that the Ministry’s attempts at decreasing the amount of wood
consumption through a gradual decrease in harvesting quotas, or “soft landing,” was “only
talk” since reducing the capacity of industry was really the only way to address the problem.
The multi-sectoral problem of overcapacity in the forest product processing industry
in Indonesia and the inability, inertia and/or unwillingness of the IDCF to address the
problem raise another important factor with respect to the relationship between central
government institutions. In Chapter 6, I discussed the origin of the IDCF and the persistent
failure of the IDCF due to the lack of interest in it by, and conflicting institutional incentives
of, various government agencies. As one official flatly stated, “The Ministry of Industry and
Trade does not want a regulation on illegal logging” (Memperinag nga mau SK illegal
logging).The lack of commitment to the IDCF and the inharmonious relationship between
government agencies are apparent in the structure of the IDCF. The Coordinating Minister of
Economic Affairs officially chairs the IDCF, but he has delegated the responsibility to
someone one at the Director General Level (Echelon I), who in turn has delegated it to one of
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her staff members, who is at the rank of Echelon II. Within the Coordinating Ministry, the
Director General in charge of the IDCF was relatively new and lacked an understanding of it
beyond the fact that it was inactive. Indeed, she even asked a senior Indonesian NGO
executive, who also participated in the interview, what she should do and how the IDCF
could be activated. She noted that she “inherited” the IDCF from her predecessor, absolving
herself of responsibility for it. When asked why she delegated responsibility of the IDCF to
someone whose rank was Echelon II, she noted that staff and funding were limited, and the
individual who was coordinating the IDCF was the only individual available.
From the perspective of senior officials in the Ministry of Forestry, who are at the
Director General level (Echelon I), this inter-institutional relationship was problematic. In
essence, the person in charge of the IDCF from the Coordinating Ministry was hierarchically
at a lower level than those officials at the Ministry of Forestry that he was calling to
meetings. For the Director Generals at the Ministry of Forestry this was unacceptable –
someone lower in rank should not be calling meetings or calling them on the phone. These
are not trivial matters for Indonesian government officials and reflect the differing levels of
commitment of various government agencies.
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IV. Perceptions of the DFF by the diplomatic corps13
A. Donors’ skeptical and cautious engagement with forestry issues
Although international donors have committed themselves to helping to resolve
problems in the Indonesian forestry sector since 2000, in the context of other internationally
funded priorities, forestry ranks relatively low. Moreover, due to the lack of progress in
forestry issues, many donors are hesitant to continue or to initiate engagement in the sector.
Donors “failed” the DFF in that they did not support and validate its significance for various
reasons (Mosse 2004), except when they needed a donor position paper for the annual CGI
meetings.
One senior representative from an international aid agency flatly noted that the “DFF
is broken because forestry is off the agenda at the CGI…[there is] no respect from GOI” and
that at the December 2003 CGI the forestry dialogue was “depressing” because the
government’s tone was “flippant, challenging, [and] cynical.” In short, there was “no
meaningful discussion regarding forestry issues.” This aid representative was equally as
critical of the donor community, noting that the DFF has “dissolved into squabbling” with
“very few active members, [and] contractors,” which “reflects that donors are not doing their
jobs regarding management....[and] collaboration.” Indeed, this official noted that not only is
there “silence at the top,” but also that there is “tremendous pressure” for the agency she
works for “to pull funding from forestry” based on diplomatic level discussions that have
13 In this section of the chapter, I discuss the perceptions of donors with respect to the DFF and the relationship between aid agencies, central government agencies and other actors engaged in the forestry sector. This section is based on interviews with embassy and international aid organization representatives who are posted in Indonesia and who are knowledgeable of and/or engaged in the forestry sector in Indonesia, but are not actively involved in the DFF, although they might attend intermittently. In other words, they are not members of the “core group” of the DFF, either because (1) they defer to their contractors and/or technical experts who are core members and/or (2) the amount of time and energy they commit to the DFF is limited because forestry is only one component of their portfolios.
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concluded very little progress has been achieved. This individual continued that the director
of their aid mission was certain that “no real reform” would occur until the Indonesian armed
forces were fully funded through the national budget and no longer involved in business
ventures such as logging. In short, this aid representative observed that a “reaffirmation at the
level of heads of missions” and “heads of agencies to give support for a coordinated
approach” were needed, but not forthcoming.
Many other aid agency representatives articulated similar concerns. The head of one
agency commented that “donors are discouraged” and that there is “no way to work, assist
where there are no results.” He noted that in the beginning there was “wide attendance at the
DFF” of both “technical and diplomatic” staff, but the “diplomatic [staff is] now disengaged”
and that “nobody has time for the DFF.” He remarked that “at this point [he was] very
skeptical” and that there were “feelings of deception” that certain elements in the government
had no interest in forestry reform. He gave an example of a proposed road in North Sumatra
supported by the military that many, including himself, noted was merely an excuse to
extract timber from Leuser National Park. He noted that it was “military supported,” that “the
military will be the contractor,” and that “the design of the road is not useful.” In short, the
Leuser National Park was “seen as a liability.” While locating most of the blame and
responsibility on the Indonesian government, this individual also noted that donor programs,
including his own agency’s, lacked the necessary flexibility to address forestry issues in
Indonesia. This diplomat’s version of the history of the DFF succinctly captures donors’
“failing” the DFF, or losing support in and validation of the DFF.
While there is deep skepticism and frustration among donors regarding the possibility
of progress on forestry reforms agreed to by the Indonesian government and donor
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community, several donor representatives noted that their agencies are not necessarily
writing off the forestry sector all together. Several donors indicated that should there be
positive indications of political will on the part of the government and substantive changes on
the ground, their agencies would (re) engage. One noted that their agency “would like to
increase lending, but [currently forestry was considered] high risk.” The head of an
extremely influential aid agency noted that while acknowledging that “forestry is the leading
case of failure” with respect to his agency’s work in Indonesia, the agency was “willing to
play any role that is helpful” and that he was “looking for a fresh start…for big ideas….[in
the] analysis of forestry issues and mechanisms appropriate for certain issues.” Another
donor representative, whose government had been actively engaged as a bilateral donor in the
forestry sector but pulled out in 2001 due to a perceived lack of commitment from the
Indonesian government, noted that “if [there is] a signal from Indonesia, [the agency] wants
to come back” but at present a “clear Indonesian commitment [is] lacking” and that donors
could not establish a mechanism without this. The interest yet skepticism of most donors
with respect to the forestry sector was expressed succinctly by one donor representative when
he noted that “unless there is revision in the legal” and institutional landscape, forestry “is
not a fertile ground for [aid] investment.” In elaborating on this point, this individual noted
that the problems in the Indonesian forestry sector are complex, involving multiple
ministries, and while the Ministry of Forestry “wants to be part of the solution, [it is]
structurally part of the problem.”
This skeptical and cautious attitude of the donor community with respect to
engagement in forestry issues in Indonesia is apparent in the DFF, viz., in the lack of
diplomatic level engagement in the DFF and the dependence on contractors and technical
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experts as proxies for donor representatives. This in turns maintains the appearance that
donors are engaged in the forestry sector, whereas the reality is that they are increasingly less
so. One diplomat noted that she was “amazed” by the work in forestry, by “the network of
information,” by “so much going on,” and “so many actors and consultations” and that
“people are really engaged,” yet at the same time “nothing [was being] done from political
aspects,” which differed from other sectors where there was much more political discussion
with diplomats. This individual concluded that forestry must ultimately be a low priority for
donor countries. This individual further noted that the technical experts and/or contractors
that constitute the DFF on a daily basis are not in a position to conduct a political dialogue,
and the lack of political dialogue suggested either poor communication between the core
group and their respective diplomats or indifference on the part of the donor community.
Others reiterated the point that the lack of diplomatic participation in the DFF was a
serious obstacle to moving the forestry agenda forward from the donor side. One aid agency
representative who intermittently attended DFF meetings noted that while “forestry experts
know what’s going on,” bringing the issues to a political level requires the involvement of
diplomats, and currently in the DFF there are “hardly any diplomats to bring [these issues] to
GOI.” In short, he noted “an ambassador can talk to a minister,” whereas technical or project
staff were not in a position to do so. This individual also commented that the lack of donor
and government interest in the forestry sector was evident in the lack of follow up regarding
forestry issues after the December 2003 CGI when follow up was agreed upon by both sides.
As he noted, “everyone says forestry is important but only discussed once, no follow up.”
Another aid agency representative concurred, stating that “you can’t have someone who is
technical and also a national delegate…[it] doesn’t work.” Another bilateral aid agency
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representative added another concern that in the DFF the core group, which consists of
technical and project staff, end up “talking more about political coordination mechanisms,”
which they are not necessarily qualified to do and which confuses the primary focus of the
group.
This analysis of the DFF based on the perceptions of donor agency representatives
reveals that the donor community’s commitment to and engagement in the reforms of the
Indonesian forest sector are not nearly as straightforward as might be assumed from the
proclamations articulated in formal CGI statements. The reasons for this are multiple,
ranging from a lack of perceived commitment from the government of Indonesia to changing
priorities and incentives of donor agencies. The reality of the DFF reflects this lack of
commitment – the donor community failed the DFF in not supporting or validating it.
Without donors’ support or validation, the ambiguous and flexible position of the core
members of the DFF became an excuse or reason for failure instead of an attribute to broker
institutional relationships.
B. Institutional arrangements that work against a concerted effort by donors
Since the 2000 CGI when forestry was first introduced as an agenda item, in addition
to the DFF, there has, at least on paper, also existed the CGI Working Group on Forestry
(CGI FWG). The CGI FWG takes the CGI as its focus and ostensibly includes donors, the
government and perhaps other actors such as NGOs – this has never been clarified. The CGI
FWG has never been functional and has only added to the confusion of institutional
arrangements that the donor community is involved in. Indeed, the relationship between the
DFF and the CGI FWG is entirely unclear, particularly since the minutes of the first DFF
meeting refers to the DFF as the CGI Donor Forum on Forestry. One aid agency
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representative confessed that it took him “one and a half years to understand that the DFF is
not the [CGI] working group.” When asked about the relationship between the DFF and CGI
FWG, another aid agency representative flatly answered that the forestry working group was
“useless.”
Although perhaps “useless,” the CGI FWG does formally exist and is officially
chaired by the European Commission (EC), which differs from the DFF, which is chaired by
the World Bank. The logic of this was that different donors would chair different working
groups so that the World Bank was not perceived as dominating the CGI. Several
representatives of the donor community noted that the chair of the CGI FWG had not been
active and indeed a senior official at the EC mission in Jakarta noted that this had been
“problematic” but would not comment further. Another aid agency representative took a
much more critical perspective on the “institutional ineffectiveness” of the CGI FWG and its
relationship with the DFF. This individual noted that the pretense of the CGI FWG in the
context of its inaction was detrimental since the FWG “pretends to take a niche of dialogue
with the Ministry of Forestry…but the conversation does not exist.” This individual
continued noting that the relationship of the DFF, CGI FWG and CGI “is ineffective and
does harm because of the pretense of doing something.”
It is also important to mention that the donors involved in the CGI process and the
Indonesian forestry sector are not all of the donors or granting institutions involved in
forestry issues in Indonesia, e.g., the Ford Foundation, Conservation International, The
Nature Conservancy, CIFOR, etc. Indeed criteria for membership in the DFF and the CGI
FWG are ad hoc, historically contingent and not straightforward. One donor representative
who intermittently attends DFF meetings and who works for a private foundation noted that
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invitations are sporadic and arbitrary since it “depends on who sends the email.” At the same
time, this private foundation is a regular member of the CGI poverty alleviation working
group. Indeed, this individual noted that the “Donor Forum on Forestry” (DFF) was a
misnomer and that more accurately the group referred to as the DFF was actually the
“bilateral CGI statement group.” More pointedly, this individual further highlighted that the
problem of the DFF and CGI FWG was that operationally they were the same and that
membership was by and large limited to “project oriented technical advisors” who had “no
say in policy” while their respective diplomats “do not know the issues.” Further, he
rhetorically asked “what is the value-added of limiting the DFF to bilaterals?” explicitly
noting that there are trade offs in government-to-government agreements.
Additionally, some donors heavily involved in other sectors such as poverty
alleviation, are unaware of the linkages and/or similarities between forestry and other sectors.
While the linkages between the problems and solutions in the forestry sector and other
sectors are multiple, substantial and evident to those heavily involved in the forestry sector,
the communication of these linkages to donors in other sectors in a way that speaks to their
institutional interests and demonstrates the value-added of taking an integrated perspective is
lacking. One donor agency representative heavily involved in poverty alleviation noted that
the “main problem [of forestry is] getting forestry out of the sector” and that “people working
in forestry…need to change language and make it relevant to others.” In short, forestry is
“not mainstreamed” and for example, there is “no connection between the PRSP [poverty
reduction strategy paper] and forestry.” And while this individual questioned the value of the
PRSP, the point was that links with other sectors were needed. Indeed, another individual
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heavily involved in the PRSP process noted that none of the PRSP task forces was addressing
forestry.
Interestingly, the two individuals who made these comments work for a bilateral aid
agency that currently funds and implements a multi-year project in cooperation with the
Ministry of Forestry. This raises a broader issue of intra-institutional communication – or
lack thereof – that several donors frankly commented on. Several donors noted this as a real
obstacle. One noted that while their agency supports efforts to mitigate illegal logging in
Indonesia, one of their poverty alleviation projects focuses on supporting small and medium
size enterprises in the furniture sector, which it turns out in part sources their timber from
illegal sources and that the price difference between “legal” and “illegal” wood was 40%. In
relating this, this individual asked “how do we deal with this?”
V. Perceptions of DFF by Indonesian NGOs14
Most NGO representatives assume that the DFF consists of donors engaged in the
forestry sector in Indonesia and also assume that the international donor community has
substantial influence over the Indonesian government’s policies and practices that affect
forestry issues. Further, most NGOs do not differentiate between the technical experts who
constitute the core group of the DFF and the diplomatic corps that ostensibly participate in
the DFF. This is unsurprising given that many Indonesian NGOs are often grantees or
subcontractors of international aid projects, and thus these projects are donors from the
perspective of Indonesian NGOs. 14 In this section of the chapter, I discuss the perceptions of Indonesian NGOs based in Jakarta with respect to the DFF as well as their perceptions of the broader relationship between the donor community and the Indonesian government both within and beyond the context of the CGI. This section is based on individual and group interviews, as well as minutes of meetings. Indonesian NGO representatives are not members of the DFF, but intermittently engage the DFF, normally at the request of the DFF as part of the preparation for the annual CGI meeting statements. Members of the core group of the DFF interact and/or work with NGO representatives in the capacity of their respective bilateral projects, e.g., as partners or sub-contractors. Since 2000, a delegation of NGO representatives has been invited to attend CGI meetings as observers.
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Many NGOs have high expectations towards donors and the DFF, while also
highlighting their disappointment and frustration at the lack of progress. These sentiments
were expressed at an October 2003 meeting organized by the DFF with primarily Indonesian
NGOs “to discuss forestry issues in advance of the [December 2003] CGI meeting” and “to
conduct an informal discussion of issues of common concern in the forestry sector” (DFF
NGO October 2003).
