Widiana Mutyasari

Master´s Thesis Title: The role of NGOs in Indonesia in influencing national palm oil governance: compensate the development through market transformation to achieve conservation goal

Indonesia is well known by its rich biodiversity and the tropical rain forest resource. However, speaking about forest in Indonesia can not be separated from deforestation topic which strongly linked with palm oil industry development. Palm oil has become sensitive topic in Indonesia, even gains bigger attention from the international community. However it is complicated to justify palm oil only as the 'bad guy' without looking deeper to multi dimension aspect of the environment, social economic, and governance. Forest sector is a potential sector to achieve greenhouse gas emission reduction in Indonesia and at the same time palm oil is also a strategic commodity contributes to national GDP and potential alternative fuel to reduce GHG emission target from energy sector. To achieve GHG emission target, Indonesian government decided to extend moratorium on forest consession permit to protect the remaining forest. However the implementation of moratorium on the ground needs full support and concrete actions from various stakeholders such as government, NGOs, companies (producers and buyers), smallholders, and also media. As emerging democratic country, NGOs have done many efforts to stop deforestation in Indonesia since 90s and even more intensive in 1998 when democratic era just begun. The loss of biodiversity has become one of the main theme that NGOs bring in their campaign actively in Indonesia.

This thesis project aims to analyze how the interaction between NGOs and government in particular influences palm oil governance in Indonesia. The study will focus on NGOs role as the representation of civil society in Indonesia. Rather than focusing on negative impacts of palm oil to the environment, Widiana would like to highlight the efforts have been done by different stakeholders particularly the state actors and NGOs to positively improve the palm oil governance in Indonesia.

Widiana is studying Sustainable Resource Management master program with specialization of forestry and renewable resources. After obtained Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Engineering department in Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia, she gained working experience in environment-sociopreneur organization focusing in municipal waste management issue and in international German cooperation in climate and environment policy advice. Her project interests areas are sustainable forest management, renewable energy development in developing countries, waste management and recycling potential, and water resource and hygiene sanitation.