Indonesia's Social Forestry (SF) programme has made significant progress in expanding community forest tenure and advancing forest governance reform, yet its livelihood impacts remain uneven. This paper examines under what institutional conditions formal management rights under SF enable or constrain communities' ability to realise livelihood benefits from forests. Drawing on legal pluralism and Ribot and Peluso's Theory of Access, the study analyses customary and village forest cases in Aceh using a sequential mixed-methods approach, with emphasis on semi-structured interviews, small focus group discussions, document analysis, and comparative thematic analysis.The findings show that legal recognition alone does not guarantee improved livelihoods. For participants, SF outcomes were shaped by statutory rights, forest-function classifications (protection versus production), forest accessibility and physical conditions (e.g. slope), and the strength of customary institutions in mediating access to finance, labour, knowledge, technology, and authority. Where customary institutions are weak, legalisation may introduce additional organisational, financial, and technical responsibilities, particularly through requirements for forest-based commercialisation. Conversely, where customary institutions are cohesive, legitimate, and administratively capable, SF can strengthen local authority, enhance exclusion capacity, reduce tenure uncertainty, and support locally defined benefit pathways, including non-commercial and conservation-oriented outcomes. The paper advances an “access-to-benefit” framework for evaluating SF implementation, arguing that tenure reform should be understood as an institutionally mediated process rather than an endpoint in itself. This shifts policy design and evaluation beyond hectares legalised and enterprises formed toward greater support for local and customary institutions in converting formal rights into practical, equitable, and locally meaningful livelihood benefits.
This article conducts an analysis of the concept of “forest degradation” as recently introduced in the European Union Deforestation-free Regulation (EUDR). It assesses the extent to which the inclusion of this concept may contribute to mitigating forest degradation and promoting sustainability. The article first outlines the EUDR and examines how “forest degradation” is defined within it. It then explains how concepts can be formally analyzed, how they can influence the achievement of policy goals, and which goals concepts such as “forest degradation” should help advance under the EUDR. On this basis, the article provides a formal characterization of the forest-related concepts used in the EUDR. It identifies several conceptual issues, including the fact that the definition of forest degradation focuses on levels of human intervention in forests. This definition fails to relevantly distinguish between human activities according to their respective levels of sustainability. To strengthen the EUDR, the article proposes reconceptualizing forest degradation through a socio-ecological understanding of forests and by distinguishing between five levels of sustainability associated with human activities in forests. The article identifies and addresses implementation challenges associated with this proposal.
