Benefit Sharing Schema from the Forest: Identifying Potential Distributions to Customary Communities in Teluk Bintuni District, Indonesia

This study identifies the benefits that traditional communities receive from the tropical rain forest in New Guinea, Indonesia. In this study, various benefit sharing schema developed by forest concession holder are assessed to understand the precise outcome compared to traditional welfare solutions. It further aims to identify benefit sharing schemas applied by concession investors in the forest sector and assesses these schema based on equitable principles. A questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were used to collect data from traditional communities, concession holders, and the government. Interviews and field observations were randomly conducted and then analyzed for both quantitative and qualitative descriptions. The results indicate that there were five benefits sharing schemas i.e., those based on financial schema, based on the market, based on infrastructure, based on social management, and based on the transfer of knowledge and technology. Overall, all the schemas that were developed did not fulfil the same criteria. However, there were only two schemas that were considered to be equal and efficient: the financial based-schema and infrastructure based-schema. This is indicated by the larger number of criteria and requirements that they fulfil. Yet, all the schemas still present various conflicts either between customary communities and the government or between the communities and investors.