Throughout the MEPS programme, we have consulted a range of governmental and non-governmental stakeholders in Indonesia as community forestry policy develops. This includes hosting knowledge exchange workshops each year to target provincial and national-level audiences. So far these events have taken place in Ketapang, Kapuas Hulu and Pontianak in West Kalimantan, Palangkaraya in Central Kalimantan, as well as additional meetings in Balikpapan (East Kalimantan), Jakarta and Bogor.

GIS training participants in Palangkaraya, August 2018

These events culminated in a GIS training workshop held in 2018 to train government staff how to use MEPS datasets to monitor the success of community forestry schemes in terms of avoiding deforestation and alleviating poverty. Follow up interviews with participants suggested that all attendees understood causal relationships between community forestry impacts and land characteristics after our activities. Understanding of deforestation and poverty datasets improved in all cases between 2018 and 2019, and all respondents stated that MEPS materials were valuable.