Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

140 • Eva Wollenberg, Ramses Iwan, Godwin Limberg, Moira Moeliono, Steve Rhee and Made Sudana
government, as well as weak documented historical claims to lands, and
are always the weaker partner in alliances with other ethnic groups 10 .
ACM Research Project
The post-1998 reforms created an atmosphere of eagerness and optimism
for change. In Malinau, ethnic divides and competition across all sectors
of society during the reforms created the potential for forest-dependent
communities to be persistently marginalised, excluded from power or
exploited vis-à-vis their access to the forest and participation in government
decisions.
In this context CIFOR’s adaptive collaborative management project sought
to empower local communities to increase their access to and control over forest
benefits and decisions. The ACM Malinau team’s objectives were to facilitate
communities to work with other stakeholders to achieve these ends:
• to increase awareness about their opportunities;
• to know and confidently express their needs and opinions;
• to manage conflict and negotiate for their demands more effectively;
and
• to understand how to use and influence political decision making
in relation to their interactions with local government, local
companies and other villages or ethnic groups.
Different from the other cases in this book, this project team did not seek
to test ACM approaches to understand their effectiveness. Thus we did not
facilitate communities’ development and use of indicator-based monitoring
systems with different stakeholders or promote collaborative management
per se. We sought instead to help communities create systems for settling
differences among themselves (e.g., over boundaries and effective
representation) and to negotiate with external parties to reach agreements
that were more just. We also sought to stimulate shared learning among
stakeholders and generate experience-based lessons for dissemination to a
broader audience.
As facilitators, we worked to build capacities for managing conflict among
stakeholders, increase accountability of the representatives of community
groups and serve as a bridge to connect communities with each other
and with other stakeholders. In doing so we tried to promote more
communication, joint learning and deliberation among communities as