In many cases, government institutions insufficiently consider the traditional land use of community areas in spatial planning policy. Although numerous investigations into the participatory mapping of community lands have occurred, their results have not been adequately incorporated into the policy realm. In Indonesia, Spatial Planning Regulation (SPR), or locally known as Rencana Tata Ruang Wilayah (RTRW) is an instrument to guide land use practices in the categories of development and protected areas. Using a case study for the Merauke district in Papua province in Indonesia, we demonstrate how participatory mapping results of important community areas were integrated into district-level spatial planning through Participatory GIS (PGIS). There are three phases to the process of integrating PGIS into Spatial Planning Regulation. The first phase is to develop a shared vision between the customary communities and the district government and gain a commitment from both parties to use the results in further planning processes. The second phase is to facilitate the PGIS process, which is conducted by the community and a facilitator -in this case a team of WWF Indonesia Sahul Papua Region Office -, and the final phase is to integrate the PGIS results of the important community areas into spatial planning regulation. The results of our case study showed that of the total area adopted by the RTRW, about 69% were important community areas designated as cultural preservation areas. The remaining important community areas were allocated to two other land use categories: protected areas (22%) and development areas (9%). In this case, 91% of the community areas (647,850 hectares) were secured from other land use purposes such as large-scale agriculture, mining, forestry, and infrastructure. The PGIS approach can be applied to districts across Indonesia for mapping community land use practices and integrating them into Spatial Planning Regulation.

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Over the last two decades, sustainable landscape approaches are increasingly being adopted worldwide. An important challenge for these approaches is to analyse and improve governance systems that promote non-conflicting land uses to provide multiple ecosystem services and safeguard biodiversity for diverse social groups over the long term. Our study provides a diagnostic of the gaps and limitations of the current institutional arrangements of an ecosystem corridor in Central Sumatra covering Riau, Jambi and West Sumatera, known as the RIMBA corridor landscape. We identify actions that stakeholders think should be taken to improve the governance of the RIMBA corridor to achieve sustainable landscape goals. We used a combination of methods, including (1) Focus Group Discussions with key stakeholders of the RIMBA programme; (2) the use of a "context diagnostic approach for conservation" to analyse the results of the Focus Group Discussions; (3) a survey on formal institution design for coordination and management of the RIMBA corridor. We found that although transformational dynamics have already been initiated at the local, provincial and national levels through a pilot project, new regulations and institutional changes, many obstacles to effective governance of the RIMBA landscape still remain. Our study points at the need for a new institution to enable cooperation for green economy policy objectives established through a Presidential Decree to achieve the required institutional innovations at the scales required. Our experimental diagnostic approach can be applied in other settings in Indonesia and elsewhere to analyse and improve the effectiveness of governance for the management of biodiversity and ecosystem services at landscape scales.