Dayu Kemalasari Soraya
This excellent scholarship gave me the opportunity to embark on a new experience and study Natural Resources Management at the University of Missouri. As a graduate student, I gained new skills, experiences, chances to network and got to develop cross-cultural friendships. There were also plenty of opportunities for growth in and outside the classroom. I participated actively as a student representative for my department and the Indonesian Student Association, getting involved in several cultural and social events such as volunteering and fundraising.
Throughout two years of study, I also attended several conferences, which gave me incredible experiences, new insights, and allowed me to present my work. These opportunities helped me to set my career aspirations and goals. I aspire to be a forestry researcher where I can conduct my research and share knowledge in a job. I built on my skills so that I could work more closely with the community at World Agroforestry on the campus in Bogor, Indonesia.
I was honored to meet with experts and local people who showed me the real meaning of perseverance and how to build a resilient community. I hope through small acts to combine science-based research and leverage livelihoods, which if it is multiplied by millions of people, ultimately has the potential to transform the world.
Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) has been implemented since 2001 in Indonesia involving timber-state enterprise and local communities in order to achieve the sustainable use of forest resources. The objectives of this study are to investigate the determinant factors affecting people’s participation in the CBFM program and and to investigate the determinant factors which led to CBFM participants’ perception about CBFM impacts. A survey was conducted with total of 210 respondents in five villages in Malang, East Java, Indonesia. Logistic regression results showed that at the 5% of significance level, years of farming experience, number of family who work on farm, the practice of agro-silvopasture and income derived from forest positively influenced people’s participation in CBFM, while size of private land ownership and income not derived from forest had a negative association with people’s participation. Results from ordinal regression and the discrete change in the probability indicated that CBFM participants’ perceptions regarding environmental benefits of CBFM such as reduction of illegal logging and maintaining of Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) were positively affected by both socio-economic characteristics (farm ownership, age, education) and knowledge (meetings, trainings, awareness of being CBFM’s members). Those who had a positive perception about the economic benefits (increasing of household income) of CBFM were influenced by both knowledge (meeting and awareness of sharing benefits) and dependency on forest (income derived from forests). From these results, it can be said that knowledge is a vital component in affecting people’s perception of CBFM, both on environmental and household income benefits.