People Monitor

Monitors, and the understanding about the requirements and authority in submitting a complaint report; 3. Continuity: less funding and small number of the monitors, and the limited scope of monitoring in forest SVLK are not able to be targeted to other fields, such as the monitoring of palm oil certification.

From those three problems, Hasyim (2017) provides advice on the 5 domains, they are: monitoring report simplification so that the community can report it; the certainty of follow up from the government and other authorities of the monitoring report; information openness assurance from the government and other authority; interaction improvement between certification bodies and unit management, and the Government provides and facilitates monitoring fund from various sources.

People Monitor

From many problems and advices from Hasyim (2017), we try to combine it with the Minister of Forestry and Environment’s statement we have said before. We would like to highlight a keyword in the SVLK success which is said by the Minister of Forestry and Environment, that is ‘long term commitment’. In our opinion, a commitment moreover a long term commitment is close related to the interest of those stakeholders. So, the interest basis is equal with the commitment. As said by Ian Scoones, a rural expert, ‘interest politics has a central role in shaping structural conditions that is determined our lives’.

Let’s look at the surface concerning interest politics in various SVLK actors. The Government as the regulator and the state’s representative has an interest to provide institution, organization, policies for a better forestry governance; certification body has an interest to get certification clients from forest or timber industries, timber processing industries, and exporter from Indonesia; sellers and buyers of legal certified timber has a business interest; and environmentalist has a nature conservation. Environmentalists

are generally in non-governmental organizations that carry out Independent Monitoring. Then, the question is, what is the interest of indigenous people/local communities surrounding the concession forest and surrounding woodworking industries on the implementation of SVLK? If we use livelihood perspective, forest and environment are complex living spaces for indigenous people/ local communities. Complex means there is a relation between economy, ecology, and culture and forest and environment. On these various interest of the actors, we would like to say that a long term commitment is not only about how big the commitment and how long the commitment is, but how big the interest of each stakeholder can support the amount and the duration of the commitment.

After the material basis of commitment becomes important in the monitoring, other element needs to be our concern is about which knowledge will be used for implementing SVLK all at once for maintaining the credibility of the system with monitoring? Whose knowledge is decided to be important and whose knowledge is marginalized to become not important? In the way to verify timber legality, involving how to measure, calculate, assess, validate, and evaluate a reality. All of those are stated in government regulations and the technical guidance. As said by Hasyim (2017) above, a reporting mechanism still becomes a specter for the Monitors because the Monitors capacity is prosecuted as a certain standard that has been regulated. So, knowledge which is used also determines what kind of reality that fits or reasonable in the knowledge, that leads to a reality according to whom is the important and not important. If we lopk back to the interest politics, the community has a lasting interest towards the sustainability of their living space included forest. There is a big possibility that the knowledge about forest which is owned by the community is different with the knowledge in the system and operationalization of SVLK. Spring in a concession is legally owned by concession, but the spring is disappeared. This is an illegal act according the community knowledge. By naked eye, the community sees a logging and they think that it is not sustainable, but the company works based on their annual workplan, so how can the community

submits a complain about the current monitoring and reporting mechanism all this time?

What happened with what is considered to happen are two different things. What happened is interpreted according to interest and knowledge to be disseminated later until achieves the formation of a fact which is actually an ‘assumption that happened’. We truly see in front of our eyes the decrease of forest area surrounding our house or parents house, and our grandmother house. We also watch in YouTube and social media, many natural disasters occurred in certain places and it doesn’t occur in other place. In other side, we also read numeric data concerning how many forest has been lost, how much carbon emission which is produced, ideas, and technocracy in solving those problems. Anthropologists see that these natural changes are caused by human intervention which change the nature or rather destroy the nature. Politics ecology perspective is more specific said it is because humans are the one who do politics so that the nature changes. Moreover, as a reflection, Covid-19 Pandemic which hits the world is also because the natural change that is caused by the human extraction of nature. Then, what is the difference and what is considered to happen are our reminder to be more careful towards diversity, towards happened and considered to happen. In his book entitled Grundrisse, Karl Marx (1972) said “the concrete one is the combination of many determining factors so that becomes unity in diversity”.

On seeing the forest lost, illegal logging, and technocracy solve problems included timber legality labelization, we would like to check with critical glasses. One of the critism is by carrying out continuous monitoring of the problem and the solution taken, and use a historic politics ecology approach to find out diversity and find out the link between the global and the local.

Through those awareness, we would like to invite the readers to discuss by using this book. In order to look back at how monitoring which carried out by indigenous people/local communities of the SVLK implementation could contribute of various monitoring problems all this time. We intend to present the experiences of

indigenous people/local communities in Central Kalimantan, North Maluku, West Papua, East Java, and Semarang Central Java on carrying out monitoring from upstream to downstream. This monitoring was carried out in 2020 and coordinated by PPLH Mangkubumi and supported by FAO-EU FLEGT Programme. We will start the story of this book by discussing about the Dynamics of Policy, Implementation, and Monitoring of SVLK from Independent Monitors Point of View which will be presented in Chapter Two. While in Chapter Three, we will tell about how indigenous people/ local communities in 5 provinces carry out monitoring and the results achieved. In Chapter 4, we would like to describe the field findings as the result of monitoring and the analysis. In this chapter, we describe the positive and negative sides of SVLK implementation in site level; and lesson learned which can be taken from those experiences. Then, in the end of this book, we try to summarize important conclusions and input for the monitoring sustainability in the future and for SVLK in general. For further, let’s take a look how the dynamics of the policy, implementation, and the monitoring of SVLK all this time.