Ismatul Hakim is a scientist with the Centre for Research and Development on Social, Economics, Policy and Climate Change in the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry’s Research, Development and Innovation Agency. He is actively involved in research on social forestry, community forestry, forest and land tenure, and agrarian reform. He graduated from the Faculty of Forestry at Indonesia's Bogor Agricultural University and the Department of Tropical Forestry at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands where he specialized in social forestry.