Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

118 • Trikurnianti Kusumanto
the livelihood assets that they could draw upon. In the research sites, the
two most significant assets affected were human and social capital.
In terms of human capital, ACM appeared to increase people’s leadership
capacity, knowledge and skills in communication, negotiation and
interaction, as well as individual motivation to act on problem situations.
Stakeholders of different power status were able to build relationships,
as illustrated by the district forestry service and the communities in Pasir
and the original population and settlers in Jambi. In some situations, the
increased human capital improved social processes. Leadership, for example,
benefited the larger group and community processes. These increases of
human capital were most likely occurred because each intervention phase
emphasised the development of knowledge and relationships, and because
the consequent experience and confidence of local actors helped them take
proactive roles in their own investigation and learning.
Of the various elements of social capital—reciprocity, networks and
connectedness, rules, norms and sanctions, and relations of trust—we
saw the most improvement in the last. Relationships and trust developed
between settlers and original inhabitants in Jambi, and between government
and communities in Pasir. Social networks among stakeholders began to
take form, albeit mostly during facilitated interactions. Reciprocity and the
sharing of norms amongst stakeholders were also evident to some extent.
The ACM intervention was short, however, and we do not yet know to
what extent these changes can persist without external facilitation. In terms
of causality, there is a likely positive association between ACM’s repeated
emphasis on communication and relationship building with the observed
changes in social capital.
Based on our observations, ACM may also have affected other livelihood
assets, if the strengthening of social and human capital can eventually
support the formation of the natural, physical and financial capital. In Pasir,
for instance, the social links and trust developed amongst stakeholders
leveraged funds from the forestry service for the purchase of planting
materials (25,000 tree seedlings) for the community’s rehabilitation efforts,
and also leveraged training support from a neighbouring community for
the production of rattan. The latter may in the long run increase people’s
income, and this financial capital may in turn affect human capital, since
many community members wanted to use their land for rattan production.
Livelihood changes in the sites are listed in Table 4-4.