To analyse the situation in Papua Province, Greenpeace Indonesia searched online and sought information directly from government agencies involved in managing the province’s forests – agencies which operate at national, provincial and regency levels. Although some agencies did respond swiftly to information requests, other agencies did not respond, or only responded after repeated requests. In some cases the information they supplied was incomplete. These experiences reflect the dire situation in Indonesia's information management and natural resources governance. After breaking free from decades of repression under Soeharto’s New Order regime, in 2008 Indonesia enacted a Freedom of Information Law;427 in 2011 it became a founding member of the multilateral Open Government Partnership,428 and Indonesia’s then President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono introduced a socalled One Map Policy on natural resources transparency.429 These legal and policy frameworks commit all levels of Indonesia’s government to proactive and timely publication of information, including maps of plantation concessions; guarantee the public’s right to request access to specific information; and establish an Information Commission to adjudicate freedom of information disputes. A decade after this initial wave of transparency reform, however, it is clear that Indonesia’s government has not lived up to the promise of openness it made to its citizens and to the world – and one result is a failure to rein in forest destruction and land-grabbing by the plantation industry. The One Map Policy, conceived by President Yudhoyono but championed by his successor Joko Widodo both domestically and in his address at the Paris Climate Change Conference,430 promised to instigate a process of proactively collating and publishing detailed maps of concessions in order to address problems of overlapping claims between communities, the plantation industry and forest protection goals. To date, however, the government has published little more than figures for the area of oil palm plantations licensed and estimated total oil palm cover.431 It has stated that there are around 3.4 million ha of oil palm within the forest estate (where plantations are not allowed),432 but has not disclosed the all-important spatial data and licensing information which would allow public participation in addressing this issue.
427 428 429 430 431 432
Law 14/2008 on Freedom of Information / Undang-Undang no. 14 tahun 2008 tentang Keterbukaan Informasi Publik (full text available at https://peraturan.bpk.go.id/Home/Details/39047/uu-no-14-tahun-2008). Open Government Partnership website ‘Indonesia’ Kurniawan NI (2016) Tempo.co (2015b) Minister for Agriculture (2019a). See also Timorria IF (2020). Alika R (2020)
139 The scale of the challenge ahead
Transparency at stake