With respect to expectations of the DFF, one Indonesian NGO representative asked
“how can DFF pressure the central government to be a better facilitator to bring regional
governments into better practice” (DFF NGO October 2003). Another flatly stated that the
“DFF needs to pressure the GOI” (DFF NGO October 2003), while a different individual
hoped “that donors can push for better data and more transparency from GOI” (DFF NGO
October 2003). Yet another explained that “because international donors are important,
NGOs want donors to respond loudly and consistently” and that “external pressure seems to
mean more to GOI” (DFF NGO October 2003). Related to this last point, NGO
representatives assume that donors and the DFF have closer relations with the government
than they do. Indeed, one individual commented that “donors have better access” (DFF NGO
October 2003).
While their expectations for donors and the DFF are high, NGO representatives are
equally frustrated and disappointed by the lack of donor influence. Indeed, one individual
noted that “every year we talk about the same things” (DFF NGO October 2003). Another
expressed his disappointment with the DFF and donors commenting that “in practice, [CGI]
statements are disappointing…not so strong, or they are contradicted by other statements or
policies that are implemented later” (DFF NGO October 2003). More concretely, this NGO
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representative explained that none of the government’s “commitments [to forest sector
reform] has been achieved, but no strong response from donors” (DFF NGO October 2003).
NGO expectations for and disappointments with the DFF and donors were succinctly
expressed by one individual who noted that “donors should conduct a real review of the
indicators of what the GOI has committed to already” since “this review should create a huge
pressure for GOI to do what it said it would” and that “up to now, the DFF has not done this”
(DFF NGO October 2003). Another individual observed that “there’s a gap in
expectations…NGOs hope for a lot, but donors can’t deliver it” (DFF NGO October 2003).
Indeed, the disappointment and frustrations of NGOs with donors carried over even with
respect to this meeting itself. One Indonesian NGO representative commented that “the DFF
has sought consultations in the past [and] sometimes the final result after these consultations
is far from what was hoped for and this is disappointing…[I] would like to see more NGO
impact on the final statement [for the CGI]” (DFF NGO October 2003). Indonesian NGOs’
disappointment with the DFF juxtaposed to the continual hopes they have for it is revealing.
It indicates that for Indonesian NGOs the symbolic capital of the DFF is such that they are
willing to overlook the continual inability of the DFF to meet their expectations. Annually,
Indonesian NGOs suspend judgment of the DFF and its track record and accept DFF meeting
invitations with at least some hope that the DFF will somehow be different. The hope of
these Indonesian NGOs is similar to the hope that Mosse discusses when speaks of
“development as hope,” which is “hope [that] involved the redefinition of the past and
present in terms of an imagined future” (Mosse 2004: 240).
While the brunt of Indonesian NGO representatives’ disappointment with the DFF
and donors was aimed at the perceived lack of donor influence, others were also critical of
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donors who funded contradictory initiatives. For example, one individual rhetorically asked
“what is the relation of the donor mission in Indonesia with the overall foreign policy?” and
“Are donors’ engagement in the CGI consistent with their actual practices and actions?” He
continued noting that “several donor governments are investing in pulp mills in South
Kalimantan, even though that is part of the [forest industry] overcapacity problem….this
foreign policy objective is inconsistent with the policy objectives expressed by the DFF”
(DFF NGO October 2003).
That said, by and large most Indonesian NGO representatives and aid-related project
staff noted that there is a “strong convergence of interests between donors and NGOs in
forestry policy reform” (DFF NGO October 2003). An Indonesian NGO representative
commented that “we [NGOs and donors] have the same objectives and hence are natural
allies” (DFF NGO October 2003). There is indeed shared interest with respect to priority
issues for forestry reform, e.g., corruption, law enforcement, decentralization, industry
overcapacity, and tenurial rights.
The shared understanding of priority issues perhaps exacerbates the frustration of
Indonesian NGOs since it is not a matter of donors having a different understanding of the
issues, but rather disjunctures in the institutional relationships between donors, the
government and NGOs. In other words, the influence of one set of institutions over another is
limited, which differs from what these inter-institutional relationships appear to be, viz., the
“order” of forest reform. One experienced Indonesian NGO representative related his
skepticism toward donors and their influence over government remarking on the following:
“Do we need the DFF? No answer because they [the donors] formed it themselves.” He
continued noting that there had been hope that the DFF and donors could play the role of an
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external pressure group, but it turned out they could not, so “we [Indonesians] do not need
them…Indonesia has not changed…the substance of the problems are not dealt with by
donors.” He noted that fundamentally each donor has its own set of “self-interests”
(kepentingan masing-masing).
One veteran Indonesian NGO representative who has also worked for international
aid projects shed further light on the perceptions of Indonesian NGOs with respect to the
DFF and donors by explaining the history of inter-institutional relationships. This individual
noted that “Indonesian nationals, activists…[are] really mad and really excited…[and]
disappointed” and that it is “difficult to maintain trust” since “the effort to include NGOs…is
not quite true” and thus “NGOs have a hard time believing.” He explained that the reasons
for this are multiple. He noted that to a great extent “donors tend to be accommodating to the
wishes of MOF rather than what is written in laws.” He gave examples of two bilateral
projects, i.e., the USAID funded NRM project and DFID funded MFP project, being
reprimanded by MOF because their initiatives were perceived as threatening by MOF. He
noted that often “donors [are] too soft [particularly with respect to tenure issues]…seen from
the perspective of partners on the ground,” who see “lots of room for improving long term
security, benefit.”
He further explained that Indonesian NGOs were disappointed with donors because
of the “conflicting agendas put on the table” by donors and their lack of coordination and
concerted effort. He mentioned that in 2000 when forestry became a high priority issue at the
CGI and “donors pressured the government to change,” one government donor announced
“out of the blue” a grant to support the Ministry of Forestry before a high-profile meeting
between the government and donors, which resulted in pressure being “100% lost.” He also
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noted that in 2000 and 2001 when there was both international and national pressure on the
government over the forestry crisis, certain donors were “praising the Indonesian government
regarding forestry, which worked against a concerted effort.” He gave another example of a
bilaterally-funded project that worked with Indonesian NGOs to campaign against illegal
logging in Indonesia and how that project lost legitimacy with its Indonesian NGO partners
because the donor did not support publicizing a case involving two officials from the MOF
because the donor did not want to damage its working relationship with MOF.
This section of the chapter has focused on Indonesian NGO representatives’
perceptions of the DFF and the relationship between donors and the government. As far as
international NGOs, their representatives were more aware of the reality of the DFF, viz.,
that on a day to day basis the DFF consisted of expatriate technical experts attached to aid
projects and that it wasn’t nearly as influential as the forum’s name would imply. Moreover,
for Indonesian NGOs the core members of the DFF were actually past and potential funders
since international projects often contracted work to or provided grants to Indonesian
organizations. International NGOs, however, by and large seek funding in donor metropoles,
e.g., USAID in Washington D.C. (and not the USAID-funded project implemented in
Indonesia).
Further, international NGO representatives had a strong understanding of the history
of the relationship between the Indonesian government and international donor community
with respect to forestry issues, and thus understood the limitations of donor influence on the
government, whether it be due to the lack of political will on the part of the government or
inconsistent, contradictory initiatives within donor agencies themselves. Also, international
NGO representatives in Indonesia were occupied with their own set of issues in dealing with
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the Indonesian government and home offices of international donors from which they
secured funding. Further, the arbitrary criteria by which organizations could or could not
participate in the DFF did nothing to ingratiate members of the DFF with the international
NGO community in Indonesia. That said, recognizing the potential influence that the DFF
could have, a number of international NGO representatives did engage with the DFF when
thet were asked, e.g. analyzing forest industry debt in Indonesia. Moreover, international
NGOs frequently worked with individual members of the core group of the DFF in the
capacity of their respective projects.
VI. Summary of Analysis of Perceptions and Conclusions
In this section, I summarize the analytical points that come out of the preceding
discussions of the perceptions of various actors who engage and/or are involved in the DFF.
In doing so, I highlight the role of the DFF as a broker or translator between various
institutions involved in aid-related forestry interventions and the master metaphor of forest
reform in Indonesia. While created by the international donor community in the context of
the February 2000 CGI, the DFF in its day-to-day functioning does not consist of donor
representatives, but rather technical experts tied to bilateral or multilateral projects. The DFF
has no legal standing, charter or by-laws, and is essentially an informal forum. The ambiguity
in the status and position of the DFF is potentially what gives it influence and makes the DFF
a resource to those actors it attempts to engage, albeit in a fragile and tenuous fashion.
Further, the core members of the DFF are well placed to play the role of brokers since they
have a strong understanding of the institutional logic and practices of both GOI agencies and
donor agencies and are in varying degrees part of both sets of institutions. Indeed, the core
members of the DFF craft the annual CGI meeting donor statement -- the donors’ articulation
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of the master metaphor of forestry reform – in part through consultations and negotiations
with government and donor agencies. The core members of the DFF and the DFF itself
possess the protean qualities important to brokering between institutions, viz., an ability to
exploit an ambiguous insider/outsider position and speak to, or resonate with, actors with
disparate interests (Mosse 2005). Mosse (2005: 123-124) notes the following about
brokering in the context of the rural development project he participated in and analyzes:
“managing relations across boundaries of organizational culture required skillful
mediators, multilingual in the discourse of village, project office, corporate
bureaucracy and donor policy and able to translate between different rationalities and
expectations. Success as a manager-broker meant having the type of
personality….‘to be a blade of grass blowing in the wind’ listening to what the
powerful forces want and delivering.”
Although the DFF and its core members were partially successful in its brokering
role, particularly in the context of the annual CGI statements, the DFF was unable to
cultivate trust between “key individuals in different parts of the system” (Mosse 2005: 125)
and ultimately could not deliver as brokers. Thus, the DFF was to a great extent failed by the
donor community and central government agencies, and the ambiguous position of the DFF
became a liability, instead of being an asset to its functioning as a broker.
Although maintaining forestry on the CGI agenda and master metaphor of forest
reform in Indonesia, the “usual suspects” or core group of the DFF agree that the DFF has
not fulfilled its mandate to monitor the achievement of agreed upon commitments and to
coordinate among donors to assist MOF. The cause of this they note is a lack of commitment
from both the donor community and government. Indeed, because of the lack of participation
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on the part of the diplomatic corps and the fact that DFF related work is secondary to their
job descriptions, members of the core group note that their dual identities as technical experts
and de facto donor representatives has debilitated the work of both the DFF and their
respective projects. Other institutional incentives and practices of the core group’s donor
organizations also work against fulfilling the DFF mandate, e.g., donors are accountable and
responsive to their respective institutions and not the DFF, donors do not penalize GOI for
not achieving commitments, coordination of various donor projects comes after individual
projects have been created, and intra-agency coordination is often lacking.
The core group also perceive a lack of commitment from the government generally
and MOF particularly, noting the lack of inter-agency cooperation within the government as
well as inaction and defensiveness. Indeed, aid projects are implicated in the power struggles
between central government agencies as well as between the central and local governments.
Central government officials themselves acknowledge that the government agencies are
presently incapable of and/or unwilling to coordinate among themselves as well as aid-
funded projects. While acknowledging the lack of inter-agency cooperation, the MOF
in particular has been disappointed by and critical of the DFF because of its inability to be
MOF’s “voice” (swara) to the international community, or in other words, explaining to the
international community that MOF should not be blamed for the forestry crisis in Indonesia.
Since the DFF did not fulfill this expectation, senior MOF officials failed to support or
validate the DFF. In the context of the post-Suharto differentiation of the state, the DFF’s
inability to support MOF’s voice or position resulted in MOF not supporting the DFF and
indeed being critical of it. Senior MOF officials observed that expatriate technical experts
who are seconded to the Ministry are de facto donor representatives in the DFF, thereby
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making the institutional position of these technical experts unclear. Additionally, from the
perspective of senior MOF officials, several technical experts have dramatically overstepped
their authority by promoting initiatives that these Ministry officials perceive as explicitly
undermining the Ministry. From the perspective of these officials, technical experts should be
understanding of and assisting the Ministry and by implication not critical of the Ministry.
Donor representatives have also by and large failed to support the DFF. They are
hesitant to continue or initiate engagement in the forestry sector because of a perceived lack
of progress and lack of commitment from GOI. They are aware that the lack of diplomatic
participation in the DFF is problematic and an obstacle to its effectiveness, yet are unwilling
to commit further then they already have. Further, the core members of the DFF have been
unable to convince them otherwise. The lack of donor participation in the DFF is indicative
of a broader set of institutional arrangements that work against a more concerted effort.
Specifically, the DFF does not include all donors involved in forestry; donors engaged in
forestry do not sufficiently communicate intersectoral aspects to other donors; and intra-
agency communication is often lacking.
The institutional reality of the DFF and incentives and practices of donors frustrate
Indonesian NGOs, who perceive the DFF as consisting of donors and who assume that
donors have significant influence over the policies and practices of GOI. Thus, they are
critical of and disappointed with the DFF, particularly since they perceive a shared
understanding of problems and solutions in the forestry sector. That said, it is precisely
because of the assumed influence of donors and the DFF that Indonesian NGOs continue to
engage them.
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CHAPTER 8
CIFOR RESEARCHERS’ EXPERIENCES PRACTICING SCIENCE
I. Introduction
In this chapter, I return to CIFOR to discuss and analyze the experiences and
practices of CIFOR managers and researchers with respect to operationalizing fundamental
elements of the institution’s mandate, viz., (1) to conduct impact oriented science, (2) to
establish and implement research priorities and (3) to work in partnership with other
institutions and build their capacity. I discuss how scientists talk about the difference
between the real and ideal world of CIFOR, including the landscape of institutions that
CIFOR is part of, and how they negotiate or manage these differences1. In doing so, I
examine the institutional culture and structure that frame CIFOR’s researchers and managers’
engagement with the broader political-economic dynamics and institutional landscape related
to forestry and forest dependent people in Indonesia and elsewhere. In this chapter, I switch
vantage points to understand from an intra-institutional perspective the logics, practices and
relationships discussed in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 specifically and in other chapters
generally. I place this chapter after the ones that examine the political-economic dynamics
and institutional landscape of aid because that context is necessary to make sense of CIFOR
scientists’ everyday practices.
1 CIFOR scientists and management are not of one voice and do not constitute a monolithic entity. CIFOR is replete with factions, alliances, cultural differences, personal histories, personalities, and power differences. These dynamics are included in the following discussion to the extent that they are explanatory. In noting the diversity of views and positions within CIFOR, I would like to emphasize that generalizations about how CIFOR scientists and management talk about and perceive the various elements of CIFOR’s mandate discussed in this chapter should not be taken as the “CIFOR position.” The issues discussed in this chapter emerged out of a clustering of comments made by CIFOR scientists and management and are ongoing debates within the organization. They are common substantive issues that CIFOR scientists and management raised in conversations with me and are focal points of debate within the institution.
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II. Description and Analysis of CIFOR Researchers’ Experiences
A. Impact-oriented Science
In this section of the chapter I discuss how CIFOR scientists talk about putting into
practice the mandate to carry out “impact-oriented science.” In doing so, I explain how
“impact-oriented science” has been discussed at the institutional level and how CIFOR
scientists have attempted to implement this mandate, highlighting how their experiences
differ from the ideal or theory.
1. Evolution of the idea of “impact-oriented science” at CIFOR
In conceiving of a CGIAR Center with the dual mandate to conserve tropical forests
and improve local livelihoods, CIFOR’s creators had a particular vision of what would make
the institution unique and justifiable, viz., “international public goods.” CIFOR’s creators
“believed that in tropical forestry, there were many ‘international public goods’ (that
is, research which provides very substantial benefits overall, but which would not be
worthwhile from the viewpoint of a single country or organization that had to pay all
the costs, but received only a fraction of the international benefits); these need and
deserve international funding.”
