3 Navigating Hopeful and Critical Geography Research Research
3.4 Three Sites of Engagement
3.4.1 Case Study 1: The REDD+ Taskforce
The first site of engagement was the REDD+ Taskforce. Instead of a location or place, this site is a national institution that works in a cross-scale way in mainstreaming and normalizing REDD+ as a governmental system. The REDD+ Taskforce was a government owned ad-hoc agency formed to accelerate the development of infrastructure for REDD+’s full implementation (see Chapter 5 for a detailed elaboration). The REDD+ Taskforce was formed through Presidential Decree Number 19/2010 in September 2010 and mandated to carry out its tasks for ten months, which was eventually extended for another two years from July 2011 – June 2013.
The Taskforce was replaced with the new REDD+ Agency that was designed to act as a more permanent institution responsible for the full implementation of REDD+. However, at the beginning of 2014, the Agency merged with the newly formed Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MOEF) under a newly elected political regime. In the rest of this thesis, I used the “REDD+ Taskforce” and “REDD+ Agency” both to refer to the Government of Indonesia’s REDD+ institution. The use of the “Taskforce” mainly refers to the ad-hoc institution that worked from 2010 – 2013. Meanwhile, whenever the term “REDD+ Agency” is employed in the text, it refers to the agency that was formed in September 2013 to replace the Taskforce.
Having chosen the REDD+ Taskforce as a site of engagement, I studied the governmental strategies that the Taskforce implemented to mainstream both carbon and non-carbon rationalities into the governance of Indonesian forests. I collected the data through semi structured interviews and observations. A total of 54 interviews were conducted with both representation from the REDD+ Taskforce’s staff and actors that were connected or were implicated in the work of the institution (see Table 3.1). Most of my informants, especially those classified as national actors, were being interviewed not only for the REDD+ Taskforce case study but also for two other case study sites. I started the fieldwork in May 2013 and arranged interview appointments with the Taskforce’s working group members who included representation from government and ministerial agencies (MoF,
Ministry of Environment (MOE), Ministry of Agriculture (MOA), the National Land Agency (NLA), Geospatial Information Agency (GIA), and UKP4 (see Appendix A for an extended explanation about each of this government body), NGOs (environmental NGOs and Indigenous based mass organisations) academics, and the private sector.
In addition to the Taskforce’s working group members, the interviews were conducted with other institutions, such as research organizations, a palm oil plantation association, a logging companies association and a pulp and paper industry association. I also observed multiple workshops, seminars, and conferences on REDD+ and its related issues organized by different stakeholders (see Table 3.2). Aside from interviews and observation I relied on secondary data coming from the Taskforce and the REDD+ Agency’s publications and reports. As I was working as a consultant for the Agency, I had the opportunity to read other consultants’ and grantees’ reports and minutes of meetings. Although I did not employ these internal data directly in my analysis, they shaped my overall understanding of how REDD+ unfolded in Indonesia as I will discuss further below in the section on positionality and reflection.
3.4.2 Case Study 2: The One Map Initiative
The second site of engagement was with a program called OMI. The Initiative is the government’s attempt to fix the messiness of forestland governance where there is no clarity over who has rights to own and use Indonesia’s forestland. The Initiative aimed to address the problem by producing a single common map of forestland in Indonesia that would serve as a reference in the decision making processes regarding spatial planning. OMI was overseen by UKP4 and the REDD+ Taskforce and has been implemented across agencies and scales. The Initiative became the means for the REDD+ proponents to problematize existing forest governance and to propose new governmental technologies.
In making the Initiative a site of engagement, I followed how new technologies of government were produced and contested, and their on-the-ground implementation. This approach enabled me to investigate how diverse ranges of
actors responded to the new governmental technologies. Similar to case study 1, I collected data through semi structured interviews with actors that were directly involved in the Initiative. I interviewed government officials, NGOs staff, Working Group members of the OMI, academics and the staff of research centres (see Table 3.1). In addition to 57 semi structured interviews, data was collected through observation (see Table 3.2). I joined multiple discussions and workshops on OMI and I visited Barito Selatan District in Central Kalimantan where the pilot for OMI activities was being rolled out. The visit was first conducted for three days in November 2013 during which time I joined a workshop organized by the Provincial Forestry Agency to discuss the forest gazettement process with five affected villages. The second and third visits were in March 2014 to interview local government agencies. Secondary data consisted of various reports and presentations provided by the REDD+ Agency.