Ideas and policy change: Indonesia's locally-based forest management policy

Indonesia has recently enacted significant policy reforms towards the legal recognition of local-based forest management. This dissertation research investigates the struggle through which this reform agenda was pursued, and the conditions under which such reform occurred. Policymaldng is often considered to be the result of political interactions among policy actors, who pursue their self-interests and policy ideals. Accordingly, policymakers' ideas, beliefs, values, and personal interests in 'public problems' matter. The way that policymakers' ideas of local forestry problems and solutions are continuously reconstructed and (re)presented in policy politics becomes crucial for understanding Indonesia's local forestry policy changes.; This study's primary aim was to investigate the process and pattern of Indonesia's Outer Island local forestry policy development with particular attention to the role of ideas in shaping policymaking and outcomes. The study's guiding questions were: what is under reform, and how do ideas affect the course of policy decisions? Other authors have examined the impact of the colonial state-based scientific forestry ideology on post-colonial forestry policy. This study goes further by investigating the process through which this ideology is continuously reinterpreted and contended in policymaking politics. The basic argument is that ideas influence policymaking and outcomes when they: (1) become embedded within powerful political institutions, (2) provide shared norms to facilitate group cohesion and collective action, and (3) provide a causal connection with regards to a particular policy problem.; The sectoral policy processes that occurred within Indonesia's broader political and socio-economic structure provided the medium for examination of local forestry reforms. The concept of the policy subsystem and its two interrelated dimensions---knowledge and interests ---was used to investigate Outer Island local forestry policy development. The first dimension refers to the notion of a policy community, i.e. an arena where those with knowledge of certain policy issues engage in policy discourse. The second dimension refers to the concept of a policy network, which signifies the relationships among subsystem actors who participate in policy making. Local forestry policy development in the Outer Islands was investigated by analyzing knowledge-based changes in the policy community and power-based changes in the policy network.