(http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/docs/_ref/aboutcifor/strategy/different.htm, emphases
added).
In theory, these international public goods were to operate in the classic CGIAR paradigm of
increasing germplasm productivity through research:
“Like other CGIAR Centers, CIFOR’s focus will be on strategic and applied research.
In the context of CIFOR’s global mission, strategic research aims to produce a better
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understanding of natural and social processes related to internationally significant
problems of forest use, development or degradation….The problem-solving nature of
CIFOR’s research approach makes it inherently applied…It will be important to
clearly distinguish strategic and applied research from both basic and adaptive
approaches. Adaptive research aims to modify human approaches and prototype
technologies to solve specific problems of people at specific locations. Adaptive
research is a major focus of CIFOR’s partners in the forest research institutes of
tropical developing countries. CIFOR itself does not have a comparative advantage in
this area…Effective research partnerships will be the principal means through which
the policy and technology outputs of strategic research will be locally adapted and
evaluated” (http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/docs/_ref/aboutcifor/strategy/different.htm).
The IPG paradigm articulated in these two quotations assumes a linear model in
which research is the basis to formulate policy, which then is operationalized in practice. The
quintessential example of this paradigm is the Green Revolution, in which High-Yield
Varieties (HYVs) of rice were developed and promoted by the International Rice Research
Institute (IRRI) during the 1960s and 1970s. IRRI, one of earliest CGIAR centers, worked
with developing country governments and their National Agricultural Research Centers to
conduct research on and disseminate a package of technologies, including seeds, fertilizers,
and pesticides, to farmers in developing countries. The IPGs in this case were the products
and technologies developed by IRRI in collaboration with their developing country partners.
In CIFOR’s case, the IPG paradigm was expected to be articulated through CIFOR’s
collaboration with national level institutions such as Forestry Departments in multiple
countries to design and implement a research protocol to address a common problem. CIFOR
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would supervise the implementation of this protocol by national or local level partners, who
would ostensibly gain capacity in this relationship. The added value or comparative
advantage of CIFOR would be producing a global level synthesis or comparison, from which
recommendations would be derived, and then adopted by national/local level institutions –
CIFOR’s global level, synthetic research would be the IPG. The IPG paradigm also assumes
that CIFOR’s global, synthetic research and recommendations would be applicable to those
institutions or countries that did not participate in CIFOR-led research. The assumption is
that “good research will sell itself.” CIFOR scientists note that the international level and
global agenda foci are the only things that justify CIFOR’s expensive existence. CIFOR
scientists are in consensus that CIFOR should not be doing what regional, national and local
institutions do, since CIFOR would be duplicating efforts at much higher costs.
As this dissertation has attempted to demonstrate however, the reality of the
relationship between research, policy and practice is dramatically different from that
envisioned in the IPG paradigm. As I have examined and elaborated on in previous chapters
of this dissertation, the relationship between knowledge, policy and practice is not
straightforward in the least, particularly when research results advocate for changes in
relations of power. In this dissertation, I have attempted to demonstrate that rigorous, high
quality research on forestry related issues in Indonesia has not been adopted and blatantly
ignored by those in decision-making positions because those individuals stand to lose out
should policies based on this research be developed and implemented. In the case of the
Green Revolution, IRRI worked closely with developing country governments, and their
research products and technologies benefited and profited these governments and relevant
private sector industries. It is in part because Green Revolution technologies did not threaten
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existing relations of power that the IPG paradigm played out so smoothly in practice. Much
of what CIFOR’s research concludes, however, threatens those in power.
In the early years of CIFOR, the issue of IPGs as the vehicle for impact was assumed
as unproblematic and not prioritized in discussions, since the organization was focused on
conducting research to establish its scientific credibility as a global authority on tropical
forests. These were relatively halcyon days of strong core funding, which meant that research
was not necessarily demand-driven, and impact was a non-issue since CIFOR was at its
inception. The idea of “good research will sell itself” figured prominently in CIFOR, and
while there was talk of impact, it was considered by and large the responsibility of other
institutions. In the words of one CIFOR scientist, “it was left to organizations like WWF.”
That said, research impact was on the agenda early on at CIFOR and an impact assessment
specialist was hired in 1995/6. This individual, realizing there was no research yet to assess,
focused on CIFOR scientists thinking about “impact pathways” in their research. According
to one CIFOR scientist, however, there was “freedom to ignore it” due to the abundance of
unrestricted funds and the focus on establishing CIFOR’s scientific credibility.
As a 12-year old institution in 2005, CIFOR felt pressure from its donors to
demonstrate impact and influence, and thus CIFOR management required more explicitly
that its researchers demonstrate that their research has had or will have impact or influence.
Although by some scientists’ accounts CIFOR was moving toward a more impact-orientation
as the organization matured, the consensus is that when the current Director General took
office in 2001 impact was pushed to the top of researchers’ list of priorities. The DG’s
prioritization of impact was sparked by several factors: his realization that donors were much
less familiar with CIFOR than expected, the percentage of unrestricted funds had decreased,
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and after nearly 10 years of work CIFOR should be able to demonstrate impact to its donors,
in other words to show that CIFOR was a good investment.
The prioritization of impact has stirred increased debate within CIFOR related to
whom CIFOR is trying to influence, the mechanisms for research to have influence, and,
more broadly, the location of, and links between, CIFOR in the landscape of institutions –
from village to global levels – affecting forests and people living in/around them. Indeed, in
2002 CIFOR devoted its annual science seminar to “Getting Impact-oriented Science” during
which CIFOR scientists discussed these issues. The prioritization of impact-oriented science
has brought out divergent views within CIFOR regarding CIFOR’s purpose and how the
institution should achieve that purpose.
The differing perceptions of how CIFOR can have influence and the debates
regarding “impact-oriented science” are embedded in several factors: First, the institution
does not have a standardized protocol or guideline on how to conduct impact-oriented
research – there has not been an institutionalized paradigm to replace the former one that
assumed that good research would sell itself. Second the explicit calls for impact have not
been accompanied by attendant institutional changes required for this orientation. Third, and
perhaps most significantly, this prioritization has required CIFOR scientists to think more
explicitly about and reflect on their institutional position, the ways that research can have
influence, and the broader landscape within which CIFOR operates, which turns out to be
significantly different from the world assumed in the IPG paradigm discussed above. Indeed,
that several CIFOR scientists noted that either before coming to CIFOR or before the explicit
push toward impact-oriented science, they did not think explicitly about impact implies that
they considered the application of research as unproblematic. The assumption among these
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individuals seems to have been that as long as the research was rigorous and relevant, it
would be used or adopted.
2. Researchers’ experiences and thoughts on implementing “impact-oriented science”
This portion of the section details the reflections and perceptions of CIFOR scientists
with respect to the “impact-oriented science” mandate based on how they have experienced
attempting to put that mandate into practice.
a. Nature, Timing and Timeframes of Research
In reflecting on the practice of impact-oriented science, some scientists noted that the
nature, timing and time frame of research differ from and/or works against influencing
donors and development agencies. With respect to the nature of research, a few scientists
observed that research should have a certain degree of uncertainty in terms of answers
(otherwise there’s no point in conducting the research), whereas impacts are more likely
where research results have a degree of certainty. One scientist commented with respect to
the link between research and impact that “if you know the answer it’s not research, yet if
you don’t know the answer, you can’t strategize about follow-up extension [or in other
words, impact].” CIFOR scientists are highlighting a perceived tension between research and
impact. The perceived tension between producing versus applying knowledge centering
around certainty is connected to another perceived dilemma, viz., management versus
science. For some CIFOR scientists the explicit push for impact has translated in practice
into overly bureaucratic managing, planning and strategizing in CIFOR that, in the words of
one scientist, “blunts creativity” that is part of what makes research exciting in the first place.
This scientist commented that the “most exciting research is the riskiest, but [acknowledges it
is] difficult to manage.” Similarly, another scientist evoked the notion of craft when talking
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about research, emphasizing curiosity and passion and that managing for impact can at times
work against that.
Several scientists also noted that research requires a relatively long period (5-10
years), unless the research is directly tied to monitoring and evaluation of an intervention,
and that donor, conservation and development agencies’ interests and priorities shift within a
faster cycle than that of research. One scientist commented that the process of finding a
research topic, securing a donor to fund it, and producing an output “takes a decade.”
Another CIFOR scientist gave the following example: After the El Nino related fires in
Sumatra and Kalimantan in 1998, donors were eager to fund research on these fires – “fire
was hot.” Yet, the results of these studies were only published in 2003 and “in 2003 no one
talks about fires.” There was little interest in the results, little interest in applying them, and
little interest in funding further research on the topic. According to this individual and
corroborated by others, “development and donor lifecycles are much faster than the research
cycle.” The non-research world moves on and is no longer as interested as they were when
they funded the project.
Another example of asynchronous institutional cycles is a book that was to be written
and published to cap off 10 years of CIFOR scientists’ research on the underlying causes of
deforestation in the tropics. Although many publications were produced during those 10
years, the compendium was never completed or published because the CIFOR scientists
involved in the book read a shift in the donor world in 2001 towards poverty alleviation and
felt that it was necessary for CIFOR to more explicitly engage that shift to access and
influence donor funds. Around this period there was a stronger, more concerted commitment
to poverty alleviation among donors due in part to critiques of the World Bank and IMF. The
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increased focus on poverty alleviation meant raising the efficiency of existing marginal
funds, which caused environmental issues to be merged with others and a decline in donor
attention on forests per se. Thus, the tradeoff was that the book on the underlying causes of
deforestation was never completed because, according to one scientist, the “opportunity cost
of the book was too high” in the context of the “gains for CIFOR and rural communities…by
raising the profile to attention to livelihoods.”
b. Simplification and Translation: Media, Donors and Credibility
1. Audiences
Another set of debates related to practicing “impact-oriented science” at CIFOR has
focused on audiences for CIFOR’s research and the appropriate means to communicate to
those audiences. These debates regarding audience and communication are a subset of the
broader question of how to apply and disseminate research, to make it useful for more direct
agents of change. Many CIFOR scientists have become skeptical of global processes such as
the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) as agents of change due to the lack of tangible
benefits since the Rio Summit in 1992. With respect to international processes related to
forestry, one scientist commented that the evolution of the “IPF to IFF to UNFF”2 was the
“same as a ‘patient alive’ to ‘patient lying down’ to ‘patient comatose.’” In this scientist’s
assessment, UN related processes achieved very little. The expected leverage of these global
forums has not been brought to bear, which has called into question one of the CIFOR’s
assumed audiences and required reflection among CIFOR scientists about mechanisms of
change and the institutional landscape they operate in. Indeed, according to one scientist, “a
sense of shared institutional audience is lacking at CIFOR.” This is not to say, however, that
2 “IPF to IFF to UNFF” refers to the evolution of UN coordinated initiatives related to forestry that grew out of the 1992 Rio Summit. IPF refers to the Intergovernmental Panel on Forests, which was the basis of the Intergovernmental Forum on Forests (IFF). The UNFF refers to the United Nations Forum on Forestry.
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CIFOR has extricated itself from global processes, agendas and meetings. Indeed, CIFOR
representatives frequently participate in these global level forums, but it is equally, if not
more, about maintaining credibility among CIFOR’s peer institutions, rather than the belief
that these global processes can actually effect change.
Within this ongoing debate as to whom CIFOR tries to influence and how, CIFOR
scientists by and large agree on two audiences: the donor and scientific communities. With
respect to the donor community, some CIFOR scientists believe that CIFOR can influence
donor agendas and funding priorities. CIFOR also places a high level of importance on being
accountable to its donors, and conversely, wants to be recognized by donors for past
achievements and future funding possibilities. That said, CIFOR scientists and management
are of the opinion that donors generally read little beyond executive summaries of lengthy
reports and rarely read journal articles in peer-reviewed publications. Indeed, one CIFOR
staff member presented on this precise issue at the 2002 CIFOR Science Seminar, marshaling
testimonials from donor representatives such as “I’ve occasionally read a whole report…an
executive summary and conclusion is a safer bet… we rely a lot on what the Post
[newspaper] and contractors tell us.” With respect to research, this donor noted, “definitely
not! Too hard to read…maybe skim some graphs.” In this same presentation, another donor
representative was quoted as saying “research may be intellectually interesting, but it is of
little relevance to donors” and that “donors want complex issues reduced to a few core
messages, followed by a brief description of the solution and some easily grasped steps on
how to achieve that solution.”
One CIFOR scientist noted that donors send mixed messages. They want to see “bang
for the buck” and want “something tangible,” but if they are presented with a choice between
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a scientific paper demonstrating results based on donor funded research and a volume of
vignettes packaged in an aesthetically pleasing way donors will reach for the latter – “[that]
will be the one the donor will pick up, but it’s not science…donors go for the easy
stuff…they don’t read.” On a related point, another CIFOR scientist noted that donors do not
read impact assessments based on the CGIAR standard of econometric surplus models,
which determine return on investment, but rather donors prefer adoption studies narrating, for
example, who uses or cites CIFOR work. According to this scientist, “adoption studies are
compelling, important for donors and corresponding constituencies….econometric models
are rigorous but late.” An example of this type of CIFOR adoption study is Spilsbury and
Bose’s (2004) analysis of “CIFOR contributions to international forest-related agenda
through its influence on policy documents” of “organizations responsible for major financial
flows” and “key organizations that help shape the global forest agenda” (Spilsbury and Bose
2004: 1)3. These observations about donors are unsurprising in light of the discussions in
earlier chapters of this dissertation, particularly Chapters 6 and 7 that in part demonstrated
that they logics, incentives and practices of donors are driven less by science and research
and more by political-economic expediency.
Recognizing that scientific publications are insufficient to have the desired influence
on the priorities and policies of donors, CIFOR attempts to work within these institutional
realities without losing key research messages. For example, CIFOR regularly sends key
research messages and reports to an assembled list of 500 or so individuals with decision-
making power at key institutions that work on issues related to forests and poverty
3 Through a bibliographic analysis (citations, acknowledgements and author contributions), Spilsbury and Bose (2004: 23) conclude, inter alia, that “use and acknowledgement of CIFOR research findings was widespread among a class of documents that influence both national and international polices and financial flows to forestry initiatives.” See Chapter 4 for a detailed discussion.
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alleviation. Additionally, CIFOR scientists and management spend significant time and
energy on face-to-face meetings with donors, influential government agencies and NGOs to
present and discuss priority issues and research for CIFOR. Further, in 1997 the current DG,
then CIFOR scientist, established the POLEX message, which is “a concise summary of
recent research that has a bearing on forest policy” (CIFOR 2004: 43). The current DG writes
the messages, and since 1997 over 150 POLEX messages “have been posted on CIFOR’s
website and mailed to an ever-increasing subscription list. Almost 17,000 individuals,
including many leading policymakers now receive POLEX” (CIFOR 2004: 43). Messages
are published in English, French, Indonesian, Spanish and Japanese.
Besides the donor community, the other agreed upon audience by CIFOR scientists
and management is the scientific community that contributes to and reads peer-reviewed
journals. The scientific community and peer-reviewed journals give CIFOR its credibility
and authority as a seminal applied research institute on tropical forests and related livelihood
issues. Peer-reviewed journal articles are a proxy for the scientific community’s approval and
legitimacy of CIFOR as impartial, objective, scientific, knowledgeable and authoritative.
