Forest management for groundwater protection is a cheap solution for a vital question, which is implemented for decades all over the world. The main challenge is to insure a constant adequate forest management to preserve the service provided.
In Lombok Island, the problem is the lack of implementation of the public regulation in the forest area. Therefore payments for environmental services (PES) are used as an alternative in this weak institutional environment.
The results of the field research show that, surprisingly, the "famous" Lombok PES case is not a PES at all, even if there are some payments.
This research has however happy ends because other "forest for water" PES have been identified in the field. In addition, the legal review identified a way to solve the lack of legal base for PES implementation. Thus, the PES examples that we identified could be spread all over Indonesia without conflicting other regulations (fiscal, local finance, forest, etc.) and circumventing the forest administrations.