Fragmentation, consolidation, and rivalry: changing bureaucracies in Indonesia's mangrove rehabilitation policy

The 2020s have been called the decade of mangroves, reflecting growing attention to their role in climate change mitigation. Indonesia, home to the world's largest mangrove area, set a target to rehabilitate 600,000 ha. Combining mangrove ecology with a bureaucratic politics framework, this article traces three phases in the evolution of Indonesia's rehabilitation policy. Before 2020, jurisdiction was fragmented across ministries, and coordination failures persisted. The establishment of the Peatland and Mangrove Restoration Agency (BRGM) ostensibly addressed this fragmentation. Instead, BRGM enabled the Ministry of Environment and Forestry to consolidate authority, although existing jurisdictional boundaries in conservation and production forests constrained its work. As a proxy institution, BRGM implemented policy while the ministry retained control over key resources. Following BRGM's dissolution and the division of the ministry into separate entities, mangrove governance entered a new phase of bureaucratic rivalry. Agencies advanced competing regulatory claims, disputed control of the National Mangrove Map, adopted different organizational structures, contested the meanings of “rehabilitation” and “ecosystem recovery,” and pursued competing funding arrangements. This phase also brought a formal shift from jurisdiction-based to landscape-based governance. Their distribution across administrative boundaries and land-use categories makes ecological restoration dependent on institutions with different mandates, resources, and definitions of the task. We argue that the ecological characteristics of mangroves shape institutional restructuring and bureaucratic competition, a relationship often overlooked in studies of natural resource governance. Climate-oriented restoration can therefore reorganize authority within the state even as it seeks to restore ecosystems.