That this community’s judgment is taken extremely seriously by CIFOR is evinced, for
example, by the primacy of publishing peer-reviewed journal articles in the performance
contracts of CIFOR scientists. Further, as recently as 2004, CIFOR conducted an analysis of
“citations of CIFOR publications” to examine the details of, for example, where CIFOR’s
work is being published, what percentage is in peer-reviewed publications, who is citing
CIFOR’s work and where, etc. (see Angelsen and Aryal [forthcoming])4. This type of
4 Angelsen is affiliated with both CIFOR and the Agricultural University of Norway. According to their study, in which they used the ISI Web of Science database, referred articles make up 24% of all CIFOR publications, and together with referred books and book chapters, refereed publications constitute 1/3 of all CIFOR publications, which in total is 1,437 (Angelsen and Aryal [forthcoming])..
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analytical stocktaking demonstrates in part the importance of the scientific community to
CIFOR. Further, as discussed in Chapter 5, CIFOR’s hybrid identity as both a research
institute and a member of the international conservation and development practitioner
community allows it to calls for certain changes, based on research, in the practitioner
community that is more acceptable than if they came from a perceived outsider, e.g., an
academic institution not directly involved in conservation and development. While
recognizing the importance of the scientific community and peer-reviewed publications,
CIFOR scientists do not consider this community as very capable of influencing relevant
policies and practices. For this reason, some CIFOR scientists grudgingly acknowledge this
shared audience, feeling that peer reviewed journal articles and the scientific community are
the farthest removed from impact, and thus contradictory to the mandate for “impact-oriented
science.”
Beyond this, there is little if any consensus among CIFOR scientists regarding the
laundry list of other actors as audiences, although each one of the following was mentioned
by one CIFOR scientist or another: local communities, local governments, national
governments, NGOs, and private sector. The lack of consensus on these other possible
audiences reflects ongoing debates at CIFOR regarding the institution’s purposes, positions
and locations in the institutional landscape. While CIFOR scientists recognize there is no
blueprint for research to have influence, this realization has done little to clarify the situation.
2. Communication: Simplification and Credibility
The second issue at core of the research impact, application and dissemination debate
is the forms of communication that CIFOR scientists this are appropriate and effective
vehicles to convey CIFOR’s research to its intended audiences. CIFOR scientists recognize
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that research results need to be “translated,” tailored and packaged specifically to the
audiences that CIFOR would like to influence and that this “translation” by and large means
simplification of research results. The tension for CIFOR scientists is simplifying research
results to communicate them effectively without compromising their integrity. This has
proven difficult for CIFOR. Commenting on the disjuncture between the audiences that
CIFOR tries to reach, one CIFOR scientist noted “scientists love complexity, politicians hate
it.” Another scientist commented that “policymakers ask ‘how much does it cost?’ and
scientists answer ‘it’s complicated.’” These remarks reflect the tension between the need to
simplify to communicate effectively without distorting and potentially calling into question
CIFOR’s credibility.
Figuring prominently in this debate is the increased use of mass media (international
and national newspapers, magazines and to a lesser extent television) to increase the
exposure and influence of CIFOR’s research results and recommendations. Under the
leadership of the current Director General, CIFOR has dramatically increased its use of and
presence in mass media. For example, the explicit focus on communications and mass media
resulted in “over 530 news articles and feature stories [that] referred to CIFOR’s research” in
2004, which exceeded 370 in 2003 and 171 in 2002 (CIFOR 2004). Of the 503 in 2004,
“online media accounted for 221 stories, newspapers for 182, radio for 59, wire services for
28 and television for 20” (CIFOR 2004: 42). Approximately “40 per cent of the media
coverage for 2004 appeared in Indonesian media,” which is unsurprising given CIFOR’s
headquarters is in Indonesia (CIFOR 2004: 42). In addition to national media outlets, e.g.,
Kompas and Tempo in Indonesia, CIFOR’s international media coverage has included the
International Herald Tribune, the Asian Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Economist,
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and Time Magazine. For example, in the first quarter of 2006, there were 134 stories about
CIFOR’s research, with major topics including China and the global market, forests and
floods, and a model forest workshop in Cameroon. Of these 134 stories 31 appeared in
international media, including the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, Associated Press (AP),
Agence France Presse (AFP), Time magazine and the Economist. Nationally media coverage
included Indonesia, Cameroon, the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia and
China5. In addition to increasing awareness of the institution, the rationale for increasing
media exposure of its research is to influence efficiently decision-makers, who are more like
to read the International Herald Tribune than Science, as well as sway public opinion, which
can potentially influence the priorities and agendas of government’s. According to CIFOR,
“A small organization like CIFOR has to get its messages across to policy makers,
opinion leaders and others without spending large amounts of money on
dissemination. If its research is to have an impact, then it must catch the attention of
the institutions and people who really matter. That means getting its publications into
the right places in the right format….Besides publishing books, occasional papers and
monographs, CIFOR seeks to get a wider audience for its research findings by using
the international and national media.” (CIFOR 2004: 37)
With respect to how CIFOR engages the mass media, CIFOR (2004: 43) notes the following:
“‘CIFOR’s strategy is to identify good stories and approach the media directly,
explains CIFOR communications specialist Greg Clough. ‘Once we have gained their
interest we send them the background information they need to pursue the story.’
Clough believes that CIFOR’s media success stems from the fact that it has
developed a reputation for providing interesting news, without being dogmatic. ‘We 5 The figures for 2006 come from an email from CIFOR’s communications specialist.
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have also made an effort to win trust by providing accurate information and helping
journalists identify other sources when we can help, he says” (43).
One of the most effective and frequently noted examples of impact through mass
media at CIFOR is Chris Barr’s research on the financial necessity of two of Indonesia’s
largest pulp and paper conglomerates – at the time carrying USD 15 billion in outstanding
debt -- to clear natural forests due to a shortfall in supply of plantation fiber, which is illegal
in Indonesia. After strategizing with individuals at CIFOR and journalists, in November 2000
Barr placed a story on the Bloomberg Financial Newswire, and within three days the share
price of Asia Pulp and Paper fell 20% on the New York Stock Exchange. In March 2001,
Asia Pulp and Paper defaulted and was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. At a
broader level, Barr’s work was pioneering in that it made financial analysts aware of the
natural resource base as a risk factor to consider when investing in these types of companies.
(http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/docs/_ref/publications/newsonline/31/major_awards.htm)
The Barr case, however, as most at CIFOR acknowledge, is unique and perhaps a
“best case scenario,” but even in this case, some CIFOR researchers question its
effectiveness and appropriateness. For some at CIFOR, this media release was too
confrontational for CIFOR, and they would have preferred CIFOR’s working with those
companies instead of exposing them in the media. This difference of opinion reveals a
difference in how CIFOR should work and CIFOR location in the landscape of forestry
institutions. One CIFOR scientist noted that the Barr article negatively affects CIFOR with
respect to working with the private sector, in Indonesia at least.6 Others question the
6 CIFOR does not have strong history of working with the private sector, but in recent years collaborations between CIFOR and certain companies has increased.
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appropriateness of the media release coming from CIFOR; these scientists perceived it as
advocacy work beyond the scope of CIFOR.
These differing opinions about one of CIFOR’s most effective media events reflect a
more general debate among CIFOR scientists regarding the effectiveness of mass media in
conveying research, and tradeoffs entailed. Even a strong proponent of the use of media for
CIFOR’s research noted “you get in bed with the devil.” CIFOR scientists recognize that
engaging mass media involves trade-offs between effectiveness and efficiency, on the one
hand, and simplification and distortion, on the other. Perceptions vary among CIFOR
scientists with respect to whether these tradeoffs are worth it, which seems to imply a need
for more systematic analysis of the sociology of media and discussion of that within CIFOR.
As one CIFOR scientist noted, “what does it [media] mean for impact? No one knows.”
Some CIFOR scientists are skeptical of mass media’s effectiveness, viz., its ability to
influence agendas and sway public opinion. For example, one CIFOR scientist rhetorically
asked whether I remembered anything I read in the newspaper yesterday, implying that mass
media is transient and ephemeral. The same individual noted that “the only thing you can
say is ‘there’s a lot of media coverage.’” Another noted that media “is important, but not to
convey scientific results…[it is] to reassure the taxpayer that money is not spent in
vain…assure people you’re doing a good job.”
Some CIFOR scientists are also concerned that mass media can simplify and distort
research to such an extent that it calls into question the researcher’s credibility. “Caution”
and “careful” were noted by several scientists. On a related point, one CIFOR scientist noted
that media articles involving CIFOR have angered the Ministry of Forestry in Indonesia,
calling into question CIFOR’s credibility from the Ministry’s perspective. This person, as
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well as others, felt that CIFOR should release media articles with the Ministry or other
partners.
Others, however, perceive the cost-efficiency, wide-distribution and attention
gathering of media as trumping concerns about simplification and credibility. In reflecting on
whether media exposure was worth the tradeoff of complexity being lost, one scientist noted
“yes, because donors and officials are framed by the news…it’s one of many impact
pathways.” With respect to angering powerful actors such as the Ministry, this individual
noted that “backlashes are no problem…[they] deepen discussion.” On a related point,
another CIFOR scientist noted that it is the hubris and elitism of researchers to think their
research cannot be presented in a mass media format. In a conceding manner, another
researcher noted that “for too long, too many institutes had this attitude of the mandarin –
‘we know, we know what’s best.’ This attitude is no longer possible.” These individuals
consider using mass media an obligation of publicly funded researchers.
A concrete example of how opinions vary with respect to CIFOR and its mass media
strategy is the 10-page CIFOR report “Hamburger Connection Fuels Amazon Destruction”
and mass media articles based on the report. The report was timed for release when the
Brazilian government announced the annual deforestation figures in April 2004, but it was
unclear precisely when the Brazilian government would release the figure or what the figure
would be exactly. A team of CIFOR researchers estimated that the figure would be high and
that timing the report with the release of the figure would be an opportunity to explain the
link between the “frightening increase in deforestation and the growth in international
demand for Brazilian beef” (Kaimowitz et al. 2004: 1). It also called “on the international
community to provide urgent assistance” (Kaimowitz et al. 2004: 1). According to one
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CIFOR scientist, this report had a particular agenda, viz., to call attention to international
demand and have the international community decrease consumption of Brazilian beef, and
thus media articles de-emphasized certain other factors such as increased consumption by the
growing middle class in Brazil and the growing demand in former Soviet counties. Given the
time constraints and uncertainties with respect to what the deforestation rate would be and
when it would be released, some of the report results were not fully verified. The report itself
generated some controversy in Brazil, but the real controversy came when the Economist
published an article based on the report in November 2004. The Brazilian government
reacted negatively to CIFOR, and released a rebuttal disputing claims in the Economist
article.
Within CIFOR, the “hamburger report,” as CIFOR scientists commonly referred to
the report and associated events, raised questions regarding the purpose, position and location
of CIFOR in the institutional landscape. Among CIFOR scientists, opinions varied regarding
the “hamburger report’s” effectiveness and whether/how it would affect CIFOR’S credibility.
Some noted that hundreds of articles7 were generated at minimal cost, attention was drawn
and thus it was a huge success, and the simplification was worth it. Others noted that it was a
media hit, but there was no lasting effect. Some were concerned about the lack of scientific
rigor of the report, which calls into question CIFOR’s credibility.
This discussion of how CIFOR researchers have attempted to practice “impact-
oriented research,” and the issues and debates raised in the process, indicate that CIFOR
researchers are dealing on a daily basis with how to make their knowledge authoritative – to
have their research have impact -- in a context that is far removed from the linear IPG model
in which policy and practice are build on “good research.” In the original formulation of 7 Indeed, “over 120 media outlets gave the report extensive coverage” (CIFOR 2004).
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CIFOR and its comparative advantage, viz., IPGs, CIFOR’s knowledge was assumed
authoritative. The idea that CIFOR would have to actively attempt – beyond conducting the
research itself – to make its knowledge authoritative was not taken into consideration.
The world within which CIFOR operates, however, requires that CIFOR make
vigorous attempts to make its research and knowledge authoritative because much of what
CIFOR’s research demonstrates and thus promotes in recommendations runs counter to the
interests of political-economic elites. Thus, for CIFOR’s research to be authoritative, being
“rigorous” or “scientific” are necessary but insufficient. CIFOR’s research must also resonate
with and persuade and compel decision-makers, their constituents and others through media
and other vehicles. Making CIFOR’s research authoritative is a political campaign because,
as Mosse notes (2004: 646), “authoritative interpretations have to be made and sustained
socially.”
B. Priority Setting
In this section of the chapter, I examine how CIFOR scientists and management talk
about and perceive individual, programme and institutional setting of research priorities, as
well the evolution of these research priorities. Two contextual factors at CIFOR are
important to highlight with respect to CIFOR’s structure, culture and priorities. First, when
CIFOR’s leadership changed in 2001, the current Director General8 initiated changes in the
institutional structure of CIFOR. Previously, CIFOR was divided along six projects, with a
senior scientist leading each project; this person was responsible for the management of the
project and supervised and conducted research. When the current DG came into office, the
six project structure was transformed into a three programme structure: (1) Forest
Governance, (2) Forests and Livelihoods and (3) Environmental Services and Sustainable 8 In CIFOR’s history there have been two Director Generals (DGs), Jeffrey Sayer and David Kaimowitz.
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Use of Forests. CIFOR scientists self-selected into programmes. Each programme is led by a
Programme Director, whose responsibilities include coordinating the programme, acting as
key interlocutor between the programme and the external world, and leading fund raising.
The terms of reference for the Programme Directors were not much clearer than this. In
March 2003, three Programme Directors and an Assistant Director General were hired, only
one among them had worked for CIFOR previously.
The rationale for this change, as well as other structural changes in the institution,
was to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of CIFOR’s research, as well as clarify for
both internal and external purposes the similarities, differences and integration of CIFOR’s
multiple research initiatives. According the current DG, it was an act of streamlining and
strengthening the organization in light of scarcer resources and increasing demand from
external stakeholders for impact. There was buy-in from CIFOR staff, and CIFOR’s Board
of Trustees agreed upon these changes.
Second, when the current DG took office, he perceived a potentially serious funding
crisis. This was due to several factors. He was concerned that the strengthening of the Euro
compared to the US dollar would negatively affect CIFOR’s fiscal health since most of
CIFOR’s funding is in US dollars. Also, there was a significant decrease in unrestricted or
core funding, which is not tied to a specific project, from CIFOR’s donors, and thus there
was a need to raise funds from donors through specific projects (restricted money). Further,
in the aftermath of the tragedy on September 11, 2001, it was anticipated that funding for
international forestry related issues would be negatively effected.
The financial crisis did not occur, and quite the opposite has happened. CIFOR’s
annual budget grew from USD 12.5 million in 2001 to almost USD 15 million in 2004, most
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of this growth occurring through project-specific (or restricted) funding. CIFOR also
maintained a critical mass of scientists in its headquarters, while also increasing its presence
in three regional offices in Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Brazil. According to the
current DG, it is this type of growth that has allowed CIFOR to maintain its comparative
advantage. That said, CIFOR scientists’ setting research priorities in this context has
highlighted a series of issues or debates within the institution regarding CIFOR’s relationship
with donors, the balance of scientific disciplines in the institution, and the usefulness of
priority setting exercises.
1. Donor-Driven
Donors figure prominently in discussions about setting research priorities at CIFOR,
whether at the individual, programme or center-wide level, and have become only more so
since the perceived financial crisis, the decrease in unrestricted or core funding9, and the
need for scientists to raise their own salaries through securing funding through projects10.
