Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

148 • Eva Wollenberg, Ramses Iwan, Godwin Limberg, Moira Moeliono, Steve Rhee and Made Sudana
are not limited by people’s cognitive and organisational skills (diZerega
2000).
Such cooperation is self-organised in a way similar to hot groups (Lipman-
Blumen and Leavitt 1999). Hot groups do not constitute a structural
unit in an organisation. People come together spontaneously because of a
common mission and dedication to a task. Being flexible, such groups have
the advantage of being able to organise themselves quickly and have high
motivation and capacity for innovation. The hot group focuses more on
ideas and work, and less on the emotionality of relationships.
Understanding how these spontaneous forms of cooperation work in Malinau
is precisely what gave us and, more importantly, the villagers the space to
manoeuvre. We can move easily from one current of actors and activities to
converge with another in the system rather than seeking to mechanically
engineer changes to these flows outside it. The main requirement for making
this work is excellent channels of information to recognise the possibilities
for convergence. In our case we achieved this through a local presence
and high social embeddedness (sharing local values, participating in local
events and building strong personal relationships).
Facilitating by muddling through: reflections
James Scott (1998: 313) suggests that where authoritarian states coexist
with a ‘prostrate civil society’, social change needs to take place through
institutions that are ‘multifunctional, plastic, diverse and adaptable’, shaped
by practical skills and intelligence in response to a changing environment.
These processes should occur in ‘small steps’ favoring small-scale learning,
reversibility and accommodation of surprises and human inventiveness
(Scott 1998: 345). In this way, weaknesses in governance to cope with
change can be overcome.
As the discussion above indicates, Scott’s tenets were central to our
facilitation strategy in Malinau. We used adaptive methods in Malinau as
an approach to facilitation rather than as a reflective process of learning by
local forest users. Adaptive methods made it possible for us to work with
the existing spontaneous order of cooperation.