Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

Chapter 5: Muddling Towards Cooperation in Malinau • 135
cooperation (diZerega 2000) 3 . We worked informally, keeping a low profile
with a multiplicity of groups and strategically linked groups as natural
opportunities and needs arose. Rather than foster formal multistakeholder
groups and help them negotiate agreements, we instead brought groups
together based on voluntary, common interests, similar to the notion of
‘hot groups’ in organisational theory (Lipman-Blumen and Leavitt 1999).
The key to developing this spontaneous order of cooperation was maintaining
flexibility in our facilitation strategy. We made regular adjustments by
‘muddling through’ (Lindblom 1959), using available information, even if it
was limited, and evaluating only a few, incrementally different alternatives
at a time. We suggest that in this context, such muddling is more realistic
than the comprehensive and routine information requirements for
monitoring in formal scientific adaptive management practice in contexts
with more stable and widely shared institutions for public decision making.
‘Muddling through’ is also well suited to working with the spontaneous
orders of cooperation naturally existing anywhere.
To better understand how we learned to facilitate these spontaneous orders
of cooperation, we report here on the elements of our approach and the
outcomes, challenges and lessons of our experience.
Context: Malinau District
The district of Malinau, located in East Kalimantan, is physically distinctive
for its broad expanses of dipterocarp forest, which consitute the largest
remaining contiguous forest in Southeast Asia (Figure 5-1). Ninety-five
percent of the district is designated state forestland (Barr et al. 2001), and
most of the district’s 40,000 inhabitants 4 practice swidden agriculture and
hunting and gathering from the forest. Households near intact forest are
highly dependent on forest products for income and daily consumption
(Levang et al. 2002, Wollenberg et al. 2002). Malinau is home to more than
20 ethnic groups, including the largest group of Punan hunter-gatherers in
Borneo 5 .