<![CDATA[The BioCarbon Fund-Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes (BioCF-ISFL) in Jambi is a jurisdictional climate-finance program that links global results-based finance with national climate accounting, provincial development planning, and site-level land management. This article asks how the program operationalizes multi-level governance (MLG) and where implementation asymmetries appear across governance functions. The study used qualitative documentary analysis of 20 official documentary items published between 2019 and June 30, 2026: six core program documents, four provincial legal/planning instruments, and ten dated implementation and monitoring records issued by the World Bank/BioCF-ISFL, the Government of Indonesia, and the Government of Jambi Province. The corpus was analyzed through the READ protocol and a hybrid reflexive thematic analysis, using Homsy, Liu, and Warner’s five MLG components, sanctioning and coordinating authority, provision of capacity, knowledge co-production, framing of co-benefits, and civil-society engagement as deductive categories while allowing inductive subthemes to emerge. The documents show a comparatively mature architecture for authority, coordination, technical capacity, and monitoring, including a maximum contract volume of 14 million tCO2e, as well as extensive institutional and stakeholder preparation. By contrast, benefit-sharing remained institutionally unfinished at the data cutoff: the final BSP, implementing procedures, and beneficiary arrangements were still being harmonized. The case, therefore, demonstrates a temporal asymmetry in jurisdictional climate governance: compliance and measurement institutions can mature earlier than distributive and participatory institutions. This study refines MLG analysis by showing that governance quality should be assessed across functional components and implementation maturity, rather than solely through vertical and horizontal actor relationships.]]>
