Forest policy diagnostics for Indonesia

This report is part of a wider inquiry into the intertwined challenges of climate change, deforestation and policy design, where global environmental goals depend on highly local realities. Forest loss remains a major driver of emissions, but its causes and trajectories vary widely across regions, shaped by governance systems, economic pressures and social dynamics. Moving beyond generic prescriptions, this study adopts a context-sensitive perspective that asks not only what policies exist, but how and where they are likely to be effective. In Indonesia, a vast archipelagic country with highly heterogeneous forest landscapes, deforestation has been both extensive and uneven, concentrated in long-established agricultural frontiers while large tracts of relatively intact forest remain elsewhere. This diversity makes it a critical case for understanding how policies interact with different ecological and institutional contexts. The report applies a diagnostic framework that connects spatial patterns (archetypes) of forest change with the behavioural mechanisms that policies aim to influence, from enforcement and regulatory controls to incentives, social norms and capacity-building. By examining how these instruments align with specific deforestation contexts, it highlights why policy effectiveness depends not only on design but also on where and how interventions are deployed. Indonesia’s experience—particularly the marked decline in deforestation since the mid-2010s—offers valuable insights into the potential of coordinated policy mixes, while also revealing the ongoing challenges of governance, land-use pressures and sustaining long-term change.