Although technology oriented research in agriculture and other sectors has been extensively documented as an effective contributor to development goals, the impact of policy oriented research is characterised by considerably more uncertainty. Despite dozens of attempts to discern the impact of policy oriented research in the agricultural and natural resource sectors, only a few studies have successfully estimated quantitative measures of research benefits (SPIA 2006; Raitzer and Ryan 2008).

Moreover, broader efforts to identify the impact of policy oriented and social science research have often been unable to successfully identify beneficial policy changes attributable to research. Rather, these studies have...

There are no well-established methods for assessing the impact of policy oriented research (Pardey and Smith 2004), although the methodological challenges that such assessment poses could be contended to be comparatively better documented. The present case study takes an iterative approach to identify prospective channels of influence, assess the importance of CIFOR’s contributions, establish plausible counterfactuals (what would have happened in the absence of CIFOR’s research), and identify attributable impact.

The principal investigator worked with project staff to identify perceived impacts of the project. This process began by identifying the most important policy changes related to poverty and environmental goals...

Indonesia has one of the world’s highest rates of deforestation, with annual losses of about 2.0 million hectares. One major contributor to this trend is wood processing capacity that far outstrips sustainable timber and fibre supply. While plantations provide less than 15 million cubic metres of wood per year, and the ‘sustainable yield’ from natural production forests is 8–9 million cubic metres, wood processing industries consume 45 million cubic metres annually (World Bank 2006). Approximately half of this is consumed by the pulp and paper sector.

As of late 2007, the Indonesian pulp and paper sector had a total...

This section contextualises the connections between CIFOR’s research and the overall evolution of events related to the Indonesian pulp and paper sector, based on available documents and the results of key informant interviews. In so doing, it is a prelude to the attribution of CIFOR’s specific contributions, which will be assessed in Section 5, so as to identify plausible assumptions for the development of counterfactual scenarios in Section 6.

As CIFOR’s research results were released in late 2000, Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) was attempting to gain approval from the US Securities and Exchange Commission to extend the repayment period...

Key informants from WWF Indonesia (Nazir Foead, Species Program Director) and WWF US (Bruce Cabarle, Director of Global Forest Programs) credit CIFOR’s research with substantial contributions to their advocacy campaigns, and support the notion that the research was essential to obtain environmental commitments during the negotiation of debt agreements for APRIL and APP. A third key informant, Michel Steuwe (currently an independent consultant), stated that the Profits on Paper study played a direct role in advocacy regarding APP, but that its influence on the APRIL campaign was more indirect, and principally arose through contributions to the APP campaigns, which drew...

This section attempts to infer plausible assumptions about likely counterfactual scenarios in the absence of CIFOR’s research from the interview findings presented in Section 5, in terms of probable delays to observed improvements in policy and practice (for the main scenarios of this assessment). These assumptions are necessarily somewhat subjective, and will therefore be subjected to sensitivity analysis when scenarios are used in the economic analysis presented in Section 9.

Key informant interviews indicate that CIFOR contributed substantially to the environmental commitments undertaken by APP and APRIL in response to NGO advocacy. The two companies both cite CIFOR’s direct influence,...

As noted previously, APP and APRIL have undertaken specific conservation commitments, which were stimulated as a consequence of NGO advocacy. This section outlines how attributable increases in conservation area will be determined.

APP undertook, as per a letter of intent with WWF, HCVF assessment of four concessions, which led to the stated protection of 107 000 hectares of forest (as reported at the end of 2006). It is not clear what proportion of these areas would have been cleared in the absence of HCVF commitments, as no details of prior APP plans for the concessions are available. Indonesian law requires...

The previous section identified overall consequences of changes in practices associated with CIFOR’s research and related advocacy and policy reforms in physical terms. However, as these outcomes are not of intrinsic value, the benefits associated with these changes still need to be identified.

As noted previously, Indonesian pulp producers do not need to pay the full market price, let alone social cost, for wood consumed from natural forests in their concessions. Current royalties only reflect 10% of the governmentdetermined reference price for wood volumes, or about $4 per cubic metre (according Ministry of Forestry Decree no. P.18/Menhut-II/2007), whereas international market...

The benefits investigated thus far represent the effects of much more than just CIFOR’s research, as they embed effects that can plausibly be attributed to increased attention to sustainability issues in the Indonesian pulp and paper sector, as a result of a range of advocacy activities by a number of civil society groups. Thus, the ‘without CIFOR’ counterfactual still needs to be generated to identify what benefits would likely have been generated with all of the other players still active, but CIFOR’s research removed. This counterfactual will be applied to identify what proportion of these benefits should be attributed to...

Although the range of benefits is rather wide among the scenarios, the benefit values of the research are consistently much higher than the costs incurred for the assessed research. As Raitzer and Ryan (2008) note, there are only a handful of studies that have successfully identified the economic benefits of policy oriented research, which renders this a rather unique case. Moreover, most of the estimates from the present study lie at the upper end of prior estimates identified in Alston et al.’s (2000) comprehensive meta analysis of studies of the economic impact of technology oriented agricultural research.

Nevertheless, there is...

The present study has explored a case example of policy oriented research contribution to improved environmental benefits. By using a semistructured interview approach to trace connections between the research, immediate users and actors ‘on the ground’, the study is able to establish causality relatively rigorously. Triangulation through document review has helped to validate these causal theories, and trend series statistical tests have further reinforced the concurrence of identified changes with the availability of CIFOR’s findings. Counterfactual scenarios are established to draw these findings together into explicit postulates about what would have occurred without the research, upon which empirical quantitative analysis...