Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

Chapter 4: Improving Forest Quality and Livelihoods in Indonesia • 103
ACM approach in action
This section gives an overview of the ACM approach taken by the local
actors, supported by facilitators and the research team, in the two research
sites. It describes a possible model for community forestry—as developed
and tested through the participatory action research of this project. We
refer to the implementation of the approach as an intervention because the
ACM approach was being considered as a way of adding strength to existing
participatory forest management initiatives in Indonesia. The section first
describes the interventions in the two sites, emphasising the differences that
reflect the differences in contexts. There follows a discussion on the process
of the interventions.
Different ‘interventions’ for different conditions
Different site conditions called for different facilitative interventions whose
direction was determined by the priorities and interests that the local
stakeholders identified by during the context studies.
The ACM intervention in Baru Pelepat village had as a starting point four
problems cited by community stakeholders:
• unclear boundaries of the community’s customary forest area and,
hence, an insecure legal basis for resource management (indicated by
harvesting by outsiders);
• poor social relationships in the community (e.g., between settlers and
original people, and between the village elite and wider community,
indicated by low levels of interaction and reciprocity, trust, collaborative
action, and occasionally social conflict);
• weak community decision-making institutions (indicated by low
participation of women and settlers); and
• insecure livelihoods because of the lack of alternatives to timber
logging.
Given those problems, and to keep pace with broader socio-economic changes
and demands from decentralisation, community actors saw the need to increase
their self-reliance and institutional capacity. This would, as perceived, in turn
lead to the betterment of standards of living. ACM was therefore aimed at
creating community-wide learning to help people achieve their goals.
In Pasir, conservation of forest resources conflicted with interests in improving
local living standards, and current employment options were dictated by