Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

4 • Robert Fisher, Ravi Prabhu and Cynthia McDougall
groups, by the late 1980s and early 1990s unsettling evidence emerged that
even long-established community forestry programmes, such as Nepal’s
(see Malla 2000), have provided limited benefits to the poor and may have
even made the poor worse off (e.g., Edmunds and Wollenberg 2003 and
Malla 2000 for Nepal, and Sarin et al. 2003 for India).
It is important to recognise that the objectives of different actors may be
incompatible and that control of forest management is inherently political.
In this context, conflict is to be expected. However, political processes are
essentially about mediating between conflicting objectives and reaching
workable compromises, so the existence of conflict should not be a cause
for despair.
In response to complexity: Adaptive collaborative
management
Forests are complex, both as ecosystems and in terms of the factors involved
in meeting the diverse objectives of society. Different types of forest, of
course, vary in the level of ecological complexity they exhibit. Tropical
forests, with large numbers of plant and animal species, are particularly
complex, especially taking into account the complex social and economic
relations among forest users and owners. While some scientists aspire to
forest management regimes based on assumed equilibrium, many ecologists
now recognise (and have recognised for some time) that ecosystems
are dynamic, that equilibrium is little more than a convenient fiction
at best, and that an adaptive approach is more appropriate. Adaptive
management, one approach to ecosystem management, recognises the
limits of our understanding of natural systems and accepts that change
and variation are intrinsic to ecosystem. It enables managers to proceed
without resolving all uncertainties in advance, while explicitly recognising
change and variability (Walters 1986; Holling and Meffe 1996; Lee 1999).
It is a management approach that involves conscious learning based on
action and the observed consequences of action.
Checkland (1985) differentiates between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ systems. By hard
systems he means systems designed (or engineered) to have a clearly defined
outcome. Soft systems have no clearly defined outcome, and in fact, different
actors within the system will have differing objectives and purposes. This
concept applies to the process of conscious management of ecosystems by