Lessons from a decade of jurisdictional approaches in Southeast Asia

High-Level Forum on Multi-stakeholder Partnerships “Strengthening Multistakeholder Partnerships for Development: Towards Transformative Change”. Photo by Kementerian PPNBappenas

Soon after the massive forest and peat fires that affected Indonesia in 2015, South Sumatra decided to pioneer a new approach to sustainable land use management for the entire province. This approach integrates environmental, social, and economic goals and gives a genuine voice to all stakeholders, from communities to the private sector and NGOs. 

Fast-forward and the jurisdictional approach (JA) has now expanded to five provinces, with another two on the way. It has even been replicated in Vietnam, informing efforts at national and subnational levels in both countries. In the process, the novel approach has risen as a guiding force for inclusive green growth in the face of climate, biodiversity, and land crises.

As a side event to the High-Level Forum on Multi-stakeholder Partnerships in Bali (1-3 September 2024), the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) co-organized a side event on Inclusive Green Economic Growth for Climate Resilience. During this session, speakers from the Indonesia and Vietnam country programs of CIFOR-ICRAF, the government of South Sumatra, and the Ministry of National Development Planning of Indonesia (Bappenas) shared insights from JA projects, along with a decade’s worth of lessons to advance green growth plans.

Jurisdictional approaches up close

Inclusive land use planning across an entire politico-administrative territory, like a province or a district, offers an alternative to project- or certification-based approaches, which may lead to a shift of deforestation, land degradation, and pollution to surrounding regions. 

CIFOR-ICRAF director for Asia Sonya Dewi explained that some JAs focus on producing one or several strategic commodities across an entire jurisdiction. In contrast, others encompass several of its main land and resource uses. In any case, a JA has three pillars: the direct involvement of a government; inclusive decision-making; and a data-driven way of defining, implementing  and tracking interventions.

“The land use, forestry, and agriculture sectors are influenced by a wide range of actors with differences in terms of information, interests, and power,” said Dewi. “Building trust among them is not easy, but it is crucial to finding mutually agreeable solutions that build our resilience to environmental challenges like climate change.”

Creating green growth plans 

Since 2016, CIFOR-ICRAF has supported provinces like South Sumatra to develop inclusive, green growth plans with a jurisdictional approach.

The same process applies to different landscapes: discussing a shared vision, collecting environmental and economic data on the focal area and then using software (Land-Use Planning for Environmental Services, or LUMENS) to conduct a tradeoff analysis against land-use planning scenarios. 

The LUMENS simulations show how business as usual compares to sustainable development plans on issues like Gross Domestic Product (GDP), emissions, and ecosystem services, informing negotiations on a green growth roadmap.

Following that process, South Sumatra came up with seven strategies to foster green growth — like landscape restoration and agricultural efficiency—  and 17 impact indicators aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals; for example, employment,  agroforestry expansion, deforestation rate and emissions from peat areas.

“The beauty of the green growth plan is that its strategies are spatially mapped, so it is clear what interventions need to happen where,” said ICRAF Indonesia program director Andree Ekadinata. “Also, the mapping makes it easier to mainstream the strategies into local development plans.”

Insights from Vietnam

CIFOR-ICRAF then brought the same tools and process to the Vietnamese province of Lam Dong at the provincial government’s request, as shared by senior scientist at CIFOR-ICRAF in Vietnam Do Trong Hoan. 

The resulting green growth plan accounted for ecosystem services and social aspects like gender, food security, and the inclusion of ethnic minorities. It also expanded the scope of the previous plan, which focused mostly on the energy sector, to encompass the agriculture, forestry, tourism, transportation, and water sectors. 

“The area, located in the central highlands of Vietnam, is a tourism destination and one of the world’s top coffee exporters, meaning it was important to prioritize sustainable agricultural and tourism practices in the new strategies,” explained Hoan. 

The work done in Lam Dong went on to inform Vietnam’s Green Growth Strategy (2021-2030), an example of the science for policy that anchors much of CIFOR-ICRAF’s work.

Learnings from Indonesia

The director of food and agriculture at Bappenas, Jarot Indarto, underscored the importance of backing up green growth plans with adequate laws and policies and mainstreaming strategies into planning and budgeting documents at lower administrative levels.

“Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelagic country and, as such, decentralizing sustainability interventions is key, especially in the agri-food sector,” said Indarto. “Oil plantations, for instance, are scattered across 25 provinces and 212 districts, all of which must be on board to see the vision for green growth through.” 

Indonesia is now developing a Sustainable Jurisdiction Platform, which is expected to launch in 2025 and will provide a scorecard for each district based on economic, environmental, social, and governance indicators. From Indarto’s perspective, outreach activities will be crucial to having districts embrace the sustainability principles promoted by the central government.

For Regina Ariyanti, head of the Development Planning Agency of South Sumatra, mobilizing financial resources to implement green growth strategies, including the Provincial Action Plan for Sustainable Palm Oil, is another priority.

They look to address issues such as the encroachment of palm oil plantations into protected areas, the risk of fires, especially in areas that overlap peat ecosystems, and land tenure conflicts. 

“We recognize that sustainable management of oil palm plantations is not only an environmental imperative, but an economic necessity to ensure the long-term viability of the industry and the livelihoods of rural communities,” said Ariyanti.

To conclude the session, Dewi highlighted the promise of jurisdictional approaches for sustainable land and resource management but pointed out the urgent need for quality data and capacity-building.

“There is no ‘one-size-fits-all,’ said Dewi. “Geopolitics and the local context must be prime considerations.”