participation only come from power sharing or local empowerment.  A real participatory process 

includes local authority to make decisions and take responsibility for consequences of those 

decisions.  If direct local stakeholders do not have adequate decision making authority, 

participation remains illusory and based on mutual mistrust, and participants only minimally 

appreciate the implications of policy change. 

The work of NRMP to improve national park management and develop broader enabling policy 

processes in the forestry sector reaffirm the importance of identifying and involving the real 

stakeholders in any policy process. Community meetings on alternative, innovative park 

management strategies, for example, created a consultative mechanism with only those who 

came prepared to listen.  Unfortunately, poachers or illegal harvesters of forest products whose 

behavior required changing did not participate.  This was a lost opportunity. The real 

stakeholders, i.e. those most affected by or affecting policy outcomes, must become involved in 

the consultative or participatory process.  Depending on the institutional arrangements at a 

particular project site, an entire village community may not be equivalent to a stakeholder group; 

rather, subsets of the community have disproportionate importance as stakeholders.  Policing, 

entrapment, and other strict law enforcement measures, established at the national level and 

outside the local context, are not working. 

In natural resources policy processes, the sectoral nature of government administration and 

planning is counterproductive to multi stakeholder decision making. The full range of 

stakeholders must be identified and engaged.  To be effective, natural resources management 

policies must consider the range of incentives created across public and private sectors and 

agencies.  Without strong intersectoral, cross organizational dialogues and consensus building, 

policy outcomes will remain unpredictable at best and dysfunctional or counterproductive at 

worst. 

Beginning with a top down, weak forestry and park management policy analysis and dialogue 

process, NRMP modified its approach by formulating small policy working groups within the 

Ministry of Forestry to address a variety of often sensitive issues largely related to 

decentralization of planning, decision making and implementation.  Greater attention to the 

interests of this key sectoral agency resulted in a far greater sense of ownership.  Some 

innovative policy measures were consequently approved and, to a certain degree, implemented. 

NRMP was also instrumental in facilitating the development of the Indonesia Regional 

Science Association (IRSA), with the intention of putting aside various institutional interests 

and thus deliberating more objectively new and existing policy options and their consequences 

for natural resources management in the country.  As a professional association, IRSA enabled 

new collaborative intersectoral policy dialogue on many issues pertaining to decentralization of 

authority for natural resources management.  Such enabling bodies are increasingly needed, 

and their importance must be stressed, in the climate of current trends that aim to decentralize 

authority to the provincial level and, perhaps more radically but effectively, to the district and 

local community levels.  To avoid risks associated with errors of national policy being 

inappropriately applied at lower governance levels, policy dialogue must transfer those 

lessons learned from the national experience to all relevant key stakeholders at the local 

level and vice versa. 

It is recommended that the MoFr and donors pursue an integrated approach to natural 

resources management policy revision that accommodates the following issues or lessons 

learned.  Lessons learned from the NRMP experience may be summarized and grouped into 

the following four general categories appropriate to natural resources management in 

vii