(By: Irwan Gunawan and Aditya Bayu­nanda): What it eco­la­bel cer­ti­fi­ca­tion? Eco­lable Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion (form here on referred as Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion) is a mar­ket based instru­ment as to acknowl­edge a good (sus­tain­able) for­est man­age­ment prac­tice. A good for­est man­age­ment prac­tice must com­ply with a cer­tain stan­dard of ecol­ogy, econ­omy and social. The referred for­est man­age­ment stan­dard is devel­oped by an inde­pen­det third party and the set­ting up process must com­ply with the prin­ci­ples of transparancey, account­abil­ity and involved rel­e­vant stake­hold­ers (the gov­ern­ment, non-profit orga­ni­za­tion, busi­ness sec­tor and direct rep­re­sen­ta­tive of com­mu­nity members).

The cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process refers to a sys­tem con­sists of stan­dard, pro­ce­dure, min­i­mum require­ments and a man­ual of cer­ti­fi­ca­tion deci­sion mak­ing. In other words, a com­plete cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem must com­pre­hen­sively include:
(1) a set of cri­te­ria and indi­ca­tors that can be referred in the assess­ment process of a man­age­ment unit.
(2) cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process pro­ce­dure
(3) min­i­mum require­ments for the imple­menter and
(4) An account­able aca­d­e­mic model for cer­ti­fi­ca­tion deci­sion making

The Indone­sian Eco­la­bel­ing Insti­tute (LEI) exists in Indone­sia as a non-profit orga­ni­za­tion. LEI runs its func­tion as an accred­i­ta­tion insti­tute, cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem devel­oper and it also pre­pares all infra­struc­tures required for the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion imple­men­ta­tion. Ini­tially the ini­tia­tive derived from sev­eral indi­vid­u­als of var­i­ous back­grounds such as aca­d­e­mics, gov­ern­ment, non-profit orga­ni­za­tion and busi­ness sec­tor and chaired by Prof. Emil Salim. In 1998 LEI the group became an insti­tu­tion. A Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Ver­i­fi­ca­tion Board (DPS) was formed to main­tain LEI’s cred­i­bil­ity. The board con­sists of cred­i­ble and inde­pen­dent indi­vid­u­als. The board’s func­tion is to con­duct ver­i­fi­ca­tion on objec­tions con­veyed by the pub­lic with regards to a cer­ti­fi­ca­tion decision.

In addi­tion to the board, a Local Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Forum (FKD) was also estab­lished. FKD is a multi party forum at local level of which role is not lim­ited to the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process but can be fur­ther devel­oped to a rep­re­sen­ta­tive media to dis­cuss nat­ural resources issues at local level. Why should we develop a cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem for com­mu­nity based for­est? This is because the for­est based com­mu­nity ini­tia­tive is an oppor­tu­nity to extend the com­mu­nity for­est manager’s access to a more valu­able inter­na­tional mar­ket.
A cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of a com­mu­nity based for­est man­age­ment can pro­vide an enor­mous boost for a recog­ni­tion process and infor­ma­tion dis­sem­i­na­tion of a cer­tain man­age­ment unit not with­stand­ing the fact that the unit is mar­gin­al­ized by the cen­tral gov­ern­ment. Infor­ma­tion dis­sem­i­na­tion gen­er­ated by the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion can draw the atten­tion of other insti­tu­tions both at national and inter­na­tional lev­els to in-depth exam­ine other rel­e­vant aspects. The point is, cer­ti­fi­ca­tion can reach broader pub­lic scope both at national and inter­na­tional level and not lim­ited to eco-sensitive consumers.

At the moment, the total cer­ti­fied com­mu­nity based for­est area is reach­ing the size of 2 (two) mil­lions hectares world­wide. Nev­er­the­less, in gen­eral the com­mu­nity based forst man­age­ment units are still con­cen­trated on wood prod­ucts. The orga­ni­za­tion of the man­age­ment unit is also varies in forms. It ranges from a very sim­ple man­age­ment unit oper­at­ing a total area size of 286 ha in Costa Rica to a mas­sive indus­tri like Menom­i­nee Tribal Enter­prise in USA. In Indone­sian con­text LEI has devel­oped the Sus­tain­able Com­mu­nity Based For­est Man­age­ment (SCBFM) sys­tem. The sys­tem is estab­lished based on a spirit to boost the recog­ni­tion of CBFM in Indone­sia. How­ever, the unique and diverse char­ac­ter­is­tics of CBFM calls for a devel­op­ment of a cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem capa­ble of adopt­ing the above unique­ness and diversity.

The approach devel­oped in SCBFM sys­tem is dif­fer­ent from the approach in the Sus­tain­able Pro­duc­tion Nat­ural For­est Man­age­ment (SPNFM) and Sus­tain­able Plan­ta­tion For­est Man­age­ment (SPFM). There are more than few par­ties that are reluc­tant to imple­ment the ini­tia­tive due to the unfa­vor­able con­di­tion to imple­ment Com­mu­nity Based For­est Man­age­ment cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in Indone­sia. For instance, there has not been a sin­gle under­stand­ing of CBFM con­cept amongst var­i­ous par­ties in Indone­sia and also the government’s reluc­tance in imple­ment­ing CBFM as the future for­est man­age­ment sys­tem. Despite the con­tin­u­ous debate on CBFM cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, a start­ing point of this sys­tem must be imme­di­ately estab­lished. Sooner or later a cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem will be imposed to all for­est area in Indonesia.

