Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

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156 • Eva Wollenberg, Ramses Iwan, Godwin Limberg, Moira Moeliono, Steve Rhee and Made Sudana This form of adaptiveness requires accepting a muddling-through attitude and coping with resulting risk and inefficiencies. Learning opportunities need to be built into schedules, with adequate time. Reflection processes need to be creative and efficient to maintain their appeal. Facilitation strategies need to be flexible enough to respond to changing opportunities, yet not change so often that other groups do not understand the purpose or direction of the work. In Malinau, adjusting strategies about once a year seemed to work; these changes were incremental and built iteratively upon earlier strategies. Adjustment does not mean abrupt departure from objectives and established processes. Facilitators need to allow enough time to really test and evaluate their strategies before they change them. In the process of muddling through, relationships do not change easily. Initial partner relationships establish the facilitator’s identity and alliances in ways that are hard to change later. The tradeoffs associated with working with one partner versus another need to be weighed carefully. We do not believe it is possible for facilitators to work neutrally in multistakeholder contexts (Forester 1989; Edmunds and Wollenberg 2001). In such contexts, facilitators should be prepared to support marginalised groups in their efforts to constructively confront those in power. They need to acknowledge their biases and anticipate the possible tradeoffs in relationships this will create. One option for trying to work more evenly with all stakeholders is to have pluralistic facilitation—that is, a team of facilitators who themselves hold diverse values that reflect different stakeholders’ interests. Each member of the team would build relationships with different stakeholders. In some ways, CIFOR’s overall project in Malinau approximates this model, where different staff have gravitated to different stakeholder groups. Such an approach is costly, however, and would be difficult to replicate. To the extent that facilitators have to take joint decisions, their own leadership and power structure biases will come into play. The strength of the informal, muddling approach to enhancing cooperation is that it can increase the relevance of facilitation to local circumstances. Information is more accurate, in-depth and comprehensive and reflects different perspectives from different groups. Facilitation more closely mirrors how local policies are made and therefore enables the facilitators to take advantage of different waves of opportunity to initiate new cycles of work and engage different groups at times of maximum impact. It is easier to carve out the space to work independently, as we did with villagers on their land-use plans and proposals to government, and easier to monitor
Chapter 5: Muddling Towards Cooperation in Malinau • 157 village conditions with PMD officials without battling the resistance of particular government officials. Officials are less likely to coopt the agenda. Social relationships are more embedded and facilitators can deal with each group more flexibly, strategically and independently. Incremental gains can be made. The weakness of this approach is that it entails risks and inefficiencies. The frustrations and constant reallocation of resources associated with hyperflexibility can impose severe costs. The approach requires a facilitation team that can be tolerant of such demands and have the forbearance to sustain their own motivation despite severe challenges. The team also requires capacities that are not readily available or trainable. It is easier to train a team in structured methods like participatory mapping than to teach them how to be adaptable. When working more informally, it can be hard to have the same level of transparency and credibility acquired through more formal cooperation. Special efforts need to be made to get the endorsements of gatekeepers and share information. From a research perspective, it is more difficult to collect information consistently enough to make meaningful comparisons. The effort requires a long-term investment. Despite those weaknesses however, the muddling approach may be the facilitator’s best option for dealing with the chaos and injustice of local circumstances. The facilitator needs to judge whether enough incremental gains are being made in a given time period to warrant the effort, especially compared with potential gains to be elsewhere. Although we were required to work with spontaneous cooperation because of the conditions in Malinau, we suggest that the concept of spontaneous cooperation and many of the methods outlined above may have relevance even in contexts with more stable governance conditions. These concepts and methods should, for example, be helpful in identifying existing forces for cooperation and working more sensitively with them. They should also help integrate facilitation with existing processes for change and policy making. The selection of facilitation strategies and methods in any site is itself an iterative and adaptive muddling process. We do not suggest that the approach we took in Malinau is necessarily the best to take elsewhere. These decisions are highly dependent on the resources available to the facilitators, their own capacities and the environment in which they
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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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Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

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