How institutional rule erosion shapes land use trajectories at forest margins in upland Indonesia

Maladaptive land use change at forest margins presents a persistent governance challenge under climate and policy pressures. This paper introduces the concept of rule erosion to explain how the gradual and uneven weakening of institutional rules drives land use change. While institutional analyses have treated rule change as adaptive flexibility or as macro-level drift, the cumulative weakening of operational rules-in-use at the community level remains under-theorised. Drawing on the Upland Saddang watershed, Indonesia, we examine how the weakening of boundary, scope and payoff rules within multi-level governance has shaped farmers' decisions and narrowed adaptation pathways. The two study villages were selected from those in the watershed that were identified as experiencing persistent drought. In the two villages data was gathered from 35 farmer interviews covering 129 land plots, 10 stakeholder interviews, focus group discussions and participatory GIS. Using the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, these findings show that maize cultivation (62.6% of plots) has become the dominant outcome across a wide range of former land uses—converting from paddy, cocoa, forest and grasslands—a pattern closely linked to repeated cycles of maize seed assistance rather than autonomous adaptation. Weakened boundary rules made maize seed assistance effectively open-access; loose scope rules have pushed it onto steep slopes and forest margins; and payoff rules have favoured short-cycle returns, narrowing available options and creating the conditions for what we term assistance-led maladaptation. The analysis extends the concept of erosion from constitutional and international-norms scholarship to community-level resource governance and calls for graduated multi-level safeguards that preserve local adaptive flexibility.