Grantee Research Project Results
Intent and Consequence: Forestry Institutions and Community Management in a Decentralizing Indonesia
EPA Grant Number: U916105Title: Intent and Consequence: Forestry Institutions and Community Management in a Decentralizing Indonesia
Investigators: Rhee, Suk B.
Institution: Yale University
EPA Project Officer: Lee, Sonja
Project Period: January 1, 2003 through January 1, 2004
Project Amount: $97,869
RFA: STAR Graduate Fellowships (2003) Recipients Lists
Research Category: Academic Fellowships , Biology/Life Sciences , Fellowship - Behavioral/Social Sciences
Objective:
The objectives of this research project are to: (1) investigate how and why good intentions of forest comanagement initiatives in Indonesia lead to unintended consequences; and (2) examine the institutional culture of and relationships between institutions involved in forest comanagement, as well as the impacts of these initiatives on forest-dependent communities in Indonesia. I hope to understand the nature and form of successful collaboration between stakeholders with different interests in and understandings of the forest. The Center for International Forestry Research and its comanagement initiative in East Kalimantan will be focal points through which these issues are examined.
Approach:
Achieving the research objectives above requires an ethnographic focus on how knowledge is produced, used, and transformed. It also demands attention to the relationship between local level natural resource issues with regional, national, and global political economy. I will conduct multisited fieldwork in Indonesia, tracing the flows, types, and transformations of knowledge about forests and forest-dependent people and examining the effects of that knowledge at global, national, and local levels. I will employ several methods: participant observation, semistructured and open-ended interviews, and content analysis of documents. Use of this set of methods allows me to triangulate interview, observational, and documentary data and analyze the continuities and disjunctures among data sources.
Supplemental Keywords:
fellowship, community management, forest comanagement, Indonesia, forest-dependent communities, East Kalimantan.Progress and Final Reports:
The perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.