The single most frequently heard phrase from CIFOR scientists about the CIFOR-donor-
priority setting relationship was “donor-driven.” This was noted as a pejorative. Analogous
comments made by CIFOR scientists included “CIFOR is not setting the agenda,” “we are
prostituting ourselves… because goodwill funding ran out,” “[we are in] danger of being
opportunistic,” and “donors are in the driver’s seat.” It was curious that “donor-driven” was
so pejorative, considering that donors created and sustained CIFOR. For these CIFOR
scientists, the current CIFOR-donor relationship in the context of CIFOR’s research priorities
has been qualitatively different since the perceived financial crisis and push for donor-funded
9 Approximately 50% of CIFOR’s current annual budget is unrestricted, but previously this proportion was higher. 10 The extent that scientists must raise their own salaries varies for every scientist.
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projects. For example, many CIFOR scientists noted that CIFOR is in “fire-fighting mode”
when it comes to submitting project proposals, that there is “crazy pressure to write
proposals,” that CIFOR is chasing small amounts of money and “short-term priorities,” and
that there is a “funding frenzy” with “no strategic thinking.” These perceptions were in part
corroborated in an in-house analysis of CIFOR’s 2003 funding raising efforts. This analysis
noted that 45% of the proposals submitted by one of CIFOR’s three programmes had budgets
less than USD 100,000, and that for the two other programmes the percentage was greater
than 60%, which suggests that CIFOR scientists were expending much effort on small-
budget projects (CIFOR PDU 2003).
On a day-to-day and visceral level, the push to secure funding has meant CIFOR
scientists’ spending much of their time, often at last minute’s notice, to write and submit
funding proposals; this has happened without a decrease in other workload responsibilities.
Some CIFOR scientists commented that the securing of project funds compromised the
quality of research since there is a shortage of CIFOR scientists who can take on the existing
workload, and thus CIFOR must hire consultants, who this person noted “rehash their own
work. You don’t get better work out of them. They just get it in on time.”
The comments about “opportunism” and “no strategic thinking” get at the core
reasons why the CIFOR-donor relationship is perceived negatively. CIFOR scientists
perceive this crisis mode of submitting proposals and securing funding, which has been
ongoing since 2001, as coming at the expense of the integrity of the institution. There a sense
that CIFOR is willing to secure funding for things donors prioritize, but they as individual
scientists and as an institution may not. For example, one scientist noted that CIFOR’s
emphasizing the potential of forests to alleviate poverty is “forced,” while another noted that
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the “discussion on poverty alleviation was too donor driven.” Indeed, many noted that
CIFOR should say “no” more often to donors, and one individual previously at a donor
organization noted that donors respect institutions that say “no.”
This raises the issue of the mission and values of CIFOR as an institution, which is
not as straightforward as previously perceived by CIFOR scientists. One senior scientist
noted that it is no longer clear what the shared mission values are or that they are shared.
Further, CIFOR scientists had expected the Programme Directors to handle most of the fund
raising; indeed, this is in part how CIFOR scientists were convinced of the three programme
structure, according to one senior scientist. CIFOR scientists feel that this expectation has not
been met over a year after they were hired, and thus this added to frustrations.
Additionally, there is a sense among these strong, pejorative comments made by
CIFOR scientists that CIFOR should be influencing donor agendas, but definitively is not.
Yet, on the topic of CIFOR influencing donors agendas, there is a variety of views on
whether this is actually something that CIFOR was created to do. Several scientists, one of
whom was involved in the creation of CIFOR, noted that CIFOR was not established to
influence donor agendas, and that the CGIAR, which created CIFOR and provides 85% of its
funding annually, does not “take direction from CG centers…CG centers [like CIFOR] work
with NARS [National Agricultural Research Institutes] to change national mandates.” In a
similar vein, another scientist noted that the “CG already knew, set priorities.” Further, others
noted a more dialogic, negotiated exchange between CIFOR and its donors. One noted that
CIFOR has “always been donor driven…[and that CIFOR] needs to accommodate…but we
are using donor money in a clever way. Not selling our soul.” For example, one CIFOR
scientist acknowledged that an unlikely donor funded a particular project he was working on
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because the proposal was more technical than the reality of the project, thereby meeting this
donor’s requirements, and thus “both sides got what they wanted,” since the donor needed to
disburse funds. Another scientist noted that CIFOR is “donor driven and influencing
donors…both are true without contracting each other…[reading] corresponding signals.”
From a slightly different perspective, another scientist mentioned that it is not clear whether
CIFOR or donors are the driving force, or who wants the next project, considering donors
must disburse their funds according to an annual budget.
It seems that this dialogic, mediated, negotiated interaction between donors and
CIFOR and the “domestication” or “translation” of various projects by individual researchers
seems under-recognized by scientists who suggest CIFOR is more donor-driven than not, at
least not donor-driven enough for scientists to quit because of some perceived breach of
individual or institutional integrity. That said, there is a strong perception among scientists
that CIFOR’s direction, integration and integrity are unclear and that this is debilitating.
Additionally, much of the frustration about being donor-driven and “funding frenzy” seems
to be due to the large time investments and frequent last-minute nature of preparing and
submitting proposals, often at the direction of a Programme Director or DG.
Although the reasons for this sense of hurriedness are not entirely clear, in part it
seems that individuals at CIFOR became aware of certain opportunities only as deadlines
approached, and staff were requested to shift time and effort to these fund raising efforts.
Moreover, CIFOR has cast its fund raising net more widely, and thus more funding
opportunities are available. CIFOR’s growth has been primarily through project funding,
which has meant an increased number of projects in any given scientist’s work portfolio.
Further, at the time of fieldwork, the division at CIFOR responsible for leading funding
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raising efforts, the Programme Development Unit, was not fully in place, and thus fund
raising efforts at the level of the institution were less systematic and organized.
There are two others factors that help explain the negative view of the CIFOR-donor
relationship with respect to CIFOR’s priority setting. First, much of the fund raising that
CIFOR scientists are required to take on seems to be outside of the programme strategy
planning document that is discussed annually and ostensibly guides each programme.
Second, since 2001, there has been a shift in focus institutionally at CIFOR towards poverty
alleviation and away from a perceived, more balanced mixture of conservation and improved
livelihoods, which makes some scientists uncomfortable. Moreover, this shift has been led by
the current DG and is perceived by scientists as a top-down decision.
In reading donor trends, the current DG among others at CIFOR saw a donor shift
away from forests specifically and the environment generally and towards poverty
alleviation, and decided to capitalize on that shift. The understanding among these scientists
was that the environment and deforestation was the fashion for many donors in the 1990s, but
there had been little tangible progress on the forest and environment issues. Further, there
was stronger, more concerted commitment among donors to poverty alleviation due in part to
critiques of the World Bank and IMF. Thus, the increased focus on poverty alleviation meant
raising the efficiency of existing marginal funds, which caused environmental issues to be
merged with others. Although no one at CIFOR seems to disagree with the importance of
poverty alleviation, some are skeptical of the link between forests and poverty alleviation
and/or that CIFOR’s applied research can contribute to alleviating poverty. Others see it as a
top-down management decision that has come at the expense of other pertinent issues related
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to forests and people, and by association important research disciplines and approaches
relevant to forests and people.
2. Natural and Social Sciences
Closely tied to the perceived shift in institutional emphasis to poverty alleviation,
many CIFOR scientists are concerned with a perceived change in the prioritization of
research agendas and scientific disciplines since the current DG came into office and the
increased demand for scientists to raise funds for both projects and their salaries. Grossly,
there is a perception among CIFOR staff that CIFOR is now dominated by social science at
the expense of the natural sciences. At the 2004 annual CIFOR meeting, it was noted that
two-thirds of CIFOR research staff had natural science backgrounds, but several CIFOR
scientists considered this an obfuscation of the reality at CFIOR. They noted that although
these individuals have natural science backgrounds, most currently conduct socio-economic
research. Further, there was skepticism among CIFOR scientists that those individuals with
natural science backgrounds were in decision-making positions and/or were senior scientists.
Even those CIFOR scientists who believe that the problems related to tropical forests
and improving livelihoods of forest dependent people are primarily political-economic feel
that conservation and production elements have been marginalized. Many scientists perceive
a loss in institutional balance between research on conservation, production and social
science aspects of forests, and in its place CIFOR research has shifted towards economically-
oriented research that targets policy change. Many perceive that institutionally conservation
is much less of a priority at CIFOR and that forest production is virtually non-existent. This,
of course, implies a perceived past of balance among these three elements that constitute
CIFOR research, which is unclear.
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These perceptions are also closely linked to personnel changes within the institution,
particularly in CIFOR headquarters, where the majority of international scientists are based.
From 2001 to 2004, CIFOR lost three expatriate “dirt foresters” for various reasons without
their being replaced. One CIFOR scientist, however, noted that this imbalance is a mis-
perception because it is a headquarters-centric view, and that his programme had recently
hired three natural scientists in CIFOR’s regional offices in Africa.
Further, the strong institutional emphasis on poverty alleviation does not sit
comfortably with several CIFOR scientists who feel that there has been an attendant
marginalization of the non-economic values of forests, e.g., the cultural and spiritual aspects.
One CIFOR scientist also noted discomfort with the poverty alleviation emphasis because it
frames the people who are ostensibly the ultimate beneficiaries of CIFOR’s work in terms of
what they don’t have.
These concerns about the loss of balance between the social and natural sciences and
the loss of balance between production, conservation and social science elements of forests
are revealing in several ways. First, these concerns are revealing in terms of what CIFOR
scientists think an international applied forestry research institute should be doing and how it
should be doing it: It should address problems related to forests and forest dependent people
in a multidisciplinary fashion, a balance of natural and social sciences. It should address in an
integrated fashion the conservation, production and social science elements of these
problems. In essence, this ideal of what CIFOR should do reflected in the comments made by
CIFOR scientists is intimately tied to an imaginary and unproblematized world of
“sustainable development,” where a balance is not only attainable, but effective, and assumes
a linear model of research informing policy and practice.
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As discussed in the previous section on “impact-oriented science” this world of
“sustainable development” is mythical, and only obfuscates the real challenges facing forests,
forests dependent people, and forestry institutions, such as CIFOR. These notions of what
CIFOR should do further imply that some CIFOR scientists, to a certain extent, believe that
the organization should be one step removed from the external world – there should be a
buffer to their everyday practice that allows for and fosters the balance in research
approaches, disciplines and topics, which in the end will lead to sustainable forest
management and improved livelihoods. There seems to be an underlying faith in this largely
mythical world among those concerned that the balance is off at CIFOR. Interestingly, one
CIFOR scientist commented that CIFOR needs more forestry and need to help foresters, but
that “we don’t believe in it,” which implies a loss of faith in this balance between disciplines,
particularly among those who favor the institutional emphasis on political-economic factors.
Second, the concern among CIFOR scientists that the balance of research approaches
and disciplines has shifted too far to the social sciences, economics in particular, is also in
part due to a perceived credibility issue. One CIFOR scientist noted that CIFOR has
credibility among mainstream forestry institutions, and hence CIFOR was an acceptable
interlocutor to bring non-traditional ideas into these traditional forestry institutions, e.g.,
ideas about community forestry. This individual’s concern about the balance in research
disciplines and agendas was partially founded on the concern about the loss of credibility in
the eyes of these traditional institutions, now that CIFOR placed less emphasis on
conservation and production.
Indeed, one CIFOR scientist’s comment that “CIFOR is a forestry institution [and]
should produce forest science [but there is] not much these days” captures the concern about
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the institution’s possible loss of credibility. Another scientist noted that CIFOR is “near the
edge of what we could afford to lose” with respect to natural scientists. This issue of
credibility is intimately tied to an historical trajectory of forestry as a profession: The
profession and discipline was first dominated by the natural sciences that denied the
importance, or sometimes even the existence, of the people that lived in and around them and
that focused on production and yield (see Scott 1998). With time, institutions involved in
forestry came to accept conservation aspects, and at later date, social science aspects. It was,
however, production that was the basis of a forestry institution. There is an origin story about
forestry institutions and the arc of their development that is implied in some of the perceived
concerns of CIFOR scientists. The implication seems to be if an institution does not have a
practicing silviculturalist who can manage forests for production, conservation and
ecosystem services, then it cannot credibly call itself a forestry institution. Implied in this is
that the social sciences should play a supporting role in a forestry institution, and yet they
seem to have taken over.
While this maybe the perception among some CIFOR scientists, according to others
multiple disciplines have always been a priority at CIFOR. According some scientists, the
previous DG, trained as a conservation biologist, recognized the importance of social
sciences and policy research to forests conservation and use and the livelihoods of forest
dependent people. Thus, he hired scientists from multiple disciplines, although was least
keen on anthropologists and the “soft” social sciences. That said, about one-third or halfway
through his tenure as DG from 1993 to 2001, he went from dismissing an adaptive
collaborative approach to forest management where forest dependent people figured centrally
to embracing it and holding it up as one of the key approaches to forest management.
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This concern about research agendas and disciplines in CIFOR reveals a tension
between the natural and social sciences in forestry institutions. From the perspective of social
scientists it’s a success story about natural scientists and foresters “coming around” to the
importance of social science in forest related issues, yet at the same time many scientists,
including social scientists, are concerned with the prospect of social sciences dominating due
to the possible loss of credibility in less “progressive” forestry institutions.
3. Programme Strategies and their Implications
In this section, I describe and analyze how CIFOR scientists and management talk
about and perceive the programme strategy process and documents, and how those are linked
or not to CIFOR’s broader center-wide strategy. Another key element in discussions at
CIFOR about determining research priorities are programme specific strategy meetings,
processes and documents and their links to CIFOR’s center-wide strategy. Annually, each of
CIFOR’s three programmes goes through a process of designing or revising a programme
strategy that ostensibly should guide the programme’s direction for 3-5 years and is linked to
the broader center-wide mid-term plan (MTP) that is a designed as a rolling three year plan.
The participative processes that produce these documents are, in theory, management tools
that guide the programme, assist in planning and communicate to external audiences of the
current and future directions the specific programme and CIFOR. Since the three programme
directors have only been in place since March 2003 and the programmes themselves since
2001/2, at the programme level these processes and documents are relatively recent.
Interestingly, analogous processes and documents existed previously, and CIFOR scientists
and management were involved in those as well.
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CIFOR scientists have little faith in the ability of these documents to actually guide
the programme and individual researcher’s work. Many scientists seem these processes and
documents as administrative exercises that have never worked at CIFOR. As one scientist put
it they are “ritual and cycles of ritual.” Another noted that institutionally “priority setting is
pathetic.” Yet another senior scientist had the question of “how do we set priorities” for the
institution and noted that in their tenure at CIFOR, which started with the previous DG, “now
and then [it has been] seat of the pants funding.” From both the perspectives of Programme
Directors and CIFOR scientists, the best that they hope for are changes at the margins, since
many research initiatives are ongoing, in different periods in the project lifecycle and whose
budgets are strictly regulated. One scientist added that since the scientists write various
portions of the strategy documents, they end up reflecting more what the scientists are
already doing than future directions for the programme.
