For more than two decades, and for eight years now as country director of RECOFTC Indonesia, I have worked with forest communities across Indonesia. This work involves careful listening, mediating, research and training. And it involves trying, where possible, to bridge gaps between policy and people.
A lot of our recent work has focused on social forestry, in which the government formalizes the rights of communities to manage, protect and benefit from local forests. Indonesia has committed to allocating 12.7 million hectares of forest land to communities by 2030 through its social forestry programme. So far, it has reached around 8.3 million hectares.
The social forestry programme forms part of Indonesia’s commitment, under the Paris Agreement on climate change, to reduce carbon emissions by 31 to 43 per cent by 2030 and reach net zero emissions by 2060. But achieving this target and ensuring communities truly benefit requires more than simply issuing permits. Communities need support throughout the process – from navigating bureaucratic requirements to strengthening their own internal governance and developing viable livelihood strategies. For that, facilitation is essential.
What facilitation really means
Facilitation is often described in technical terms. In social forestry, this takes the form of helping communities to apply for permits, interpret regulations or draft forest management plans.
At its core, facilitation is something deeper and more human. It is about bridging two worlds that do not always align. One is the world of communities with their customary practices and lived experiences. The other is the world of government with its rules, procedures and policy goals.
Communities may have practiced agroforestry for generations without ever putting their knowledge into a written plan. Government systems, meanwhile, often require forms, maps, business models, legal entities and administrative procedures. A facilitator’s role is to bridge this gap.
Facilitation involves carrying community knowledge, priorities and concerns back to policymakers. Good facilitators can help government actors see that local practices need not be obstacles to policy implementation, but sources of knowledge that can make policy more applicable and effective.
Facilitation is the backbone of successful social forestry. Without a two-way approach, a community may misunderstand policies and laws. Similarly, government agencies may misjudge community experience. In some scenarios, lack of effective facilitation can lead to conflict if a community resents and resists what the government is trying to achieve.
Facilitators must listen well
Listening allows facilitators to understand the diversity within communities. Too often, outsiders treat a community as a single actor, but every community is made up of groups with different livelihoods, priorities and degrees of influence. Young people may have different aspirations from elders, women may have concerns that men overlook, poorer members may hesitate to speak in public meetings.
A facilitator who listens can help ensure that these voices are heard. And when people feel that their ideas shape the process, participation becomes meaningful instead of feeling like a bureaucratic requirement. Without this sense of ownership, social forestry could become just another government programme.
At the same time, facilitators must know when to speak. They must guide discussions, explain options and risks, and connect community aspirations to policy and market realities.
Consent is a process
A commonly misunderstood aspect of social forestry is the idea of consent. Many assume it is only about obtaining a community’s agreement before starting a programme. But consent – especially free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) – is an ongoing process. It must be present at the beginning, revisited throughout implementation, and checked again when communities make decisions.
Well-conducted consent processes prevent conflict. They ensure that communities fully understand the implications of decisions and that all groups, not just leaders or vocal individuals, are genuinely involved.
Consent also helps to identify options and assess their feasibility. When RECOFTC applied FPIC to assess the feasibility of agroforestry across 4,800 hectares in Lampung, discussions with farmers identified livestock farming as a more promising alternative in some areas. Without FPIC, the intervention might have failed or burdened the community.
Rather than treating FPIC as a rigid checklist, we need to see it as a way to ensure that decisions are well-understood, inclusive and aligned with community goals. To stand the best chance of being effective, decisions should also align with government policies and private sector opportunities, such as demand for certain products.
While consent is partly the domain of facilitators, it is also the responsibility of the communities themselves to continue applying consent-seeking processes long after the facilitators have gone. Community consent through representative local governance structures ensures that decisions reflect interests and ideas, and are based on informed understanding of risks and opportunities.
Assessing capacity needs
Communities cannot be expected to implement social forestry effectively simply because land has been allocated to them. They need knowledge, skills, awareness and support, and these needs vary widely from place to place.
Some communities have strong traditional institutions but lack knowledge of financial management or legal frameworks. Others may be keen to develop agroforestry businesses but lack capital for planting trees. Still others, especially in regions like Papua, may prefer to maintain traditional systems rather than pursuing enterprises at all. Outsiders pushing such communities into business can ruin lives.
If facilitators ignore these differences, they risk overwhelming communities or training them in areas that are irrelevant to their needs. At RECOFTC, we first conduct a capacity needs assessment – interviewing community members and observing their practices to identify existing skills, gaps and possible interventions that are likely to be most useful.
Sometimes this means creating agroforestry demonstration plots. Other times, it means strengthening social forestry management committees, working with communities to establish grievance mechanisms or ensuring information reaches all groups. Beyond communities, capacity development is also for government officials, academics and private sector actors, who often have their own knowledge and skills gaps, specifically in areas such as community livelihoods or participatory processes.
Communities at the centre
Social forestry is not a five-year programme. It is a multi-generational effort requiring stable funding, coherent policies and a commitment to empower communities. Indonesia needs far more social forestry facilitators than it currently has.
The 10,215 personnel working today are insufficient to support the more than 1.4 million holders of social forestry permits already issued. The country also faces a regeneration challenge. Universities are not yet producing enough field-ready extension workers. More diploma-level forestry programmes are needed to supply practical facilitators who can work directly with communities.
Government initiatives such as the Ministry of Forestry’s ‘bakti rimbawan’ programme, together with village-level youth initiatives and village champions, can help fill this workforce gap by preparing young people to become the next generation of social forestry facilitators.
At its heart, facilitation is about different stakeholders – communities, government agencies, private-sector actors – to sit together, understand each other and move forward collectively. And it is about ensuring that through all of this, the community remains at the centre.
When facilitation is done well, communities can meet environmental challenges while strengthening livelihoods and sustaining traditions. This is the promise of social forestry. Facilitation is what helps make that promise real.
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Gamma Galudra is country director of RECOFTC Indonesia.