<![CDATA[Community empowerment programs implemented in Indonesia’s upland regions, including those bordering protected forest areas such as Kerinci Seblat National Park, are typically evaluated using economic indicators alone income growth, employment creation, and market access while the ecological sustainability of the natural resource base on which these upland livelihoods ultimately depend receives comparatively little systematic evaluative attention. This narrow evaluative focus risks certifying empowerment programs as successful even where they inadvertently accelerate encroachment, unsustainable land conversion, or degradation of the very ecosystems that upland communities rely upon over the long term. This study addresses this gap by integrating environmental governance indicators alongside conventional economic indicators into a combined evaluation framework, applied through Participatory Action Research (PAR) across three upland villages in Bengkulu Province located within or adjacent to the Kerinci Seblat National Park buffer zone. Using iterative PAR cycles of planning, action, observation, and reflection, combined with focus group discussions, field observation, and document review, the study evaluated existing coffee-based and agroforestry-oriented empowerment programs against an integrated matrix combining four economic and four environmental governance indicators, the latter including community participation in conservation decision-making, monitoring of buffer-zone land use, and adoption of sustainable agroforestry practices. Findings indicate that programs scoring well on economic indicators did not consistently score well on environmental governance indicators, revealing specific trade-offs between short-term income generation and longer-term ecological sustainability, though villages with stronger participatory monitoring institutions demonstrated the ability to reconcile both dimensions more effectively.]]>
