Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

200 • Herlina Hartanto
stakeholders in the two ACM sites. It was expected that increasing
committee members’ awareness of the fundamental problems would lead
to better policies and programmes.
The ACM team worked ‘inside’ the community forestry system in the
Philippines in anticipation of achieving significant impacts. This strategy,
however, may also have reinforced two weakness of the programme. First,
the granting of forest management rights to people’s organisations can
sideline other forest users and push them into marginal economic niches
(Li 2002); by working directly with the POs and increasing their social
capital, the ACM team may have compounded the power imbalance
between the POs and the marginalised groups. Second, by helping the POs
meet DENR’s technical, legal, and administrative requirements, the team
may have inadvertently reinforced these constraints.
Conclusion
Community forestry in the Philippines was initially designed to engage local
communities in rehabilitating degraded forests. The emphasis therefore has
been on technical forestry and management for productivity, with little
attention on local institutions within the community, their political and
social dynamics and their economic needs. Large areas of forestland have
been devolved, but the management of community forests by people’s
organisations was not sufficiently supported by conducive policies, economic
opportunities and capacity building. Furthermore, DENR staff were hesitant
to share power and engage in partnerships with local government and local
communities, as indicated by their bureaucratic requirements.
Our three-year project showed that the ACM approach can address
those challenges. Stakeholder analysis identified the relevant players, and
engaging them in community forest management improved collaboration
among the PO members and other local people. By putting the POs at the
heart of ACM processes, ACM enhanced their members’ skills, capacities,
awareness and confidence in communication, networking, proposal
making, recordkeeping, and management of small enterprises. The POs
have exercised a more democratic process of forest management planning
and decision making. ACM made collaboration and learning intentional
and deliberate. The cycles of reflection, planning, action and reflection
encouraged people to observe and monitor the outcomes of their decisions
and adapt subsequent actions accordingly. These have improved the capacity