In an in-house analysis of information flows within CIFOR, a CFIOR research fellow
clearly demonstrated that the link between (1) research projects and their impacts and (2)
programme strategy documents was entirely unclear. According to this individual,
programme strategies had not translated into research projects, and research projects’ impacts
had not informed programme strategies. There seems to be a strong disconnect between
policy and practice. Indeed the perceived lack of usefulness or real implications of these
documents was confirmed by several CIFOR scientists’ comments that they give priority to
their own research interests over the programmes. However, some scientists did note the
usefulness of the process of building and/or revising a programme strategy to foster a sense
of coherence and integrity in the programme.
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It is clear from these comments that the actual guiding ability of these documents
have been marginal, and most scientists who have experienced these processes perceive them
as a “necessary evil” or as perfunctory, administrative burdens that are part of the price of
being a member of the CGIAR and an institution as large as CIFOR. Moreover, given the
reality of fund raising noted by CIFOR scientists in the earlier part of this section, the
leverage of the documents seem extremely limited. They may become even less so as CIFOR
becomes more dependent upon donor funding for specific projects (restricted funding), which
means having to accommodate donor priorities and demands to a greater extent, and thus
greater probability of neglecting these documents. One scientist flatly noted that “believing
that strategies make a difference is self-deception.”
Another set of reasons that these processes and documents are perceived as not useful
is institutional. As noted earlier, they are disconnected from projects on the ground, which
really means they are disconnected from institutional reality and institutional history. The
reason for this is, in part, they are public discourse and management documents – documents
that represent CIFOR and each programme as coherent and progressing rationally from and
into a particular direction. To portray the messy reality of securing funding, implementing
projects, and institutional learning (or lack thereof) would not speak well of CIFOR
management to donors and other external stakeholders. Thus, there is very little learning that
is possible from these processes and documents at the individual, programme and center
levels. At least to a few CIFOR scientists recognize these documents require ex post facto
rationalizations and historical revisions necessary for public consumption/discourse. But for
these scientists the problem arises “if we begin to believe these rationalizations [since] we
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lose our sense of history and lose our possibilities to learn,” implying that the formulation of
these documents and related processes are not opportunities to really learn.
These programme strategies are quintessential examples of Mosse’s notion of policy,
and thus it is unsurprising that they lack any actual guiding ability for future programmatic
direction. Mosse (2004) notes that policy’s primary functions are “to legitimize rather than
orientate practice.” (648) and that “good policy” is “policy which legitimizes and mobilizes
practical support” and is not a good guide to action (663). The role of policy is to provide “an
authoritative framework of interpretation, or a ‘second order rationalization of politically and
economically ordered work routines” (Heyman 1995: 265, cited in Lewis and Mosse 2006:
4). In light of these insights, the disconnect between programme strategy documents and
research project impacts noted earlier is to be expected. This disconnect is precisely the
inherent disjuncture between policy and practice that Mosse and others discuss (Mosse 2004,
2005; Rossi 2004).
These insights also shed light on why scientists participate in these processes. One
reason is that since these documents have historically little institutional leverage, i.e., not
abiding by them does not lead to punishment or reprimand, but not participating in the
process does. Also, it is important to note that scientists feel ownership of the institution and
programme and thus do expend time and energy in these processes. Another related reason
that CIFOR scientists actively participate is perhaps connected to institutional change at
CIFOR and a perception that management – the Programme Directors, the Assistant Director
General and Director General – has become more hierarchical and more bureaucratic.
Scientists are concerned with the possible implementation of top-down, non-process decision
making, and hence, scientists participate in these processes to ensure that should these
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documents be enforced, their interests will not be excluded. In light of the perceived
increased hierarchical, top-down structure of CIFOR, the earlier comment about the dangers
of “believing our own fictions” is a concern that the combination of institutional hierarchy
and management tools such as strategy documents could have negative consequences for
scientists, e.g., increased regulation and control of their activities justified through these
documents.
C. Partnerships and Capacity Building
1. Theory of Partnerships and Capacity Building in CIFOR
In theory, partnerships and capacity building have figured prominently in CIFOR’s
modus operandi from its inception. “Increasing national forestry research capacity” is one of
four main objectives in CIFOR’s constitution
(http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/docs/_ref/aboutcifor/strategy/mission.htm), and one of CIFOR’s
unique traits is
“its commitment to working in collaborative partnerships and in the process
enhancing the capacity of national institutions and researchers to address their own
research needs and to set their own agenda and effectively pursue their own scientific
programmes” (http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/docs/_ref/aboutcifor/strategy/different.htm).
Partnerships are the way that CIFOR operationalizes its unique character as a “Center
without Walls,” a modus operandi that is not “business as usual”
(http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/docs/_ref/aboutcifor/strategy/partnership.htm).
In theory, partnerships and capacity building are glossed over as part of a single
process to achieve impact: “CIFOR’s comparative advantage…is derived from its appeal to
partners…fostering research capacity in developing countries”
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(http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/docs/_ref/aboutcifor/strategy/comparative.htm). Further, in
operationalizing a partnership, in theory, “the conception, execution and delivery of research
must include all partners and should not follow only the agenda set by CIFOR HQ,” and
“joint decision making in a partnership maybe less efficient than direct control by one party,
but we recognize that not only efficiency but eventual empowerment of these partners is
central to this strategy”
(http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/docs/_ref/aboutcifor/strategy/partnership.htm). And indeed, in the
ideal world of CIFOR “true partnership comes through collaboration on mutually agreed
tasks for mutual benefit”
(http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/docs/_ref/aboutcifor/strategy/capacity_building.htm).
2. Reality of Partnerships and Capacity Building
The reality of partnerships and capacity building at CIFOR articulated through the
experiences of its scientists differs substantially from the ideal, while also varying across
individual researchers and context. Consistent across individuals and contexts, however, is
the perception that CIFOR is not very good at it and more often than not pays lip service
rather than supporting and encouraging it. Further, partnerships and capacity building are not
as straightforward as presented in the ideal in the context of scientists’ incentive to produce
high quality research products.
One instructive example is the partnership and capacity building relationship between
CIFOR and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry’s Division of Forestry Research and
Development (FORDA), which is ostensibly a key CIFOR partner. One senior Indonesian
scientist who was involved in discussions at the time of Indonesia’s bid to host CIFOR
mentioned that the Ministry had wanted to host CIFOR not only for the political
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encouragement and legitimacy, but also for career, partnership and capacity building
purposes. The Ministry anticipated a relationship analogous to IRRI in the Philippines where,
according to this Indonesian scientist, at least 60% of staff were Filipinos. Thus, the Ministry
saw CIFOR not only as a vehicle for legitimacy, but also as an opportunity for Indonesian
foresters and scientists. And, indeed on paper it would seem to be a natural pairing.
The practice has been considerably different, with the partnership often non-existent
or strained in practice. One CIFOR researcher noted “FORDA is a weight around our necks.”
Further, with the increased focus on political-economic issues at CIFOR, senior officials in
the Ministry note that CIFOR opposes the Ministry, not “contributing to the Republic.” And
indeed, on several occasions the Ministry has not only expressed its unhappiness with
CIFOR, but also reprimanded CIFOR. According to senior officials in the Ministry and
FORDA, CIFOR’s research should not be critical of the Ministry, particularly in public. For
FORDA what is considered acceptable research is research that “backstops” or justifies the
policies of the Ministry. Hence, research that challenges the Ministry’s position and policies
is referred to as advocacy, which for the Ministry is mutually exclusive from research.
FORDA and CIFOR also have different notions of what research is and the boundaries of
research. For example, FORDA finds action research unacceptable; from FORDA’s
perspective it is not research, it is extension. Further, CIFOR and FORDA are both mired in
their own bureaucratic procedures, which makes institutional partnering difficult, and indeed
both parties acknowledge the lack of incentives to institutionalize the partnership. At one
meeting between CIFOR and FORDA in January 2003 regarding improved collaboration, a
senior FORDA researcher openly stated that they had these precise meetings annually, and
progress was never made. He noted that, for example, FORDA had promised CIFOR a list of
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FORDA publications several years ago, but did not even deliver on that. This researcher was
retiring the next day.
One CIFOR scientist who de facto became the interlocutor between CIFOR and
FORDA noted that indeed the partnership is mostly on paper because, inter alia, a
framework for collaboration did not exist. Further, he noted that the massive difference in
salary – 10 to 1 according to him – between CIFOR expatriate scientists and Indonesian civil
servants did little to incentivize FORDA scientists to work in partnership with CIFOR.
A few CIFOR scientists, however, are recognized by CIFOR and FORDA as having
established meaningful research partnerships. One CIFOR scientist in particular noted that
she initiated the relationship with FORDA over a two year period, presenting research at
annual FORDA meetings. After introducing herself and her research to FORDA, she built
relationships before any specific proposal was on the horizon. When a possible research
proposal opportunity presented itself, she worked with specific individuals at FORDA to
develop the proposal and to navigate the bureaucratic maze of FORDA to ensure the
individuals at FORDA she had worked with received permission to work on the project from
their superiors. She noted that the
“CIFOR person must be patient…the transaction cost is high…[we] must go to
FORDA…we must make time…people at CIFOR tend not to make the time…[and]
CIFOR should be more sensitive regarding issues that the government, NGOs and
communities are dealing with.”
The FORDA-CIFOR partnership illustrates the multiple constraints that partnerships
and capacity building place upon CIFOR researchers and their partners, and also exemplifies
how those constraints are navigated. There several key analytical points. First, much works
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against institutional partnerships or capacity building because of the ideological,
epistemological and bureaucratic differences. However, given little choice but to work in
partnership because of its mandate, CIFOR as an institution tends to these institutional
partnerships in an ad hoc basis, limiting investments, whether time, energy or funds.
Second, at the level of the individual, much also works against forming meaningful
partnerships due to the “high transaction” costs perceived by CIFOR scientists, and thus
many are only willing to invest small amounts of time and energy, since often the payoff is
not worth the time and energy, and also because at the institutional level partnerships are not
as rewarded or recognized as other accomplishments. Indeed many CIFOR scientists noted
that often partnerships are really sub-contracting, which translates into contracting out
specific tasks without any pretenses of capacity building. At the institutional level this is not
reprimanded since it often means more efficient delivery of research products, which is
highly recognized and rewarded. Thus, in the case of the CIFOR scientist who has
established a good partnership with FORDA, this individual perceives she is working against
certain strong professional incentives valued by CIFOR.
Third, partnerships and capacity building often require technical skills, as well as
“soft” skills and the willingness to use them, such as cultural understanding, patience,
process activities and frequent face-to-face meetings that often do not have immediate
payoff. Although some CIFOR scientists have and/or are willing to use one or both sets of
skills, some do not and/or are not willing to prioritize them because other institutional
priorities take precedence. Indeed, several CIFOR scientists noted that the institutional
incentives are quite the opposite, although there is institutional incentive to call something a
partnership or capacity building.
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Comments made by CIFOR scientists, beyond the CIFOR-FORDA example, support
these analytical points. Most CIFOR researchers have clear understandings of what
partnerships and capacity building entail, but there are many serious doubts about whether
this is or should be one of CIFOR’s main objectives. Most scientists agree that partnerships
and capacity building require substantial time investments and some financial investments
since they are about building relationships, finding common interests on multiple fronts,
meeting with people face-to-face, cross cultural understanding and working intensively with
a relatively small group of people. According to one scientist, it is about embedding each
other in each other’s problems. There is also agreement that particularly the time investments
are difficult for CIFOR scientists.
CIFOR scientists also differentiate between partners and those that require or want
capacity building in terms of power or status, or the resources that each contributes. Several
noted that with capacity building there is a power relationship where CIFOR is the bearer of
resources, whereas with partners it’s more of an equitable relationship in which both parties
bring resources, and there can be lateral capacity building. Further, several considered that
capacity building as a goal as patronizing and irrational since it assumes that CIFOR is the
bearer of expertise that its “partners” need.
Scientists question CIFOR’s role in capacity building. Several noted that it was not
CIFOR’s main line of business, that is was a footnote, and/or that that CIFOR did not have
the skills or appropriate people to conduct it. On this latter point, many scientists noted they
were not hired based on their capacity building skills, but rather their publications.
On a related point, many scientists commented that what is called partnerships is
more often sub-contracting where CIFOR is a broker to conduct or coordinate research as
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efficiently as possible, and much of what is called capacity building is at best a byproduct of
research and at worst in the eye of the beholder, who is “tempted to call all things capacity
building that are not.”
For one senior scientist, this disconnect between theory and reality is unsurprising
given that at the time CIFOR’s key objectives or goals were established, “they were not
discussed and thought about with respect to weighing or role of each relative to each other.”
That said, capacity building is still one of CIFOR’s main objectives, but it is the one most
frequently sidelined and allowed to be sidelined by the institution. As one scientist noted
about partnerships and capacity building, they are a “little stone we have in our shoe….a
democratic sword hanging over our heads…moral obligations to have it in our basket.”
3. Perception of Tradeoffs and Institutional Incentives
CIFOR scientists often perceive partnerships and capacity building as a tradeoff with
producing high quality research and efficiency, both of which are stronger institutional
priorities at CIFOR. Repeatedly, CIFOR scientists stressed that it was publications that
counted, although a few who have had significant media coverage did not feel the pressure of
having to produce scientific publications.
Thus, partnerships in general and capacity building specifically are consistently lower
priorities. For example, one scientist noted that going out and discussing possible projects
with possible partners means time not writing scientific publications, which from an
institutional incentive perspective and the perspective of a scientist’s career has higher
priority. Moreover this individual noted that there is often not a budget to initiate and explore
these possible partnerships, which is an additional incentive not to do so, at least until there is
a project tangibly in hand, which then often translates into finding partners hastily and not
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having a sense of ownership of the project on their part. It is a logic that works against
partnerships in the ideal sense.
Another scientist related that for one project he was involved in, the key criteria for
choosing partners was to minimize the cost of case studies and thus partners with the most
data and/or most expertise were chosen. Capacity building was not a specific objective of the
project. In this case as in others, capacity building and high quality research were perceived
as mutually exclusive due to the institutional incentive of efficiency. An example came from
one senior scientist who, on the subject of partners and capacity building, noted that an
article submitted by CIFOR researchers and 30 of their national level partners to a high
profile peer-reviewed journal was rejected, in part, because the article required so many
compromises to make it acceptable to all the authors. Whether it would have changed the fate
of the article or not is questionable, but he noted that if authorship had been limited to the
two principal CIFOR researchers, it would have been stronger. Also, it would have been
better tailored to the audience of journal since many national level partners have much less
interest and incentive in publishing peer-reviewed journal articles. With respect to transaction
costs, he also noted that to even obtain the signature of the 30 authors, which the journal
required, took three to four months.
Moreover, from the perspective of several scientists, capacity building is a high risk
investment because of the uncertainties surrounding the recipients of capacity building
activities – it can be “hit or miss” because capacity building assumes a certain statis or
trajectory of the recipient. One scientist noted that although she invests a lot on capacity
building of local government partners in Indonesia, she is uncertain whether it will have any
impact due to the likely changes in positions of government officials. And although capacity
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building should ostensibly be at the institutional level to ensure that even if an individual
leaves an office, the position will still have strengthened capacity, in reality this is not the
case because of the difficult institutional changes it requires.
The requirement that CIFOR scientists produce high quality scientific products
maintains higher priority. As one scientist noted, and many other scientists’ comments
corroborate, “if you want to do well you can drop capacity building” in terms of one’s career
at CIFOR or in other research-oriented organizations. Another scientist noted that “[you are]
not punished for not doing it [and] it doesn’t count if you do do it.” This further substantiates
the perception among scientists that they and CIFOR are ultimately “judged on science.”
