The fall of Soeharto in 1998 provided the impetus for the transformation of Indonesia’s political system to one that is considerably more democratic and decentralized. But what has this meant for Indonesia’s natural resources? The stakes for the nation and the international community are considerable. In physical and biological resources, Indonesia is a wealthy country. It is a world leader in mineral exports, its rainforests account for more than 50 percent of the tropical forests in Southeast Asia and more than 10 percent of the world’s total, it has unique and extensive biodiversity resources, and its fisheries are some of the world’s most productive and threatened. The challenges in using and managing the vast natural resources of Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, are immense. They include ensuring that resources are exploited in a manner that is optimal for the economy, equitable for the population, and sustainable for future generations.

While recent and rapid political change under "Reformasi" and decentralization may seem to have provided opportunities for long-term development that embraces these goals, they have also generated an environment of political uncertainty, weak law enforcement, insecurity over property rights, and increased local conflict. This situation, together with an imperative to accelerate the pace of socio-economic progress, has created a pressing need to address the challenges of proper use and management of natural resources.

If you are ordering The Politics and Economics of Indonesia’s Natural Resources outside of the United States or Canada, please contact the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies by phone at (65) 870 2447, by fax at (65) 775 6259, by email at pubsunit@iseas.org, or online at http://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg.

Many articles in the Reader were originally published in RFF’s quarterly magazine, Resources. Wally Oates has supplemented that with material drawn from other RFF works, including issue briefs and special reports. The readings provide concise, insightful background and perspectives on a broad range of environmental issues including benefit-cost analysis, environmental regulation, hazardous and toxic waste, environmental equity, and the environmental challenges in developing nations and transitional economies. Natural-resource topics include resource management, biodiversity, and sustainable agriculture. The articles address many of today's most difficult public policy questions, such as environmental policy and economic growth, and "When is a Life Too Costly to Save?" New to the second edition is an expanded set of readings on global climate change and sustainability, plus cutting-edge policy applications on topics like the environment and public health and the growing problem of antibiotic and pesticide resistance.

For general readers, the RFF Reader has been an accessible, nontechnical, authoritative introduction to key issues in environmental and natural resources policy. It has been especially effective in demonstrating the contribution that economics and other social science research can make toward improving public debate and decisionmaking. Organized to follow the contents of popular textbooks in environmental economics and politics, it has also found wide use in beginning environmental policy courses.

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Building on earlier work that established the importance of flexible, collaborative approaches to sustainable forest management, The Complex Forest describes the work of ACM practitioners facing a broad range of challenges in diverse settings and attempts to identify the conditions under which ACM is most effective. Case studies of ACM in 33 forest sites in 11 countries together with Colfer’s systematic comparison of results at each site indicate that human and institutional capabilities have been strengthened. In Zimbabwe, for example, the number of women involved in decisionmaking soared. In Nepal, community members detected and sanctioned dishonest community elites. In Cameroon and Bolivia, learning programs resulted in better conflict management. These are early results, but a wide range of recent research supports Colfer’s belief that these new capabilities will eventually contribute to higher incomes and to sustainable improvements in the health of forests and forest peoples.

The Complex Forest reinforces calls for change in the way we plan conservation and development programs, away from command-and-control approaches, toward ones that require bureaucratic flexibility and responsiveness, as well as greater local participation in setting priorities and problem solving.

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This handbook of locally based agricultural practices brings together the best of science and farmer experimentation, vividly illustrating the enormous diversity of shifting cultivation systems as well as the power of human ingenuity. Environmentalists have tended to disparage shifting cultivation (sometimes called swidden cultivation or “slash-and-burn agriculture”) as unsustainable due to its supposed role in deforestation and land degradation. However, a growing body of evidence indicates that such indigenous practices, as they have evolved over time, can be highly adaptive to land and ecology. In contrast, "scientific" agricultural solutions imposed from outside can be far more damaging to the environment. Moreover, these external solutions often fail to recognize the extent to which an agricultural system supports a way of life along with a society's food needs. They do not recognize the degree to which the sustainability of a culture is intimately associated with the sustainability and continuity of its agricultural system.

Unprecedented in ambition and scope, Voices from the Forest focuses on successful agricultural strategies of upland farmers. More than 100 scholars from 19 countries— including agricultural economists, ecologists, and anthropologists—collaborated in the analysis of different fallow management typologies, working in conjunction with hundreds of indigenous farmers of different cultures and a broad range of climates, crops, and soil conditions. By sharing this knowledge—and combining it with new scientific and technical advances—the authors hope to make indigenous practices and experience more widely accessible and better understood, not only by researchers and development practitioners, but by other communities of farmers around the world.

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While there continues to be refinement in defining and assessing sustainable management, there remains the urgent need for policies that create the conditions that support sustainability and can halt or slow destructive practices already underway. Carol Colfer and her contributors maintain that standardized solutions to forest problems from afar have failed to address both human and environmental needs. Such approaches, they argue, often neglect the knowledge that local stakeholders have accumulated over generations as forest managers and do not address issues involving the diversity and well-being of groups within communities. The contributors note that these problems persist despite clear evidence that equity and social relationships, including gender roles, are important factors in the ways that communities adapt to change and manage forest resources overall.

The Equitable Forest offers an alternative to traditional, externally organized strategies for forest management. Termed adaptive collaborative management (ACM), the approach tries to better acknowledge the diversity, complexity, and unpredictability of human and natural systems. ACM works to strengthen local institutions and use the knowledge and capacity of groups in local communities to enhance the health and well-being of both forests and the people who live in and around them.

The Equitable Forest provides a detailed explanation of the descriptive, analytical, and methodological tools of ACM, along with accounts of early stages of its implementation in tropical regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Although the contributors make it clear that it is too soon to evaluate the efficacy of ACM, their work is supported by evidence that rural communities do make important contributions when involved in formal forest management; that management strategies are most effective when flexible and tailored to local contexts; and that efforts by outside governmental and nongovernmental organizations to support local management are feasible from the policymaking perspective, and desirable for their impact on human, economic, and environmental well-being.

A copublication with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

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