Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

Chapter 4: Improving Forest Quality and Livelihoods in Indonesia • 113
Organising and facilitating ACM
As our team carried out the fieldwork, we searched for the underlying
principles that could be used to organise learning activities and encourage
learning amongst stakeholders. Along the way we identified four such
principles:
• Stakeholders must have ownership of the learning process.
• All relevant stakeholders must be represented in the learning
activities.
• Learning must take place by means of experience.
• Learning must happen by means of communication (cf. Kusumanto
et al. 2005).
These principles guided us in laying down a structural basis for the
organisation of learning activities. What were their implications for the
actual fieldwork?
First, the learning had to be meaningful to each stakeholder (so that
individuals had ownership of the learning process) but also to all stakeholders
(to permit collective ownership). The prioritising of problem issues by the
group as a whole thus became very important, if not essential. The diversity
of views needed to be understood by everyone, and problem perspectives
were subsequently reframed.
Second, field activities had to reach all relevant stakeholders and at the
same time be manageable. If learning did not engage them all, learning
would not be system-wide. One way of doing this is to organise activities
in so-called nested platforms (Groot et al. 2002). Such an arrangement for
our case is illustrated in Figure 4-4. Decisions made at the district level—
for instance, issuance of a policy that regulates forest harvesting—affected
actions at the community level. Conversely, community actions affected
decision making at district level. For example, excessive forest harvesting
by community stakeholders made district-level decision-makers implement
more restrictions. We organised learning activities at two levels:
• at the centre of the circle for representatives of key stakeholders
(in Jambi, community-level stakeholders, and in Pasir, community
stakeholders, logging companies and government); and
• across the district and key stakeholder levels (for representatives of
the local community, logging companies and district-level decisionmakers).