Participatory Climate Governance: Insights From Indonesia’s Peatlands

Evidence-based decision-making is a process for making decisions based on the best available research and informed by experience from the field. Article 3 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change adopts the precautionary principle where the lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to anticipate, prevent, or minimise the causes of climate change and its adverse effects. In turn, environmentalists highlight the importance of participatory democracy and inclusive decision-making at every level of society. Taken together, the precautionary principle and participatory democracy highlight the complementary role of scientific and contextual knowledge co-production in climate decision-making. 

A project funded by the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research explores the challenges and opportunities related to climate-related peatland policymaking in Southeast Asia. As part of the project, fieldwork was conducted among policy stakeholders in Jakarta and peatland communities in Pontianak, Indonesia, in August 2024. The experience in the field has revealed interesting insights about how different types of knowledge are created, perceived, and gatekept, and how this delimits opportunities for participatory decision-making in peatland policy and governance in Indonesia. 

Why Peatlands are Crucial for the Climate

As home to the world’s largest area of tropical peatlands, Indonesia’s peat ecosystems hold great potential to mitigate climate change. Peatlands are waterlogged forests where carbon-rich material from aboveground biomass settles underwater, decomposing exceptionally slowly. Acting over millennia, the accumulating carbon-rich soil serves an important “sink” function, absorbing more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases. Researchers have estimated that Indonesia’s peatlands contain up to 57.4 gigatonnes of carbon stocks. 

However, the natural hydrology of peatlands can be easily disturbed due to deforestation, drainage, or conversion into agriculture and other land uses. When this happens, the peatsoil dries up quickly, becoming extremely fire-prone. Fires can occur due to natural reasons, such as lightning strikes or accidental sparks, and anthropogenic causes, such as stray cigarette butts or intentional land clearance. Dependent on meteorological conditions, this smoke can travel across vast distances, causing transboundary haze. In addition to its severe health, economic, and political impacts, fires also accelerate the release of carbon into the atmosphere and reduce peatlands’ natural carbon absorption and storage capacities.

Due to its carbon stock potential, Indonesia’s peatlands have become potential sites for carbon credit and results-based payment projects. An important consideration for the success of these projects is the buy-in of the communities that live in, around, and off these peatlands. Peatlands play a major role in the livelihoods of these communities - as hunting and fishing grounds, and for small-scale agricultural plots. Hence, it is crucial to understand the extent to which decision-making surrounding these projects and their related policies involved peatland communities in a participatory manner.

Knowledge and Participatory Decision-Making

During the fieldwork in Indonesia, it was observed that parties engaged in policy often perceived climate change and climate-related projects as too "complicated" for peatland communities to understand. This observation was corroborated by findings from community focus groups, where participants shared that they had a minimal understanding of climate change and climate projects. In contrast, they reported having a clear understanding of how fires and haze negatively affect their health and livelihoods. Because of this (real and perceived) knowledge gap, climate projects and policies are often adopted and implemented in a top-down manner, where peatland communities receive and carry out instructions with little understanding of how it will contribute to the climate, or how their actions may eventually lead to climate-related financial gains. Fires and haze are instead used as a more accessible entry point – policymakers, project owners, and NGOs often focus on communicating how fires and haze can make community members sick and damage their crops, to encourage behavioural change.

While the effort to adapt climate messaging to suit the audience is commendable, this approach raises important questions about the role of knowledge in participatory decision-making. In accordance with the green principle of participatory democracy, peatland communities have a fundamental right to express their views, be listened to, and directly participate in and influence decisions that affect their lives and livelihoods. However, the perception that communities cannot understand risks often excludes them from the decision-making process. This perception becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as there appear to have been minimal attempts to share climate knowledge with these communities in the first place. 

Furthermore, local wisdom is often sidelined in favour of conventional scientific knowledge. For example, Indonesia's fire bans have made communities afraid to use fire to clear and cultivate lands, despite this practise being rooted in traditional wisdom for generations. As a result, peatlands are left to accumulate flammable biomass, increasing the risks of fire. Similarly, blocks placed in canals for peatland rewetting without consulting local communities can disrupt their day-to-day activities.

Importance of Co-Producing an Evidence Base

The precautionary principle is especially important for decision-making related to peatlands. The process of estimating peatland greenhouse gas emissions is not without uncertainty -including methodologies on mapping peat extent, emissions factors, allocating peat areas to land use classes, and the extent of peat condition changes over time. In Southeast Asia, peatland fires add further complexity, and drivers of peatland deforestation, such as oil palm, can be challenging to map. However, this uncertainty does not diminish the significance of Indonesia’s peatlands in the global carbon balance, as the country’s peatlands store an estimated 30% more carbon than the biomass of all its forests. 

In the face of scientific uncertainty, local knowledge and field experience become even more important for decision-making. Participatory, placed-based approaches will ensure local community needs are taken into account within national regulatory frameworks and that these policies align with specific geographical contexts. It can support the incorporation of diverse values and co-management approaches like community-led monitoring and reporting, which are likely to be integral elements of various climate projects. Further, it can pre-empt perverse incentives like the over-focus on firefighting over fire prevention, community members becoming reliant on wages for restoration projects, and lack of infrastructure for alternative livelihoods like eco-tourism. 

An important element of the APN project is to support capacity-building among community members, enabling them to participate more effectively in peatland policy and governance processes. By valuing and integrating the shared knowledge and lived experiences of local communities, we can build more inclusive, sustainable, and resilient peatland management practices. These practices would not only address the complexities of climate change but also empower those most affected by its adverse effects.

Helena Varkkey is an Associate Professor of Environmental Politics and Governance at the Department of International and Strategic Studies, Universiti Malaya.

This article was developed under the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research Project on “Policy and governance approaches to cooperative mitigation of peatland carbon emissions and transboundary haze in Southeast Asia” (CRRP2022-03MY-Muhamad Varkkey).

Disclaimer: This published work was prepared with the support of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. The views and analysis contained in the work are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the foundation. The author is responsible for any liability claims against copyright breaches of graphics, photograph, images, audio, and text used.