Since the 1980s, the digital revolution has been both a negative and positive force. Within a few weeks of the Covid-19 outbreak, lockdown accelerated the adoption of digital solutions at an unprecedented pace, creating unforeseen opportunities for scaling up alternative approaches to social and economic life. But it also brought digital risks and threats that placed new demands on policymakers. This article assembles evidence from different areas of social science expertise about the impacts of Covid-19 in digitised societies and policy responses. The authors show how the pandemic supported changes in data collection techniques and dissemination practices for official statistics, and how seemingly insuperable obstacles to the implementation of e-health treatments were largely overcome. They demonstrate how the ethics of artificial intelligence became a primary concern for government legislation at national and international levels, and how the features enabling smart cities to act as drivers of productivity did not necessarily give them an advantage during the pandemic. At the micro-level, families are shown to have become ‘digital by default’, as children were exposed to online risks and opportunities. Globally, the spread of the pandemic provided a fertile ground for cybercrime, while digital disinformation and influencing risked becoming normalised and domesticated.

Forest fires in Indonesia are of a local, national, and global concern, which is why the activities of local actors have emerged as a new problem in Indonesia, especially in Kalimantan. The current study employed a network content analysis method to examine the involvement of actors in forest fire cases based on Supreme Court decisions, complemented by several reputable online news sources such as kompas.com, detik.com, and tribun.com. By examining the cases, the actors involved were able to be identified as key actors, contest setters, and subject actors. Key actors, referring to companies and landowners, were found to have high correlations between one another. Moreover, key actors were observed to be involved in providing funds for land clearing or burning, yet they remained legally untouchable. Meanwhile, contest setters—permanent employees—were found to be the most involved in land burning/clearing, and they were often convicted in the Supreme Court rulings as they were merely commoners, farmers, and jobseekers in need of cash. Nevertheless, the subject actors, i.e., jobseekers and farm workers, were seen to have a weak relationship with key actors in the Supreme Court rulings, particularly in terms of forest burning and its operational funding.

This article portrays a case study in Yogyakarta, Indonesia which looks into the dynamic relationship between communities and the effectiveness of the implementation of community-based forest management (CBFM) policies and its programme, and particularly on how local institutions deal with the shifting dynamics of these policies. As there is currently an absence of research in this area, this research therefore focuses on how the local community implements policy, builds relationships with other stakeholders, and strengthens local community institutions. CBFM has been implemented in Yogyakarta since 1995 and during that time, the central government has been changing the policy for five times. At this point, this article argues that CBFM should rely on local institutions and deal with the shifting dynamics of policies. The terms of institutions can be considered to include formal institutions, such as Constitution, government laws, charters, decrees and statutes, and informal institutions, such as code of conducts, customs, local knowledge and social expectations. Furthermore, in selected communities, it is clear that the local communities can apply their informal institutions as an important component and value of traditional systems and significantly involved in forest management sustainability and establish the formal institutions simultaneously.