Many tropical countries continue to devolve forest management to forest-dwelling communities. The assumption is that local knowledge of forests and community
engagement in forest management will attain multiple social and environmental
co-benefits, such as poverty alleviation and reduced deforestation and fires.
Evidence for this, however, is scant, commonly hampered by data availability
and a lack of technical capacity for implementing statistically robust impact
evaluations. Based on a practice-based review of policy implementation,
impact evaluation of case studies and examples of counterfactual analyses
from Indonesia, we demonstrate that it is increasingly feasible to determine
the conditions under which community forest management will most likely
achieve its social and environmental objectives. Adapting community forest
management implementation based on feedback from accurate impact evaluation could lead to positive outcomes for people and environment in Indonesia, and across the tropical realm