Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

98 • Trikurnianti Kusumanto
problems. And yet as described above, local systems tend to be nonadaptive,
incapable of responding to new demands and rapid changes at broader
levels. Consequently, because community-focused initiatives do not link
to these to wider-level structures and processes, local action often runs up
against the constraints associated with higher-scale dynamics. Indeed, the
legal and policy setting of forest management all too easily creates cultural,
legal, economic and political disincentives for local people to sustainably
manage their resources.
Can adaptive collaborative management work?
The conditions that have thwarted participatory forestry initiatives are
primarily social: these initiatives have failed to address the complex dynamics
of societal change—in particular, the changing relationships between
interest groups in evolving political and socio-economic conditions. This
observation was the spark for the research project: would an adaptive
collaborative management approach be useful in the Indonesian context,
where forest management decision making seems to be uncertain and
chaotic, and make a difference in forest quality and human well-being?
In our view, ACM was worth investigating in the Indonesian setting in part
because it placed the concept of learning at the centre but also because
it had the potential to bring about on-the-ground changes to forests and
people’s livelihoods. A core thrust of ACM is ‘social learning’ (Chapter 2).
In social learning, individuals or groups communicate with one another to
understand shared problems, explore solutions and negotiate options and
eventually make collective decisions (e.g., Maarleveld and Dangbégnon
1999; Jiggins and Röling 2000). Social learning enables adaptation to
adjust management.
ACM also became interesting as a potential means for Indonesia’s
institutions—particularly the dominant top-down, science-based ones—to
learn their way out of the tensions between old practices and new demands.
For institutions, social learning involves not only microlevel processes
(e.g., learning among stakeholders about the uses of a given forest area)
but also the ways in which existing institutions interact (Woodhill 2002).
In the rest of this chapter the term learning rather than social learning is
used, but throughout, the concept of social learning forms the basis of the
discussion.