Intent and Consequence: Forestry Institutions and Community Management in Indonesia

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation research project will investigate how and why good intentions of forest co-management initiatives in Indonesia lead to unintended consequences. It will examine the institutional culture of and relationships between organizations involved in co-management, and map how these initiatives provide an arena to strengthen, negotiate and contest claims to forest resources at the local level. The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and its co-management initiative in East Kalimantan will be the focal points through which these issues are examined. The study seeks to understand the process of knowledge production about forests and forest dependent communities in Indonesia, as well as the consequences of that knowledge for forest dependent communities. Research objectives are as follows: (1) to document the processes of and identify the factors that affect selecting, implementing and reporting research on forest co-management in Indonesia by CIFOR; (2) to trace the types and flows of information between CIFOR and other actors at local, regional and national levels; (3) to examine how local level actors negotiate and contest rights and claims to forest resources and determine how CIFOR's co-management initiative affects these contestations and negotiations; (4) to compare the consequences of CIFOR's intervention with the initiative's intentions; and (5) to contribute to a broader theoretical understanding of the culture and political economy of institutions that produce knowledge about forests and forest dependent people. Meeting these objectives requires an ethnographic focus on how knowledge is produced, used and transformed. Over a 12-month period, multi-sited research will be conducted in Indonesia, employing the following methods: participant observation, semi-structured and open-ended interviews, and content analysis of documents. Using this set of methods will allow triangulation of interview, observational and documentary data collected from multiple sources, as well as the analysis of the continuities and disjunctures between data sources. On a logistical level, collaborating with CIFOR provides the necessary access to conduct this study successfully. This study will contribute to theoretical debates concerned the culture and political economy of knowledge producing institutions, and the effects of that knowledge at global, national and local levels. Investigating the institutional culture of a forestry institution fills a major gap in the literature on development and environmental institutions. It also contributes to the science studies literature by investigating the nexus of science and management, and moving from the laboratory sciences, which has been most examined, to the field sciences and their application, which has been least studied. While most studies of forestry institution interventions at the village level limit their scope to village level dynamics, this study 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 analyzes the interplay between village and institutional realities. In doing so, it interrogates the assumed boundaries between western knowledge and its non-western subjects and between experts and those ostensibly in need of expertise.