IMPACTS OF SOCIAL FORESTRY ON FARMERS’ REVENUES IN YOGYAKARTA AND LAMPUNG: Economic, Social, and Environmental Perspectives

The persistence of inequality, poverty, and deforestation in Indonesia has forced policy makers to reconsider social forestry as a key policy reform since 2014. There was about 42.25 million hectares of Indonesian forests in which the private firms, mostly owned by conglomerates, have hold and utilised about 95.76% of forest areas. Ironically only 4.14% of the forest areas are given and utilised by either local farmers or Small-Micro Enterprises. The central government during Joko Widodo regime introduced a new paradigm of social forestry that was designed to change the inequality drastically. Forest areas are not only for big players that exploiting forest for wood-based industry. Now the local communities in and around the forest areas are given the license of social forestry, free access to forests and a right to run business from core crops, supplementary crops, animal husbandry, to tourism-based activities. Our paper attempts to explore to what extent economic, social, and environment factors have brought any impacts on farmer’s revenues participating in social forestry? Our analysis pioneers the study of Indonesia’s social forestry development that incorporates economic, social, and environmental perspectives. An explaratory ethnographic study and binary logistic regression model prove to be useful as the basis to integrate the three perspectives. We found that partnership, number of workers, log stealing and core crops are the key predictors of farmers’ revenues. Some economic, social, and environmental variables are insignificant to explain the revenues as the period of implementing social forestry is relatively short. Our findings offer some insights about impacts of social forestry, and hence, suggest some policy recommendation to improve the planning and implementation of social forestry.