Yet there is an understanding and perhaps even struggle that the dissonance between
the real and ideal and how CIFOR scientists must navigate it is problematic, particularly with
respect to the institutional incentive to be efficient. One senior scientist commented, “if we
talk ‘cost-effective,’ we stop talking Africa – this is not the point [of CIFOR],” meaning that
efficiency should not be the sole the metric for CIFOR to determine whether they should
work on a certain issue or certain region. Similarly, another scientist acknowledged that “in
the longer run, capacity building is the most meaningful.” The issue of the longer run seems
important here because as far as incentives and investments, most are seen in a shorter time
horizon.
CIFOR scientists noted that fundamental changes in institutional incentives are
required if partnerships and capacity building are to be taken seriously. For example, there
needs to time and budget allocation for researchers to carry out partnerships and capacity
building, and perhaps even a separate capacity building unit, since many researchers
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acknowledge the do not have the skills11. CIFOR scientists noted that in their hiring
interviews, capacity building was not a criteria. Capacity building needs to be
institutionalized, e.g., integrated and weighed heavily in the annual performance contracts of
researchers.
The institutional incentives that work against partnerships and capacity building in
CIFOR are, of course, part of a much broader constellation of institutions and incentives. In
other words, the problems and solutions regarding partnerships and capacity building are not
bounded within the confines of CIFOR, but rather require systemic change in the broader
landscape of institutions. CIFOR’s mixed messages, contradictory incentives and hidden
transcripts only reflect the mixed messages, contradictory incentives and hidden transcripts
of the broader system of which it is a part. Further, it is not merely about whether funds are
available or not since, for example, several scientists could point to large tranches of funding
specifically for capacity building.
An illuminating example was provided by one expatriate CIFOR scientist who noted
that the donor for a particular project involving national partners in three countries locked in
both his billing cost and time on a given project because that donor agency had strict policy
about minimizing the expatriate time on a project but locking them into particular billing
costs. The consequence in this case was that his allocated time on the project had almost
expired during the first year of a three-year project. The prospects of fostering partnerships
and carrying out capacity building activities look bleak for this project.
In a critique of international forestry aid – published by CIFOR – Persson (2003)
notes the following:
11 Other CGIAR Centers such as ICRAF do have separate capacity building units, but these Centers tend to be much larger.
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“most donors do not have an administration that is suited to assistance in forestry…In
spite of all the talk about ownership and partnership, projects are still very often
donor driven. The bureaucratic systems of most donors are very complicated” (x) and
that “it is quite easy to strengthen the capacity of individuals, but building
institutional capacity is a different issue….need strong commitments from
governments and real ownership of the process” (80).
In a similar vein, Black (2003: 117) notes the following:
“The results oriented, bureaucratic imperatives of many government and donor
agencies effectively nullify the long-term, participatory, and process-oriented
approach to capacity building that is promoted in the discourse. UNICEF notes that
many interventions categorized as ‘capacity building’ are in fact implementation
support measures, which aim simply to improve an organization’s service-delivery
function to better achieve the donor’s mandate (IFCB nd, accessed 2000).”
III. Conclusion
In this chapter, I discussed and analyzed the experiences and practices of CIFOR
managers and researchers with respect to operationalizing fundamental elements of the
institution’s mandate, viz., (1) to conduct impact oriented science, (2) to establish and
implement research priorities and (3) to work in partnership with other institutions and build
their capacity. I discussed how scientists talk about the difference between the real and ideal
world of CIFOR, including the landscape of institutions that CIFOR is part of, and how they
negotiated or managed these differences. In doing so, I examined the institutional culture and
structure that frame CIFOR’s researchers and managers’ engagement with the broader
political-economic dynamics and institutional landscape related to forestry and forest
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dependent people in Indonesia and elsewhere. This discussion of how CIFOR researchers
have attempted to practice “impact-oriented research,” and the issues and debates raised in
the process, indicate that CIFOR researchers are dealing on a daily basis with how to make
their knowledge authoritative – to have their research have impact -- in a context that is far
removed from the linear IPG model in which policy and practice are build on “good
research.” The discussion of priority setting at CIFOR reveals a dialogic, mediated and
negotiated interaction between CIFOR and its donors, as well as “translation” between
project proposal, implementation and reporting. However, the current donor emphasis on
poverty alleviation and CIFOR’s attempts to connect to that agenda have raised concerns
within the institution with respect to the extent to which CIFOR can speak to that agenda
item without compromising the integrity of CIFOR scientists’ interests and practices. Lastly,
the discussion regarding partnerships and capacity building reveals a tension not only
between the incentives of CIFOR and its partners, but also with respect to the incentives of
CIFOR researchers to produce high quality research products versus build the capacity of
local partners.
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CHAPTER 9
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
I. Summary
This dissertation examined the nexus of research, policy and practice from village to
global levels with respect to forest management and local communities’ control over forest
resources and improved local livelihoods in Indonesia. I investigated how problems and
solutions are articulated; how these articulations are transformed in practice; how practices
are translated into knowledge or policy; and how certain interpretations become authoritative.
In doing so, I examined the institutional culture of and relationships between forestry
institutions in Indonesia, highlighting the role of brokers of authority, i.e., how certain actors
become brokers and the social processes involved in brokering across institutions to recruit
support for certain interpretations to become authoritative. In this dissertation, CIFOR and
the DFF were the key interlocutors studied.
With respect to CIFOR, I examined in one analytical frame (1) project plans and
intentions, (2) the context within which activities take place and the relationships between the
different actors engaged in CIFOR’s activities on the ground, and (3) how CIFOR addresses
or represents the difference between plan and outcome to a broader public. In doing so, I
show that although “the coherence of design unravels in the practical unfolding of a project”
(Mosse 2004: 664), CIFOR’s reporting and publishing of unintended outcomes incorporate
this unraveling into an authoritative narrative of prescriptions for CIFOR’s interpretive
community. CIFOR’s articulation of these prescriptions -- which promote an approach to
international conservation and development that is adaptive, flexible and accommodating to
local variation -- through the vehicle of self-critical reflections is essential to legitimizing and
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mobilizing support for them and CIFOR since that rhetorical mode is more palatable to
CIFOR’s interpretive community involved in policy and practice.
I also studied the tension between order and disjuncture in the landscape of aid-
related forestry institutions in Indonesia. More specifically, I examined how the “order” or
“master metaphor” (Mosse 2004, 2005) of reform agreeable to both the international
community and Indonesian government was crafted and maintained by the DFF in its
brokering role. I investigated how this master metaphor evolved through the active
refashioning by both donors and government to incorporate the lack of progress on
commitments. Moreover, I examined the structural dynamics that explain this lack of
progress and the ineffectiveness of aid in Indonesia. In doing so, I revealed the disconnect
between knowledge, policy and practice, as well as how these disjunctures are maintained. I
expanded the use of Mosse’s framework beyond any one given development project and into
the realm of multiple projects, multiple interests and multiple actors, all of whom were
recruited by the DFF to support the master narrative of forest reform.
After contextualizing this study in Chapters 2 and 3, in Chapter 4 I examined
CIFOR’s role in Malinau, and in doing so analyzed CIFOR’s role as an interlocutor or broker
between villagers and the district government. I analyzed the perceptions and relationships
between villagers, district officials and CIFOR in the context of CIFOR’s applied research.
My analysis demonstrates that these relationships and the role of CIFOR’s research are not
straightforward, and require continuous negotiation and compromise. Further, the results of
these negotiations are contingent upon a broad set of factors beyond the formal institutional
relationship between CIFOR, the district government and villagers, and rarely meet actors’
expectations. The significance and role of CIFOR’s research are embedded in the tenuous,
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negotiated articulation of perceived interests and possibilities. It is clear that CIFOR’s
influence, at least at the local level, is more limited than CIFOR and villagers had hoped.
CIFOR’s presence and activities do, however, provide a vehicle of articulation and potential
leverage for the actors the institution engages. These articulations, however, are established
in a mire of contingencies, and thus their formations and consequences are unpredictable.
Indeed, the process of articulation is a fragile one.
Given the importance that CIFOR places on the influence of its research on global
forest policy and the substantial influence it seems to have to date, it is important to examine
how CIFOR addresses the social reality of Malinau when CIFOR writes about its research to
this global audience, which was the focus of Chapter 5. In that chapter, I discussed how
CIFOR represents its experience in Malinau to a broader audience, viz., how it addresses the
disconnects or challenges in publications geared toward its global interpretive communities
and what those representations attempt to achieve among the practitioners and academics
involved in international conservation and development.
CIFOR researchers’ reporting of their local-level research experience in Malinau and
articulating these experiences through a particular self-reflexive mode provide compelling,
persuasive (policy) narratives and prescriptions to their global interpretive community.
Essential to the traction of these narratives and prescriptions is the telling of the challenges
and constraints that CIFOR encountered in Malinau. CIFOR researchers’ first-hand
experience of “being there” lends further legitimacy to its prescriptive comments and
suggestions. In employing this self-reflexive mode, CIFOR attempts to carve out a space for
aid, research, science culture, and conservation and development that underscores the need
for the broader practitioner community to account for and accommodate local variation. The
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emphasis on the need to be adaptive and flexible is unusual for a CGIAR institute (see for
example Marglin 1996), and yet by virtue of being a CGIAR center CIFOR has the
legitimacy and authority to advocate for these changes in the mainstream development
community. CIFOR’s Malinau based publications indicate not only an awareness of the non-
linear and political relationship between research and practice, but also a call to embrace
these dynamics in research and development.
The extent to which these prescriptions will be institutionalized at CIFOR or
elsewhere depends greatly on whether significant institutional changes can take place. There
is potentially a performative aspect to these “lessons learned” in which there are nods of
agreement but the necessary institutional changes are not made.
To examine these issues more closely, in Chapters 6 and 7 I investigated the broader
landscape of aid-related forestry institutions in Indonesia. In Chapter 6, I analyzed how
forestry became a top priority for both international donors and the Indonesian government
and examined how the order or “master metaphor” (Mosse 2004, 2005) of forest reform was
mutually crafted and articulated in official documents. I also analyzed how this master
metaphor evolved through time as the lack of progress on commitments became impossible
to ignore. In doing so, I attempted to show how the master metaphor was maintained by both
donors and the government and incorporated the lack of progress. In attempting to stabilize
the master metaphor in the face of a potentially destabilizing element, viz., the indisputable
lack of progress, both donors and the government refashioned it to include other actors and
factors, which had the effect of keeping the master metaphor viable and justifying continued
engagement. However, the inclusion of other actors and interests to support the master
metaphor also had the opposite effect of further destabilizing it. In other words, as
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responsibility for Indonesia’s forest crisis and lack of progress on reforms were located in the
multiple policies of multiple ministries of multiple countries, support for this interpretation
became more difficult to recruit because it required buy-in from too many diverse interests
and actors.
In chapter 7, I analyzed the relationships and perceptions of actors who engage and/or
are involved in the DFF. I highlighted the role of the DFF as a broker between institutions
involved in aid-related forestry and the master metaphor of forest reform in Indonesia. While
created by the donors, the DFF in its everyday functioning does not consist of donor
representatives, but rather technical experts tied to bilateral or multilateral projects. The DFF
has no legal standing, charter or by-laws, and is essentially an informal forum. DFF’s
ambiguity in status and position is potentially what gives it influence and makes it a resource
for those actors it attempts to engage, albeit in a fragile and tenuous fashion. The core
members of the DFF are well placed to play the role of brokers since they have a strong
understanding of the institutional logic and practices of both government and donor agencies
and are in varying degrees part of both institutions. Indeed, the core members of the DFF
draft the annual CGI meeting donor statement -- the donors’ articulation of the master
metaphor – in part through consultations and negotiations with government and donor
agencies. The core members of the DFF and the DFF itself possess the protean qualities
important to brokering between institutions, viz., an ability to exploit an ambiguous
insider/outsider position and resonate with actors with disparate interests (Mosse 2005).
Although the DFF was partially successful in its brokering role, particularly in the
context of the annual CGI statements, it was unable to continue cultivate trust between “key
individuals in different parts of the system” (Mosse 2005: 125) because as more actors were
378
recruited to support the master metaphor of reform, the DFF could not accommodate the
multiple and disparate interests of these actors. By the December 2003 CGI, the master
metaphor of forest reform had lost the support of many actors; the DFF could no longer
broker the multiple and disparate interests, and hence the master metaphor was not only
destabilized, but also broke down. The DFF was unable to continue to deliver as brokers and
thus was no longer useful to donor and government agencies, which subsequently failed the
DFF resulting in its dissolution in 2004. The DFF became obsolete, and the DFF’s
ambiguous position became a liability instead of an asset to its functioning as a broker.
Although a lack of progress and failure to achieve commitments had previously
become part of the master metaphor of reform, they were necessarily accompanied by a sense
of “striving” -- of hope -- which maintained support for the master metaphor. As it evolved
and more actors and interests were recruited to support the master metaphor, it reached a
point where the disparate interests of the multiple actors could no longer be accommodated
and brokered -- at least by the DFF. The sense of failure and lack of progress came to greatly
outweigh a sense of hope, which is fundamental to the master metaphor since hope involves
“the redefinition of the past and present in terms of an imagined future” (Mosse 2005: 240,
emphases added). Brokering multiple interests and institutions to cultivate a master
metaphor provides this sense of hope and translates reality into an imagined future. The DFF
had been a successful broker until it could no longer articulate a compelling sense of hope
and vision for the future that resonated with all of the actors and their interests.
With this detailed understanding of the institutional landscape, in Chapter 8, I
switched vantage points to an intra-institutional one to analyze the experiences of CIFOR
managers and researchers with respect to (1) the conduct of impact oriented science, (2) the
379
establishment and implementation of research priorities, and (3) partnerships with other
institutions and capacity building. In doing so, I examined the institutional culture and
structure that frame CIFOR scientists’ engagement with the broader political-economic
dynamics and institutional landscape in Indonesia and elsewhere. The discussion of CIFOR
researchers’ practicing “impact-oriented research” indicates that they deal on a daily basis
with how to make their knowledge authoritative – to have their research have impact -- in a
context far removed from the linear model in which policy and practice are built on “good
research.” The discussion of priority setting reveals a dialogic and negotiated interaction
between CIFOR and its donors, as well as translation between project proposal,
implementation and reporting. However, donor emphasis on poverty alleviation and CIFOR’s
attempts to connect to that agenda have raised concerns with respect to the extent to which
CIFOR can speak to that agenda without compromising CIFOR scientists’ interests and
practices.
I placed this intra-institutional chapter after the analysis of the institutional landscape
(Chapters 6 and 7) so that CIFOR’s logic and practices, as well as brokering with institutions
in Indonesia and its global interpretive community would make more sense. For example,
although CIFOR engages the DFF and CGI through strategic collaborations and targeted
articles in national newspapers such as Kompas, it does so in a limited fashion because
CIFOR realizes that they are largely impotent institutions that have been unable to effect the
change CIFOR advocates. As I discussed in Chapters 5 and 8, CIFOR places more emphasis
on articulating with its global interpretive community at the level of donor metropoles, e.g.,
USAID in Washington DC instead of the USAID Indonesia Mission, which from CIFOR’s
perspective has greater likelihood of affecting relevant political-economic dynamics in
380
Indonesia. As discussed in Chapter 8, part of CIFOR’s communication strategy is to
articulate its research findings and recommendations in ways and in media palatable to its
global interpretive community, e.g., articles in the International Herald Tribune and
Economist to influence politicians and their constituencies, as well as in-person meetings
with Ministers of Trade and Industry in Japan and the US that speak to the interests of those
actors.
