When The Global‐National Climate Change Agenda Meets With Provincial Ambitions: how Do State and Non-State Actors Influence the implementation of National Forest Moratorium in East Kalimantan?

This paper analyses the implementation of the national forest moratorium in the Indonesian province East Kalimantan as part of the global‐national climate change agenda. The national forest moratorium is a follow‐up of the Letter of Intent (LoI) between Indonesian government and Kingdom of Norway in May 2010 to implement REDD+ programme. Its’ purpose is to realize large scale climate mitigation by improving forest governance. The central questions of this paper are: how state and non‐state actors from various levels affect the implementation process of national forest moratorium. For this purpose primary and secondary data have been collected by reviewing policy documents on the forest moratorium and interviewing 15 actors. The first finding of this research is that the commitment of national and provincial governments to postponing issuance of new permits for forest clearing in the moratorium area has not prevented the granting of permits for the development of highways, industrial estates and an international port project in the area. The second finding is about the limited effectiveness of a provincial moratorium that has been declared by the provincial government to o improve forest governance. This moratorium only affects the coal mining sector: palm oil and forest plantation can get a permit if they meet standard requirement regulated in provincial moratorium. The third finding is that industries successfully removed the “existing permit concessions” from the moratorium area which led to a significant reduction of the moratorium area in East Kalimantan. Environmental and international development agencies were not able to prevent this, if present at all. . The fourth finding is that the implementation of the globalnational agenda on climate change agenda at the provincial level is heavily depended on the political commitment of the governor of East Kalimantan and the engagement of non‐state actors.