Forest Landscapes and Institutional Transition: Essays Examining Sociopolitical and Forest Cover Change in Indonesia

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes how institutional change affects social-ecological outcomes, with a focus on forests, over the first two decades of Indonesian democracy (1999 to 2016). Canonical research concludes that self-organized groups can employ rules, norms, or behaviors (i.e. institutions) that permit the sustainable management of natural resources for long-term benefit. However, institutions are not static. Periods and places of institutional transition may generate outcomes for people and natural resources that differ drastically over time and space. With sweeping changes in contemporary land cover occurring alongside shifts in governance across the Global South, it is of crucial importance to study institutional transitions and environmental change together. Over the past two decades, Indonesia has experienced two revolutions rarely studied in tandem. The first revolution is political. After the fall of Suharto in 1998, Indonesia transitioned to become the world’s third largest democracy amid a succession of policies that mandate direct, proportionate elections for political positions and increase the decentralization of government authority. The second revolution is environmental. Since Indonesia’s turn toward democracy, it has lost over 15% total tree cover, demonstrating the second greatest loss (24.4 Mha), and the greatest acceleration in tree cover loss, of any tropical nation in the world over the same period. Although research often examines these changes separately, analyzing them in tandem provides insight into how institutional transitions generated outcomes for forests and people in contemporary Indonesia. To examine changes in institutions, forest cover, and livelihoods this dissertation draws on institutional analysis and land systems science. It uses a mixed-methods approach, combining analysis and interpretation of policy content, land cover change, and survey data. Specifically, it provides analysis of national forest-related policy from 1999 to 2016 to determine if and how policy changes reflect national pledges to reduce forest cover loss. Then, it combines remotely sensed land cover change with the Village Census (Sensus Potensi Desa) to measure the impact of decentralization on forest cover loss from 2000 to 2014 using statistical matching and fixed-effect models. Finally, it combines land cover and primary survey data (n=1,304) from the Kerinci-Seblat National Park landscape to understand the legacy of international conservation assistance on forests and communities. This dissertation makes several novel contributions. First, it introduces a new method for policy network visualization and provides the most comprehensive analysis of Indonesian forest-related policy to date. Second, it performs the first analysis of regulatory dispersal on forest cover change through the creation and analysis of a social-ecological dataset with higher spatial and temporal resolution of any other published study. Third, it provides the first study of social-ecological legacies from Indonesia’s largest Integrated Conservation and Development Project. Together, these contributions demonstrate how overarching political trends affect forest-related outcomes in Indonesia. In doing so, it demonstrates the benefits and potential for analyzing institutional change as transitional processes when studying social-ecological outcomes.