REDD+ in Indonesia: An assessment of the international environmental program

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the literature and assesses the progress on the effects of Indonesia’s REDD+ program. Due to the significance of Indonesia in terms of global rainforests and the comprehensive implementation practice of REDD+ programs since 2009, focusing on the case study of Indonesia enables interesting insights regarding the challenges and opportunities of REDD+. Indonesia faced challenges during the project’s implementation, but there were also reductions. This success is attributed to the set program design of REDD+. In this paper, we show that without international development cooperation in the field of climate change mitigation, the countries in the Global South lack locally driven forest conservation or restoration incentives. These incentives emanate exogenously from international development cooperation programs in the field of climate change mitigation. The review of the program also shows that despite the rigorous institutional design of REDD+ in Indonesia, not all the stakeholders could benefit from the program appropriately. Because of the de facto weakness of the smallholder farmers, indigenous population groups, and other vulnerable categories in the political process of Indonesia, these groups’ interests have not come fully to their own in Indonesia. Hence, we conclude that international programs that target environmental protection, while addressing inferior institutional quality, bad governance and operate through more accountable NGOs than government agencies would perform better in terms of global environmental targets and the sustainability of local livelihoods.