Koalisi Ekonomi Membumi
🌐A collective movement catalyzing sustainable investment ecosystems across Indonesia through their Value Chain Collaboration Canvas approach. KEM connects local governments, smallholder farmers, businesses, and financial institutions to build nature-based commodity value chains.
Bioregional Context
Bali is a volcanic island in the Indonesian archipelago known for its forested highlands, terraced rice fields, and coastal areas. The island faces critical environmental challenges including water scarcity, with tourism-intensive areas experiencing severe deficits.
Background
Bali combines rich forest endowment with acute resource pressure. Forests cover more than 249,000 hectares; Buleleng, Jembrana, and Tabanan hold 63% of tree cover. Those forests underpin high-value crops—vanilla, cacao, coffee, spices—and buffer biodiversity and livelihoods.
Tourism growth and land conversion are squeezing water supplies. In 2021, the sharpest deficits appeared in tourism-heavy districts with over 250 lodging businesses each. Keeping forest-rich regencies such as Jembrana and Tabanan from wholesale conversion to resorts is part of island-wide water security.
Origins and Network
Koalisi Ekonomi Membumi (KEM) organises as a movement to speed up investment that fits Indonesian place-based wisdom. It takes Tri Hita Karana—“three causes of prosperity”: harmony with spirit, among people, and with nature—as a governing ethic for weaving spiritual, social, and ecological aims in bioregional work.
Members such as Supernova Ecosystem, Katalys, Swadaya, Pandegha, and PBF host collaboration and delivery. KEM works in Bali, West Kalimantan, Central Sulawesi, and South Sumatra, linking districts, enterprises, and finance through the Value Chain Collaboration Canvas (VC3).
Activities
Value Chain Collaboration Canvas
VC3 stitches stakeholders so each chain link reinforces the next. In Tabanan, agroforestry cacao growers work with Agridesa on data-backed farming, digital tools, and finance; Cau Chocolates off-takes organic, agroforestry-grown beans. When actors align, projects become investable and finance can follow. Farmers report stronger soils and bean quality plus roughly IDR 10 million extra per harvest cycle—income that helps keep forest on the land, catchments intact, and businesses viable.
100 Regenerative Village Program
100 Regenerative Village (100RV) promotes agroforestry and regenerative practices so forests stay intact as water catchments. With Eco-Tourism Bali, hotels and food businesses are nudged toward local, sustainable sourcing—paying farmers who steward forest a credible alternative to selling land for tourism.
Multi-Stakeholder Forest Governance
In Jembrana, KEM supported Sabha Wana Kerthi, a multi-stakeholder forest forum chaired from the regional planning agency and joined by forestry and environment offices, the forest management unit (KPH), farmer groups (KTH), and firms such as Palapa (nutmeg) and Conservana Spices (vanilla, coffee, cacao). The body coordinates stewardship, benefit-sharing, and on-the-ground practice with policy.
Planning Assistance to Local Governments
KEM backs districts in drafting plans that lock in environmental and social commitments—not only pilot projects. Workshops bring government, smallholders, firms, and financiers into the same conversation so VC3 logic can be embedded in formal instruments.
Vision and Legacy
KEM seeks proof-of-concept bioeconomy and nature-based value chains that reduce dependence on extractive industry and industrial monoculture: 100 jurisdictions committed to sustainable development, 100+ nature-based enterprises, connected chains, and about USD 200 million in funding and transactions. By May 2023, roughly USD 35 million was unlocked, toward a USD 50 million target by 2025 (rolling disbursement).
The bet is that Tri Hita Karana-style alignment—people, nature, and policy—can show how forest water, farmer income, and visitor economies co-evolve at scale across Indonesia.
Sources
| Type | Name | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Report | Bioregional Governance - Asian Case Studies & Framework | ↗ |