The brief describes development planning consultations, locally known as musrenbang, conducted in stages through different levels of governance: village, sub-district and district. The brief then documents lessons from experience catalyzing collective action among local community goups (in particular women’s groups) to engage in this development process and to help articulate the women’s aspirations in such a way that they could be heard by district decision makers.

Governments in many countries are decentralising to give more control over decision making and budgets to local administrations. One expectation of this change is that local governments will more effectively and efficiently respond to the poorest citizens in their jurisdictions. Decentralisation is especially significant to forest communities, which have historically benefited little from government services and poverty reduction programmes because of their physical isolation and social marginalisation.

Poverty is a persistent problem throughout Indonesia. Seven years after decentralisation began there is little improvement in the wellbeing of rural people. Local governments have received new opportunities and responsibilities for development, but few districts have the necessary capacity and experience to effectively reduce poverty. This report provides a portrait of household poverty and wellbeing in Kutai Barat, a district that was only established in 1999.

Poverty is a persistent problem throughout Indonesia. With decentralization, local governments had a new direct role in alleviating poverty and local wellbeing. At the same time they could do so in accordance with local realities and development needs. Yet, there is little improvement in the wellbeing of rural people. Local governments may lack the necessary capacity and experience to reduce poverty effectively. This report shows how a local specific monitoring system can be developed and applied.

Rural development in the uplands of Lao Peoples’ Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) has presented many challenges for farmers and their communities. Lao government policy is directed at reducing the production of upland rice and providing sustainable alternative livelihoods for upland farmers.

The concepts of adaptive management and participatory forest management (PFM) reflect an increasingly holistic relationship between society and its forests. Adaptiveness depends on learning processes. This review considers the ways in which PFM has been assessed in recent literature and focuses on the role of learning, through cross-cutting quantitative analyses, project monitoring and evaluation, and participatory research and experimentation.

This brief identifies the problems with the Thai Community Forestry Bill (granted in 2007) that had initially aimed to help forest communities preserve and manage their surrounding forest land and to transfer the rights of management from the central government to local communities.

Laos depends heavily on rice based agriculture systems and there is evidence that the traditional diversified diet and income base is being eroded, resulting in a negative effect on the livelihoods of the people. The opportunity to gather food in forests is diminishing and dietary diversity is being narrowed.

This paper explores the conflicts between badly-affected local communities and logging and mining companies and analyzes how such conflicts can be addressed effectively.

This regional synthesis paper is part of an overall effort to share the knowledge gained in five years, from 2002 - 2007, of implementing the Small Grant Program for Operations to Promote Tropical Forests (SCPPTF). The findings, lessons, and recommendations presented here emerged from the grantees’ reflections, site visits, project documentation, and discussions and inputs from the eight in-country teams, as well as from the key staff in regional support organizations.

This is a regional overview of the main legal and regulatory questions concerning ownership or access to and management of land-based natural resources. Using the Listening Learning and Sharing (LLS) method, RECOFTC, the Southeast Asia office of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) and other RRI partners from the Asia region produced a regional overview of the main legal and regulatory questions concerning ownership or access to and management of land-based natural resources.