Governing Innovative Finance for National Parks under Biodiversity and World Heritage Obligations: A Criterion-Based Documentary Policy Analysis from Indonesia

Protected areas face chronic financing gaps, and governments are increasingly experimenting with innovative mechanisms to mobilize additional resources for conservation. However, finance reform can also redirect management towards revenue generation, visitor growth, infrastructure delivery, or investor-facing projects unless biodiversity outcomes, legal limits, and public accountability remain decisive. This paper analyzes Indonesia's emerging initiative to establish a national task force on innovative financing and national-park management as a live policy case. We conduct a criterion-based documentary policy analysis using a purposive corpus of 29 official, legal, planning, technical, international, and peer-reviewed sources. The corpus was coded into 112 relevant text segments and 174 criterion-code applications against five literature-grounded criteria: ecological primacy, legal and zoning integrity, institutional coherence, outcome accountability, and justice and legitimacy. Landscape connectivity was treated as a cross-cutting biodiversity condition. We show that the Indonesian case is distinctive because national-park finance reform is being advanced through a high-level task-force model within an existing environmental-fund architecture, a national-park system containing a World Heritage property on the List of World Heritage in Danger, and strategic indicators that already connect conservation management with environmental-service revenues and carbon-value readiness. The analysis identifies six governance risks with plausible pathways to biodiversity harm: conservation drift, legal and zoning drift, institutional duplication, metric failure, weak social legitimacy, and protected-area insularity. We compare these risks with other conservation-finance mechanisms, including conservation trust funds, tourism user fees, biodiversity credits, wildlife conservation bonds, Indonesia's Environmental Fund Management Agency and Indonesia Biodiversity Fund, and regional public-service financing. We translate the risk analysis into an operational safeguard device linking minimum approval rules, evidence requirements, accountable institutions, and measurable indicators. The core argument is that innovative finance is defensible only when designed as a biodiversity-governance instrument rather than as a revenue strategy attached to protected areas.