for Policy Makers and Advocates

Illegal logging in Indonesia has been raised as a key driver in deforestation and degradation, leading to biodiversity loss, increased climate emissions, and poor forest governance. This paper explores the pathways through which strategists might travel to combat illegal logging. This paper will focus on one proposed mechanism for combating illegal logging in Indonesia: legality verification. Problem Definition With 98.7 million hectares of forest cover (Indonesian Ministry of Forestry 2012), Indonesia has the third-‐largest expanse of tropical forests in the world after Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, high rates of illegal logging in Indonesia (Seneca Creek Associates 2004) and hundreds of millions of cubic meters of illegal exports (Obidzinski et al. 2007) have combined to cause extensive deforestation and cost the Indonesian economy from $1 billion to $5 billion (U.S.) per year (Seneca Creek Associates 2004; Human Rights Watch 2009). Although it is estimated that rates have declined from 80 percent in the early 2000s (Environmental Investigation Agency EIA and Telapak 2002) to 40 percent in 2009 (Lawson and MacFaul 2010), illegal logging remains one of the key challenges facing the Indonesia forest sector. In response, the Indonesia government in 2009 created a new national legality verification system, Sistem Verifikasi Legalitas Kayu (SVLK), which domestic and international organizations now view as one of the most promising mechanisms for addressing illegal logging in Indonesia (Cashore and Stone 2013). However, the degree and extent of successful implementation of legality verification will depend on the decisions made by policy makers and environmental practitioners in the coming years. This paper will