Social forestry is a sustainable forest management system implemented in state forest areas or private/customary forests implemented by local communities or customary law communities as the main actors to improve their welfare, environmental balance and socio-cultural dynamics so that the community has recognition status from the state in forest management. To date, social forestry has been successfully implemented and accessed by the community in legal form, in the form of a decree approving social forestry in various forms of schemes such as Village Forests, Community Forests, Customary Forests, Community Plantation Forests, and Forestry Partnerships. However, in the midst of the issuance of the social forestry approval decision letter, an equally important fact is the action taken after the social forestry approval decision letter was received, to be able to participate in the implementation of institutional management, area management and business management so that the big goal of social forestry can be realized, namely reducing inequality. control and ownership of land, creating agrarian-based sources of prosperity and welfare for the community, creating jobs to reduce poverty, improving community access to economic resources, increasing food security and sovereignty as well as improving and maintaining the quality of the environment as well as handling and resolving agrarian conflicts.

These existing challenges are in addition to technical issues such as administration of complete documents post social forestry approval, capital and business innovation, institutional governance, and other things. What is no less strategic is how to continue to develop ideological awareness. So, to achieve this goal, a number of preparations and supporting instruments are needed both related to policy aspects, human resource readiness, natural resources, business capital support and institutional governance.

Considering the great potential both for the environment, social and economic aspects of each social forestry area, the even distribution of locations throughout the provinces of Indonesia as well as business challenges with different characters from most situations and conditions of the social forest management community in general, it is necessary cooperation and consolidation between social forestry managers and accompanying institutions. These are some of the considerations that have been made, then on November 26 2019, 51 social forestry groups and 17 accompanying institutions agreed to declare themselves in a forum called the Indonesian Social Forestry Management Association (AP2SI).