Sequencing the political forest: Power, exclusion, and the corporate hijacking of social forestry in Indonesia

Indonesia's ambitious social forestry (SF) program, designed to empower frontier communities through forest devolution, has paradoxically enabled corporate control in South Sulawesi through processes of “exclusion by inclusion.” Applying the Sequential Power Analysis (SPA)-Exclusion framework, we analyze how power dynamics perpetuate marginalization across three phases. The power background reveals how colonial territorialization, armed conflict, and state-led reforestation disrupted traditional livelihoods, embedding structural dependency. During power delivery, SF proposals were co-opted by market forces, with a corporate-funded Non Govermental-Organization and bureaucrats prioritizing administrative compliance over genuine participation. Post-implementation power adjustment saw elite capture flourish through manipulated profit-sharing and the policing of local community members who tap the pine trees for resin, institutionalizing corporate control via informal clientelism. Drawing on ethnography and policy analysis in two villages, we demonstrate how exclusion evolves while maintaining corporate dominance, from overt regulation and coercion to subtle market manipulation and discursive legitimation. Our findings challenge SF's technocratic assumptions, showing how informal institutions like village-head patronage facilitate exclusion by inclusion, where participatory policies mask persistent corporate control. We argue that without addressing historical power asymmetries, SF risks becoming a vehicle for extraction rather than liberation. The study advances critical political ecology by demonstrating the mutability of exclusion across governance phases through the SPA-Exclusion lens.