The bureaucratic politics of conservation in governing land conflict: A typology of capacities

Abstract

Recent land management policies around the world have experienced a broader political push to resolve forest and land tenure conflict through agrarian reform policy. As a result, conservation bureaucracies are responding with both formal and informal interventions to acknowledge the role of people in forests. In this methods paper, we provide a closer examination of the ways that conservation bureaucracies apply their political capacity in negotiating forest and land tenure conflicts. Our proposed method measures both the capacity and actions of conservation bureaucracies, combining formal dimensions (such as of legal status, budget availability, and the type of organization unit) with informal dimensions (including ways of gaining authority, donors and funding, and trust). The framing is rooted in theories of bureaucratic politics, and while culled from rich empirical experiences from Indonesia, the proposed method is also applicable in examining bureaucratic politics in other natural resource governance contexts. •We develop a method rooted in bureaucratic politics to measure the capacities of conservation agencies to manage forest land tenure conflict•The proposed typology guides forest and land use policy researchers to incorporate emergent governance issues such as land tenure reform into their assessments of changing conservation bureaucracies•The can be adapted for examination of bureaucratic capacities and actions in other contested natural resource contexts.

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