Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

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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
Chapter 5: Muddling Towards Cooperation in Malinau • 153 method of facilitation, but rather to have a lasting impact on the power and influence of local communities and their access to government. Outcomes Despite the lack of strong, shared institutions to guide cooperation, our efforts of the past five years have had clear impacts. During our annual intercommunity workshop in 2003, a CIFOR staff member unconnected with our project asked the 52 community participants to evaluate the benefits or utility of CIFOR. The participants reported the following: • CIFOR has expanded our thinking, helped us understand conditions elsewhere, increased our information and experience, improved our human resources and provided feedback about our situation. • It has helped our community advance and develop and has provided input to the community through advice and explanations. • It has improved relationships among villages, reduced conflicts and helped with boundaries. • It has helped bridge communities and government and created space to meet with government. • It has improved our awareness about forest conservation. Such responses reflect the types of impacts that facilitating cooperation and shared learning can have. They also suggest that these types of impacts, though intangible, are valued. During an evaluation in June 2003, an independent consultant interviewed villagers and government officials. Most villagers considered the mapping to be the most concrete outcome of our work, followed by sharing of information. ‘We now know a lot’, said one Punan man. A Punan village leader added, ‘There was a change after CIFOR came. Before, we were too closed. After CIFOR, we became more open about government ... CIFOR helps villagers to deliver information, to make requests to government.’ A number of respondents commented, however, that the mapping process had not been acknowledged by government and had led to conflict. Others observed that CIFOR had been ‘mostly talk’ and had generated little tangible economic benefits for communities. A Merap village leader observed, ‘After I came back from the cross-visit, I had a meeting with the village. They wanted to make a rubber plantation and we proposed this to CIFOR. CIFOR only replied that we should contact government.’
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Adaptive Collaborative Management o
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Copyright © 2007 by Center for Int
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iv • Contents Chapter 5. Muddling
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vi • Foreword problem solving. Th
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viii • About the Contributors God
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Acknowledgements In early 1999, two
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Chapter 1. Introduction: People, Fo
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Chapter 1: Introduction: People, Fo
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Chapter 2: Adaptive Collaborative M
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Chapter 3: Adaptiveness and Collabo
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Chapter 4. Shaping Opportunities fo
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Chapter 4: Improving Forest Quality
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Chapter 6: Facilitating Change from
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Chapter 7: Discussion and Conclusio
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CIFOR is a leading international fo
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