What kind of SCBFM LEI has devel­oped? The first to do is to iden­tify the forms of CBFM in Indone­sia. This process is approached in 4 (four) vari­ables: forest/area allo­ca­tion, objec­tive of man­age­ment, type of prod­ucts gen­er­ated and land ownership.

Area allo­ca­tions include: For­est Cul­ti­va­tion Area, Non-forest Cul­ti­va­tion Area, and Pro­tected Area. The Objec­tives of the man­age­ment are: to be sub­sis­tent and com­mer­cial. The land own­er­ship includes: state land, tra­di­tional adat ( individual/ com­mu­nal) land and fully owned land. From the crossed of the four vari­ables, and their sub-variables, 48 CBFM types were found (see table 1). Due to the lim­ited infor­ma­tion and tech­nol­ogy the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion assess­ment has yet to cover non-wood prod­ucts, there­fore the sys­tem is only suit­able for wood-products. Thus, there are 24 types of CBFM for for­est prod­ucts (see table 2)
A cat­e­go­riza­tion sys­tem is imple­mented to deter­mine the most appro­pri­ate cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem for the respec­tive man­age­ments. The first cat­e­gory is CBFM located in the pro­tected area excluded from the SCBFM cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. The sec­ond cat­e­gory is com­mer­cial CBFM located in the for­est cul­ti­va­tion area with fully owned land sta­tus and land with for­mal own­er­ship (cer­ti­fied) located at the for­est cul­ti­va­tion area. Thus, in SCBFM cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for for­est resource there are 2 mod­els of assess­ments being devel­oped based on the exist­ing CBFM cat­e­gories, namely:
1. Assess­ment per­formed by Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Insti­tute, but employ­ing dif­fer­ent stan­dard based on the CBFM’s pub­lic func­tion pos­sessed by a man­age­ment unit.
2. Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion con­ducted by a cred­i­ble inde­pen­dent insti­tu­tion such as NGO, research insti­tute, or other com­pe­tent insti­tu­tion. The inde­pen­dent insti­tu­tion– with a writ­ten con­sent from the for­est man­age­ment com­mu­nity – will sub­se­quently pro­vide an effec­tive report on the pro­posed CBFM unit’s per­for­mance. The report will then be ver­i­fied by a panel of expert assigned by a cer­ti­fi­ca­tion insti­tute. Nev­er­the­less, this type of ver­i­fi­ca­tion is only suit­able for CBFM unit which has been proven capa­ble of per­form­ing good for­est preser­va­tion effort. The per­for­mance of the unit must be proven sci­en­tif­i­cally and tested through time. Although there are dif­fer­ences of par­ties apply­ing for cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, based on model I and II of the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, the main prin­ci­ple here is voluntary-based. The vol­un­tary based prin­ci­ple must be imple­mented for both par­ties apply­ing for cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and par­ties pro­vid­ing the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. Even if the party apply­ing for cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is comes from a third party ori­gin, the vol­un­tary based prin­ci­ple must still be applied. The dif­fer­ence in the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion model has an impli­ca­tion on the valid­ity period of the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion (a time period imposed for cer­ti­fi­ca­tion valid­ity for a cer­tain unit/community group declared “passed” the assess­ment) by tak­ing into account the fac­tors of cer­ti­fi­ca­tion costs and the sil­vi­cul­ture of which include the type of tree species and log­ging sys­tem. Can the eco­la­bel cer­ti­fi­ca­tion be imple­mented to com­mu­nity based for­est? The answer lies on the par­ties involved in the com­mu­nity based for­est man­age­ment prac­tice in Indonesia.

This is due to the fact that the SCBFM cer­ti­fi­ca­tion imple­men­ta­tion is not aimed at devel­op­ing the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem only. The impor­tant aspect that must be taken into account is the prepa­ra­tion of other impor­tant ele­ments, such as insti­tu­tional prepa­ra­tion and per­for­mance improve­ment of the for­est man­age­ment com­mu­nity, inter­na­tional mar­ket net­work and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion cost. In addi­tion to that, it also takes time to dis­sem­i­nate infor­ma­tion on SCBFM cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem, prepar­ing the field asses­sor, panel of expert and a cred­i­ble cer­ti­fi­ca­tion insti­tu­tion. Since May 2002 LEI has been work­ing on a Pilot Project for the SCBFM cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. In the Pilot Project, LEI works together with . KpSHK, AMAN, WWF, SHK Kaltim, ARuPA and Persepsi. The Pilot Project is expected to capa­ble of pro­vid­ing the answer to the ques­tion raised in this article.