Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

Chapter 6: Facilitating Change from the Inside in the Philippines • 191
communication, networking, proposal making, monitoring, recordkeeping
and small enterprise management. Other improvements include higher
levels of trust among and between the board of directors, members, and
other stakeholders; increased awareness of the board of the importance
of engaging their members and other stakeholders; and the inclusion of
community members and stakeholders in forest planning and management.
In both sites, increased self-confidence and self-reliance were observed:
rather than waiting for external assistance, the PO started its initiatives
with what was available, even if it meant starting small.
Modest changes in financial capital were observed as well. Several
women who made handicrafts as the result of ACM-facilitated training
sessions enjoyed increased income, and the PO generated some income
from lumber, rattan and almaciga extraction. Improvement in natural and
physical capital was similarly modest, for several reasons. First, the ACM
project did not make financial investments to directly improve natural or
physical conditions by, for example, rehabilitating the community forests or
setting up nurseries. What the team did was facilitate a process so that the
POs could identify areas that needed improvement and then assist them
in securing external financial sources. In many cases, the POs invested
their own resources—for example, in setting up small-scale nurseries to
grow timber species and planting trees in their community forests and
farms. Second, the time frame of the project in both sites was too short for
the team to observe changes, particularly in Bukidnon site, where action
research processes were facilitated for only a year. Several actions, however,
can be expected to affect forests in positive ways. In Palawan, partnerships
with the Bataks and traders could prevent overextraction of almaciga
resins. In Bukidnon, the success of the herb garden and the wider use of
herbal medicine may make the community more aware of the importance
of managing the forests properly. The improved human and social capital
should also eventually increase natural and physical capital, but it will take
time before any changes reach measurable levels. Certainly there was no
decline in forest quality during the ACM project.
Besides the outcomes produced through the application of ACM processes
were two ‘emergent’ outcomes: more participatory decision making, and
better control of illegal harvesting. The specific local issues the POs
confronted were connected in many ways to the broader socio-economic,
political and ecological systems. By affecting several inter-connected specific
local issues in a positive way, outcomes at the higher level could emerge
even without direct intervention by ACM team. In Palawan, where the