No. 218, June 2018 The governance arrangements of sustainable oil palm initiatives in Indonesia Multilevel interactions between public and private actors Key messages • Different types of interactions are emerging involving public and private (non-state) actors across sustainability initiatives in the palm oil sector in Indonesia. • Such initiatives include the development of government standards for sustainable palm oil, legislation related to the setting aside of conservation areas, a ‘wave’ of provincial and district Green Growth programs, a focus on jurisdictional approaches, and efforts around smallholder registration. These have been accompanied by the emergence of a number of political ‘champions’ in the form of provincial and district leaders. • Some initiatives can help to implement immediate specific sustainability objectives by filling implementation gaps, by bearing some operational costs and by speeding up regulatory change. • To bring about the transformation and to move beyond a proliferation of pilot schemes, interactions would need to survive political cycles and align with on-going national processes of reform around natural resource policy. • Those initiatives intended as innovative pilots or to kick start a process in unclear legal contexts may benefit from acting quickly outside of more formal state systems. However, there are clear benefits in integrating initiatives into existing executive systems to help weather and uncertain electoral cycles. • Some actions by non-state actors act to strengthen the capacity of public authority and accountability, whereas others can weaken or undermine these public systems. Cecilia Luttrell, Heru Komarudin, Mike Zrust, Pablo Pacheco, Godwin Limberg, Fitri Nurfatriani, Lukas R. Wibowo, Ismatul Hakim and Romain Pirard Introduction The palm oil sector in Indonesia has seen the adoption of zero deforestation commitments by some large companies in the form of various pledges around No Deforestation, No Peat and No Exploitation (NDPE). At the same time, at the national and subnational levels, new governance arrangements are emerging for sustainability initiatives involving government, the private sector and other non-state actors. Our review (Luttrell et al 2018), which was carried out in 2016–2017 explored the interactions between public and private sectors in a selection of these sustainability initiatives in three provinces and four districts: Kotawaringan Barat, Suruyan in Central Kalimantan, Ketapang in West Kalimantan and Musi Banyuasin in South Sumatra (see Table 1). We interviewed 154 respondents: 79 government, 54 NGO, 17 private- sector and 3 donor respondents at the national and subnational levels. The key question was the ways in which private standards and actors are pushing sustainability reforms and the ways in which related initiatives are likely to bring some degree of transformation in the sector. There are a number of discourses around sustainability of palm oil in Indonesia. These include hopes that the sector will support the expansion of palm oil by taking care of environmental protection while simultaneously contributing to improve infrastructure, economic growth and poverty reduction. At the same time there are DOI: 10.17528/cifor/006901 | cifor.org CIFOR infobriefs provide concise, accurate, peer-reviewed information on current topics in forest research