Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

152 • Eva Wollenberg, Ramses Iwan, Godwin Limberg, Moira Moeliono, Steve Rhee and Made Sudana
and community-government dialogue and hope that this event and the
improved facilitation skills will lead to further self-organising among
community and district government members. One of the individuals is a
villager who has been a member of the team since the mapping exercises
and has developed considerable facilitation and community organising
skills. (We purposefully included villagers at different stages of the project
as staff to increase local capacities.) Community meetings in some form
will continue in our absence because they happen anyway, through annual
harvest festivals and annual meetings of certain customary associations.
Unfortunately, few Punan attend the harvest festivals, but they have
had large, well-organised meetings in the name of the Punan Customary
Community. We can expect that it will be difficult for local community
members to continue to host meetings across all ethnic groups, especially
given the trend towards increasing political organisation and divisions
among these groups.
Among communities and government, we promoted shared learning at
a basic level of iterative sharing and gathering of information, not as an
analytical exercise of cyclical self-improvement. We tried to promote more
communication, joint learning and deliberation among communities as
well as between communities and government, but we did not explicitly
facilitate them in an adaptive process. We took this approach simply because
it seemed more feasible to implement, given the complex relationships with
which we were working. In addition to the activities of each cycle described
above, this approach included setting up information centers in villagers.
The centers were abandoned after a couple of years because information
was not more widely shared by the people managing them, which led to
jealousies and tensions among villages. We now share information directly
with each village.
Our most successful efforts at institutionalisation, then, seem to be building
capacity of individuals and working with like-minded agencies. In the spirit
of working with spontaneous cooperation, we felt it would be unwise to
invest in more intensive institutionalisation of an organisation or process
(other than the annual community meetings) likely to be coopted and
overridden by other interests. We do not expect the meetings we have
facilitated to be continued in their current form, but we do expect that
the types of relationships and activities that communities and government
engage in will be affected. In this way we may have had a small impact on
future collaborative learning. We should stress, however, that unlike the
other projects descripted in this book, we have sought not to institute a