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span class="caption" style="width: 468px;">Frances Seymour in her farewell party. —JP/P.J. LeoDeparting Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) chief, Frances Seymour, first came to Indonesia in 1987 for her dream job.

As with many other young intellectuals in Washington DC, she was fascinated with the newly found global awareness of tropical forests and biodiversity in the late-1980s.

She was not a typical forrester who had learned all the maps about tropical forests. She was a Master of Public Affairs graduate from Princeton University with a great fondness for cats.

It was her father, Robert Seymour, a Baptist Church minister in North Carolina, who was committed to anti-racial campaigns in the US, who inspired her to engage in civil-society service.

Being adventurous and idealistic, she left Washington and her two cats, Sabah and Sarawak, to pursue her first professional job as a program officer at the Ford Foundation in Indonesia.

She worked with the Forestry Ministry and state forestry corporation Perum Perhutani to gain their awareness on social forestry.

“It was about how you could change forest management so that it was beneficial to local communities; not about having a forest and armed guards on one side and citizens on the other,” she said.

She did not directly engage with forests or local people. Instead, she traveled with Perum Perhutani to meet with farmers. She could not shake off the notion of being an outsider, “a young foreigner” as she described it, but her friendly and candid demeanor landed her many Indonesian acquintances during her five-year stay with the foundation.

Her stint in Indonesia has propelled her career as an international bureaucrat waltzing through top positions in international organizations to work on environment and development in lower-income countries.

With the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), she led the efforts to reform grant disbursement mechanisms in the World Bank and USAID (United States Agency for International Deevlopment), while later at the World Resources Institute (WRI), she developed The Access Initiative, a global coalition to promote citizens’ access to information and participation in decision-making regarding the environment.

The cliques in Indonesia benefited her work when she came for a second time in 2006 to head the Bogor-based CIFOR. Those people she knew in the past have attained prominent positions and they remember her for her generous sense of humor and persistence.

“I met all kinds of interesting people who were working to create change [in Indonesia]. I am deeply grateful to those of you who worked patiently with me and have contributed to my education.”

“I’m still clueless but no longer young,” said Seymour, gaily joking in her farewell speech at the conclusion of her tenure as CIFOR director general this year. She is 53 years old.

Seymour was at the heart of the country’s forest management development when President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s administration campaigned for better forest governance to tackle climate change and reduce emissions.

As the only international organization with its headquarters in Indonesia, CIFOR has focused its research on various topics about forestry in Indonesia since 1993. The time when Seymour took office marked the moment when the research unit started to develop its work on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) which later became REDD+.

Ever since, CIFOR has become a partner for government in forest management. Under its “No Surprises” policy, it always informs the government on its research findings before they are published.

It has continued to create joint projects with and assistance to the government including the recent work on a forest-clearing moratorium and REDD+ initiatives under a bilateral deal with Norway. If successful in launching the system, the Indonesian government may receive up to US$1 billion.

Seymour agreed that the targets in the agreement would be difficult to achieve. But as a faithful Democrat, she said she believed in change.

“My father’s mission in life was to achieve a society where there were equal rights for blacks and whites. He saw in his lifetime an amazing change from racial segregation to a more integrated society.”

Her husband, Michael Kopetski, a businessman and career politician, took her father to the inauguration of US President Barack Obama three years ago.

“I believe that forest management can change from all the problems to a better way of doing things.”

Seymour said the openness and transparency between the government and civil society is already in place and it’s only a matter of time before things start happening.

“It’s hard to imagine now, but 25 years ago you really could not talk about indigenous peoples’ rights in forest planning. But now, it is openly discussed in the context of a task force on forest management reform in the [Forestry] Ministry. That’s pretty amazing,” she said.

She also said that it was worth changing the prevailing paradigm of the government as the exclusive manager of the nation’s forests and to move forward with collaborative management of forests between government agencies and local communities.

For Seymour, driving change can always be done from the back seat. She was always busy traveling around the world for fund raising and visiting CIFOR offices during her tenure. She barely has time to garden, her hobby, or even to have a cat. Instead, she swims every day and does yoga to relax.

She did not have much time to explore Indonesian forests or meet the local people. But CIFOR remains firm in its contribution to supporting the government’s policy through its research on REDD, peatlands and mangroves as well as policy recommendations for REDD’s national strategy.

Seymour said she was planning to return to Washington with her husband in July and take a break for a while.

“We’re going to go hiking in Montana and enjoy the beach in North Carolina for the rest of the summer. We may try to spend some time to help reelect Obama. Then I’ll look for a professional opportunity after that.”