DISCOURSE INTERACTION AND POLICY CHANGESIN INDONESIA’S SUSTAINABLE PALM OIL GOVERNANCE

ABSTRACT:Natural resource management generally involves multi stakeholder with conflicting interests and roles. The government is requested to be more transparent and open to accommodate the point of view of involved stakeholders in improving palm oil governance. It has implications to put environmental issue at the same level of economic interests. In this study, online media discourses from 2015 to 2018 were analyzed to provide a comprehensive description of issues and stakeholders involved in the development of sustainable palm oil. The study finding shows that there has been a significant paradigm shift in interpreting the importance of environmental services that were previously separated from economic development as a result of discourse interaction in public sphere. In an era where the Indonesian government was concerned about the strategic role of oil palm in developing the national economy, NGOs were able to graduallyput environmental and social issues as a matter of concern and resulted in several policy changes
Keywords:discourse, media, environmental communication, palm oil, policy changes