II. Conclusions
The findings of this dissertation contribute to and expand upon multiple debates in the
academic literature regarding the culture and political economy of knowledge producing
institutions, and the effects of that knowledge at global, national and local levels. Although
the need was articulated over thirty years ago (Nader 1972), institutional ethnographies
generally and ones that deal with international conservation and development specifically are
not yet commonplace1 (Dove 1999b). As I have attempted to demonstrate in this dissertation,
“studying up” yields robust insights and complements existing social science literature that
brings the local and global into one analytical frame. Much of the existing literature does not
illuminate the inner workings of these institutions. More specifically, analyses of
international conservation and development institutions by and large lack a detailed
examination of the agency within and between these institutions – they lack an ethnographic
“thickness” that investigates the actors, logics, motivations and relationships within an
institution. As Cooper and Packard (1997: 28) note, “[i]t is not hard to deconstruct the modes
of discursive power. It is much harder to discover how discourse operates within
institutions.”
1 Notable exceptions are recent ethnographies by Goldman (2005) and Mosse (2005).
381
Carrying out this institutional ethnography allowed me to understand the everyday
social practices and processes by which narratives are fashioned within institutions, how
certain narratives becomes privileged over others, and how they are translated and brokered
to recruit support for them by other actors. In “studying up” I attempted to pry open the black
box of institutional policy and practice (Mosse 2004) and documented what Tsing (2005: 1)
refers to as “friction,” or “the sticky materiality of practical encounters.” In doing so, I
discovered how unintended consequences and failure can be articulated to strengthen
narratives of hope and of development, and moreover, that failure and can be integral to these
master metaphors. In other words, I traced the process by which order is crafted out of a
social reality that is inherently disconnected from, yet related to, these orderings (Lewis and
Mosse 2006).
For example, I analyzed how CIFOR articulated the unintended consequences of its
applied research initiatives in Malinau into data, which were then transformed into “lessons
learned” and recommendations for its global interpretive community. Moreover, I argued that
CIFOR’s “being there” in Malinau was integral to its establishing legitimacy for its
recommendations – it provided CIFOR with an authenticity and expertness. CIFOR’s self-
critical testimonial mode of “being there” cultivated an authoritativeness to justify its
recommendations, which runs counter to much of international development conventional
wisdom.
My analysis of the evolution of the master metaphor of forest reform at the CGI
meetings by the DFF and Indonesian government demonstrated how failure, or a lack of
progress on agreed upon commitments, can be articulated in terms of hope. The master
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metaphor was expanded to include the recruitment of other actors and interests to stabilize it
and maintain a sense of possibility that reform was attainable.
With respect to the linkage of local and global realities, my analysis of CIFOR in
Malinau demonstrated that an international institution not only has less local influence than
the political ecology literature (e.g., Ferguson 1994) would suggest, but also that the position
of these institutions is fragile, negotiated and constrained. I do, however, argue that CIFOR
attempts to engender discursive authority, but that this authority is attempted at the level of
CIFOR’s global interpretive community. My analysis of how CIFOR attempts to have global
influence complements the literature on transformations and articulations of interventions at
the local level (e.g., Tsing 1999a, Li 2000) in that it details how an institution transforms
field realities into institutional prescriptions. My analysis attempted to integrate an
investigation of the interplay between village, district government and CIFOR’s institutional
realities with how CIFOR addresses and represents the differences between plan and practice
to its interpretive community.
With respect to the methodological issues and implications related to “studying up,”
this dissertation offers several insights, the most basic of which is that ethnographic methods,
particularly participant observation, are indeed well suited to addressing how transnational
institutions link with aspects of society such as the state and household, as other scholars
have argued (see Markowitz 2001). Conducting this type of ethnographic research is,
however, challenging for several reasons, perhaps the most pragmatic being that powerful
groups do not appreciate being studied (Dove 1999b, Markowitz 2001, Pierce 1995). This in
part explains the relative lack of ethnographies that “study up.”
Scholars who have written about the experience of “studying up” such as Pierce
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(1995) have emphasized the ethnographer’s positionality as a key methodological tool as
well as theoretical issue. Being aware of, articulating and shifting one’s positionality is
critical to studying up since the relations of power are unclear (Pierce 1995). In carrying out
this dissertation project, I also came to understand the fragile and uncertain qualities in the
articulations of my positionality and research. Since the beginning of my research in 1999,
the extent that I would be able to “study up” and the extent that the practitioner community
would be comfortable with it were entirely unpredictable. My confidence as a researcher to
carry out this project and the comfort of the practitioner community with it have interacted
over the years in such an erratic and shifting fashion that I almost came to expect an element
of unpredictability in the quality of my interactions.
This unpredictability was closely related to the multiple, shifting identities I assumed
during my fieldwork, which were absolutely critical for me to be able to translate across,
indeed broker, multiple institutions and interests. Interestingly, navigating my multiple
positions was the most difficult at CIFOR because the institutional worldview of CIFOR
scientists was too close to my own to be able to accurately and consistently draw boundaries
and gauge to what extent CIFOR would be comfortable with my studying it. Moreover, not
only did my research agenda and representation of it shift over time, but so did CIFOR’s
understanding of it.
One of the key methodological elements of “studying up” is for the ethnographer to
cultivate an insider/outsider position. With respect to being an insider, my collaborating with
CIFOR and engaging other aid-related institutions over the years provided the necessary
access and institutional intimacy. In his institutional ethnography of DFID, Mosse also
discusses how insider status allowed him access, particularly since in these institutions
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“information is a private good rather than a public asset” (Mosse 2005: 11). Critical to
cultivating an insider identity is to be useful to the institution since it is “virtually impossible
to sustain long-term participant observation in the absence of making a practical
contribution” (Mosse 2005:12). On a related point, Mosse (2005: 12) notes something that I
experienced, viz., that development institutions are “less tolerant of research that falls outside
design frameworks, that does not appear to be of practical relevance.” Insider status in itself,
however, is insufficient in “studying up” since it limits “interpretive possibilities” (Mosse
2005: 12). A hybrid position, however, allows the researcher “to engage in ‘participant
destruction,’” wresting one’s “thinking free from prevailing models and means-ends
rationality in order to offer critical insight” (Mosse 2005: 13).
The discussion of multiple positions and a hybrid insider/outsider status raise issues
for current debates regarding the nature of ethnographic research and its audiences. Given
that I was at various times and capacities a member of CIFOR and other practitioner
institutions, I cannot and do not claim my analysis to be objective in the sense of
“suppressing subjectivity” since I was “part of the world described” (Mosse 2004: 666).
Indeed, this dissertation, similar to Mosse’s institutional ethnography, is an “interested
interpretation” whose “objectivity…comes from maximizing the capacity of actors to object
to what is said about them (to raise concerns, insert questions and interpretations) (Latour
2000)” (Mosse 2005: 14). Assuming that the number institutional ethnographies will
increase, it seems important to revisit discussion about who is reading our work or what the
effects of the circulation of our representations are, both of which have received much less
attention that issues of “ethnographic authority” (Dove 199b).
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With respect to the field of science studies, in examining CIFOR, its applied research
initiatives in Malinau and how it represents those experiences as authoritative knowledge, I
found that the boundary between what does and does not constitutes data and science for
CIFOR is much less clear than laboratory or bench sciences, where science and data are
constituted within the confines of a laboratory. In CIFOR’s case, the boundaries of its “lab”
and “science” are emergent properties that are defined through dialogue and negotiation with
both the subjects of its research, e.g., villagers and government officials in Malinau, and
CIFOR’s interpretive community, e.g., international conservation and development
organizations concerned with tropical forests and forest dependent communities.
The shift from laboratory to field sciences is significant because of the great
complexity in contextual factors that exists in field conditions, which is relatively absent in
the laboratory. Hence, an important contribution of this study is an examination of how a
science producing institution elides or addresses that complexity. To this end, my analysis of
CIFOR demonstrates that this variability is addressed by transforming it into data itself.
While variability in a lab or bench science would perhaps be discarded as “noise,” in the case
of CIFOR’s field science, it is precisely the variability that is embraced as “signal.” Pushing
the comparison between lab and field sciences further, I would also surmise that field
sciences such as CIFOR’s require a particular type of work or effort of recruitment to make
its knowledge authoritative and have traction that lab sciences may not. As my analysis of
both CIFOR and the broader landscape of institutions attempted to demonstrate, brokering
and translating interpretations between various actors is not only critical in making
knowledge authoritative, but also must be continuous so that these interpretations can adapt
to changing contexts and speak to different audiences.
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In my analysis of CIFOR’s work in Malinau, an interesting similarity between field
and lab sciences was found in the case of CIFOR’s articulation with the village of Setulang,
which was the one village that did not sell felling rights to its forests and which became the
focus of much of CIFOR’s work. In a sense, Setulang became a model village for CIFOR in
that it contained the elements of forest dependence, village empowerment and community
forest management that are at the heart of CIFOR’s applied research interests. There was
then a “laboratization” of Setulang through CIFOR’s activities there and through that process
“non-project community forestry – and indeed broader society and forest use – are being
imagined as if they were actual or potential projects, and thus depoliticized” (Fairhead and
Leach 2003: 48). In other words, through CIFOR’s articulation with Setulang and CIFOR’s
attention to it through publications and media, Setulang became an ideal type community
forestry village from which lessons can be learned by other, less “ideal” villages.
CIFOR’s “laboratorization” of Setulang transforms the village into something that
science can control and manage, which complements the scholarship on articulations and co-
production between actors and the appropriation of dominant discourses (see for example
Tsing (1999a,1999b, 2000a, 2000b); Moore (2000); Li (1999a, 2000); and Brosius 1997,
Conklin 1997) (see Chapter 2). Much of this literature focuses on how articulations are
crafted in the necessary “room to maneuver” that provides an ambiguity that can be read into
by the actors involved. For example, Tsing (1999a) shows how the existence of a "green"
international development project creates a "field of attraction" that provides local Meratus
Dayak the conceptual space to tap into the globally circulating discourse of the "ecologically
noble savage" (Redford 1990) as a means to assert territorial claims. Tsing’s study as well as
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others to a great extent focuses on a marginalized group’s ability to appropriate a dominant
stereotype or discourse to their benefit.
CIFOR’s “laboratorization” of Setulang provides a detailed perspective from the
other end of the articulation, viz., the development institution, demonstrating what and why
the development agency found compelling about a particular village and its inhabitants. In
the case of CIFOR and Setulang, it was not the exoticism of the ecological noble savage that
interested CIFOR, but rather Setulang’s resonance with the mundane and everyday of
CIFOR’s work, e.g., community forest management, and the willingness of Setulang to
become not only a subject of scientific study but also an ideal type or model village, all of
which CIFOR articulates to its global interpretive community. Setulang’s role as a model
village for CIFOR is informative with respect to how the intimations of pilot projects,
demonstration plots and unproblematic scaling up continue to pervade international
conservation and development thinking, albeit in a landscape of ideas and concepts more
heterogeneous than previously. Through these insights, this dissertation hopes to contribute
to the anthropological and sociological studies of science by examining the nexus of science
and management, and moving from the laboratory sciences, which have been most examined,
to the field sciences and their application, which has been least studied (Franklin 1995).
This dissertation also attempted to expand the use of Mosse’s framework beyond any
one given development project and into the realm of multiple projects, multiple interests and
multiple actors, all of who have formally bought into a particular master narrative of forest
reform in Indonesia that maintains aid and attention. In doing so, I demonstrated that while
the basic principles of his framework of order and disjuncture pertain, the work of brokering
and translating interpretations across multiple actors is more fragile and vulnerable to being
388
failed due to the increased disparate interests of those that brokers attempt to recruit. Indeed,
in the case of the master metaphor of forestry reform, the recruitment of the Indonesian
government to support it was extremely tenuous, particularly considering that the amount of
aid made available through support of reform was marginal compared to the revenue that the
forestry sector generated through its pre-reform practices. It was only through international
political pressure that the government came to support the master metaphor of reform.
Moreover, the recruitment of government was only maintained by through a particular
evolution of the master metaphor that ensured that the revenue generated by the Indonesia’s
forest industry would not be affected. The government refashioned the master metaphor to
displace attention away from the practices and policies related to forestry in Indonesia itself
and towards the consumption of Indonesia’s timber by the global community, as well as
towards broader governance issues in Indonesia. For example, the Ministry of Forestry
placed blame on the Ministry of Trade, and the Ministry of Trade responded by emphasizing
the employment and income from forest industries for Indonesian citizens who already face
economic difficulties. This analysis has highlighted the tension between recruiting as many
supporters as possible to maintain a master metaphor and its breaking down due to the
multiple, disparate interests of those who were recruited to support it. The tension between
recruiting supporters and the breakdown of support due to disparate interests intimates the
robustness or durability of the master metaphor.
With respect to brokering, this dissertation raises the question of whether actors who
become brokers are aware of their role as brokers, or whether an actor’s role as a broker is an
emergent property of the system they are in. In other words, is an actor’s role as a broker
planned or is their role an emergent function of the system? With respect to the DFF, the
389
individuals who came to represent the DFF in everyday practice – the “usual suspects” –
assumed the role of brokers because of institutional expediency and historical contingency.
When the DFF was created, many of its members were actual donors, i.e., they were part of
the diplomatic corps and could speak on behalf of their governments, as opposed to a
contractor or consultant on an aid project. As the DFF and the CGI social system (e.g.,
actors, functions, frequency, locations and topics of meetings, etc.) began to gel, the
diplomatic corps began to disengage from the DFF’s everyday functioning, and the core
group or “usual suspects” came to assume the role of the DFF, as well as the role of brokers.
This was not planned. Indeed, according to the minutes of the first DFF meeting in March
2000, the DFF itself was envisioned to be temporary, lasting only a year. Moreover, if DFF
membership had consisted only of the donor diplomatic corps, the DFF would not have been
a broker – it is precisely because of the ambiguous identity of the “usual suspects” and their
ability to cross institutional boundaries that the DFF was able to become a broker. The usual
suspects becoming the DFF and taking on the role of broker was part of the self-organization
of the system and outside the cognizance of the actors involved.
CIFOR, on the other hand, actively fashioned itself as a broker – brokering across
multiple institutions and disparate interests to establish authoritative interpretations
articulated as science and policy recommendations. From its inception CIFOR was
established with the potential to play the role of the broker, particularly since in it was part of
the CGIAR. The organization is located at the interface of multiple institutional realities and
languages, e.g., government and non-government, villagers “in need of expertise” and “the
experts,” field and office, research and application, social sciences and natural sciences, and
academic and practitioner. CIFOR’s protean qualities made it an ideal candidate to broker
390
authority among the institutions involved in and impacting forest management and the
livelihoods of forest dependent people, and under the leadership of its second Director
General, David Kaimowitz, this role became more central and expanded. Moreover, the
institution’s cognizance of its role as a broker or translator became much more heightening
under the leadership of Kaimowitz, who advanced an institutional agenda to communicate
research-based policy recommendations to a broader audience and in multiple media so that
CIFOR’s research would have more impact. Thus, at its inception CIFOR already possessed
the potential to be a broker, although the awareness of this role among CIFOR scientists and
management was most likely limited at that stage since the institutional focus was on
establishing its legitimacy as a seminal applied research institute. It was under the
directorship of the second Director General that the institution and staff became more aware
of and actively played a brokering role.
391
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