Successful pesticide reduction policies: Learning from Indonesia

The rapid transition to integrated pest management in Indonesian rice production represents the world's most successful policy effort to reduce pesticide use on a national level. This article seeks to identify the reasons for this success. Conventional policy analysis, which focuses on state regulatory and economic intervention, misses several important factors. State and nonstate actors cooperated in a unique division of policy labor that allowed both traditional and alternative policy mechanisms to be used. These mechanisms included a decentralized and participatory form of information generation and dissemination. In addition to bureaucratic autonomy, institutional arrangements in the Indonesian case included a decentralization of decision‐making authority, creating an integrated policy‐making process capable of learning about, and responding to, local conditions.

Keywords:

• farmer field school
• Food and Agriculture Organization
• Indonesia
• integrated pest management
• pesticide policy
• pesticide use reduction
• sustainable agriculture