Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

198 • Herlina Hartanto
of the intracommunity relations is crucial for DENR staff in developing the
POs into cohesive and durable institutions.
Lack of incentives for people’s organisations
Economic incentives encourage communities to participate (Gilmour and
Fisher 1997), and without them, it will be difficult to maintain interest in
forest management, especially where people are struggling with poverty.
One resident of Barangay Basac said, ‘It is difficult to think about longterm
benefits coming to us in the next five years when today we are hungry
and have nothing to eat tomorrow; it is more difficult to think about the
future generation when today you can hardly feed your children’.
Several POs had DENR reforestation contracts that provided economic
incentives for their members, but once the rehabilitation work ended,
the incentives disappeared. Extractive activities were usually limited to
small volumes of nontimber forest products, such as rattan, bamboo, resin,
honey, or dead wood; this was the case for the PO in the Palawan site.
Forest resources may be sufficient to provide economic incentives to the
POs for a certain period of time, but in general, their tenurial areas are
of marginal economic importance. As Li (2002) points out, the upland
communities of the Philippines were given management rights over state
forestland only after the most profitable opportunity—timber extraction—
had run its course and the elites had found better investments elsewhere.
DENR views nonforest income-generating activities as viable alternatives
for meeting the POs’ needs and in controlling people’s dependency on
forest resources. The agency therefore supports ‘pump-priming’ activities
to generate financial capital that the POs can invest in nonforest incomegenerating
activities. Unfortunately, these enterprises have often failed, the
POs cannot provide much-needed income for their members, and interest
and participation wane.
Although DENR has no mandate for POs’ economic development, because
forest resource management is intertwined with livelihood, it cannot
ignore the importance of addressing the economic needs of PO members.
By proactively approaching the organisations that do have the resources
and the mandate to provide economic assistance, DENR may be able to
channel resources to the POs. During the ACM project in Bukidnon, a drug
manufacturer considered establishing partnerships with the PO because it
needed agricultural areas to grow herbs. DENR could offer incentives for