Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

Chapter 6: Facilitating Change from the Inside in the Philippines • 173
the rainy season and drying up of springs and other water sources during
the dry season—became apparent (Catacutan et al. 2000; Valmores 2002).
Forest resources also declined over time. The participatory assessment that
the ACM team conducted with community groups in Barangay Basac in
2002 indicated that rattan, abaca, coffee, herbs, wild animals, and forest trees
had become scarce. Such scarcities created problems for the communities
because they depended on many forest resources (Burton 2002).
The alarming degradation of natural resources around Mount Kitanglad and
the potential impacts on both the rich flora and fauna and the people in the
area led policy makers to formulate a protection and conservation strategy.
The Mount Kitanglad Range Natural Park was declared a protected area
in 1996 by presidential proclamation. The protected area and its buffer
zone are about 40,000 ha. Mount Kitanglad is considered one of the most
important parks in the Philippines and one of the 10 sites in the Philippines
funded by the World Bank’s Global Environment Facility through the
Conservation of Priority Protected Areas Project. The management of the
park follows the 1992 National Integrated Protected Areas System Law,
under which management is the responsibility of a multistakeholder policymaking
body called the Protected Area Management Board. Day-to-day
management of the park is carried out by DENR (DENR-IPAS 2000).
Barangay Basac has a total land area of 2,800 ha. The village is subdivided
into six puroks (subvillages or hamlets) with a total population of about
4,000, in 750 households. In 1999 about 95 percent were indigenous people
of Talaandig, and the rest migrants, mostly from the nearby provinces of
Cebu, Bohol, and Leyte (Arda-Minas 2001). The majority of the villagers
were farmers. Their community forest consists of 517 ha in the buffer zone
of Mount Kitanglad. About 60 percent of the area was cultivated land and
planted with food crops, 15 percent was grassland, 15 percent was open
canopy forest, and only 10 percent was closed canopy forest (Hartanto et
al. 2002b). Management rights were granted to the Basac Upland Farmers
Association, Inc., in 1999.
Stakeholder analysis
Although different in their ecology and socio-cultural setting, the two ACM
sites shared several similarities. In both sites, the people’s organisations
that held the management rights over the forests were not the only local
institutions, and they were not the only ones who had interests in forest