Radical Listening as a Governance Innovation: Integrating Planetary Health and Community‐Led Forest Conservation in Indonesia

ABSTRACT While REDD+ prioritizes carbon sequestration, its narrow focus often overlooks forest‐health linkages critical to community well‐being. This paper examines the holistic model of Health in Harmony (HIH) and Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI), which integrates forest conservation with healthcare through radical listening—a decolonial community engagement approach that centers indigenous expertise and challenges historical injustices. In Indonesian Borneo (2007–2017), Radical Listening revealed that lack of healthcare access was a primary driver of logging. Community‐defined interventions, from livelihood trainings to healthcare‐for‐conservation programs, led to a 70% reduction in forest loss, a 67% drop in infant mortality, and significant reforestation accompanied by the return of endangered wildlife. Recent RL sessions across Papua and West Papua (2021–2024), engaging 346 participants from 29 communities, surfaced context‐specific priorities from healthcare to Indigenous‐led restoration, confirming the replicability of HIH‐ASRI's approach. We argue that Radical Listening functions as a governance innovation that (1) identifies deeper systemic leverage points by diagnosing root causes; (2) enables the design of non‐market, holistic natural climate solutions (NCS) that simultaneously restore ecosystems and advance health equity; and (3) advances procedural and epistemic justice by redistributing authority to indigenous communities. This paper offers a scalable, community‐led framework for reorienting climate and conservation policy toward safeguarding planetary health in Southeast Asia and beyond.