Choosing timber legality verification as a policy instrument to combat illegal logging in Indonesia

•This paper describes the governance arrangements of legality verification in Indonesia.•This paper employs theories of instrument choice.•This paper analyses factors under which legality verification is selected as a policy instrument in Indonesia.

The Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MoEF) of Indonesia has recently started to implement legality verification as a policy instrument to combat illegal logging. Using theories of policy instrument choice, this paper attempted to shed light on the conditions under which the instrument choice takes place. Over the past few years, there has been a significant change in political perception on illegal logging. In fact, the problem has been brought forward as one of the most chronic forest problems in the country. At the same time, there has been growing dissatisfaction on the previous range of instruments and measures. In addition, MoEF decision to use legality verification heavily interacts with the trend on import legislations in a number of countries. In fact, the trend is still “more friendly” for Indonesian timber products than boycotts. Legality verification was also preferred due to its streamlined requirements, compared to the more comprehensive standards of sustainability certification.