Whose Woods are These? 'Maintained' Forest Enforcement in Indonesia

In this paper I investigate the effectiveness of enforcement of Indonesia’s Maintained Forest, a vast area under the control of the central government that is supposed to be maintained as forest in perpetuity. Using a geographic RD design across carefully matched local forest boundaries, I find that this de jure protected status generates small but meaningful differences in de facto forest cover across the protection boundary, with forest cover differing by 6.5-7 percentage points across the discontinuity. Most of the small protective effect appears to operate through restrictions on tree crops, a major source of deforestation (and also local economic development) in Indonesia; the share of land under oil palm drops by 10 percentage points (or approximately 50%) across the boundary. Future work aims to quantify the tradeoff between deforestation and economic development in a spatial land use model calibrated to these estimates.

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