Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

8 • Robert Fisher, Ravi Prabhu and Cynthia McDougall
cycles of revised planning, action, observation and reflection (Kemmis and
McTaggart 1988).
Action research as an explicit methodology was originally developed by
the social psychologist Kurt Lewin in the context of community projects in
post–World War II United States (Lewin 1946). It has subsequently been
applied in a wide variety of fields, including rural development, natural
resources management (Fisher and Jackson 1999) and organisational
change (Greenwood and Levin 1998).
Collaboration and participation have sometimes been seen as defining
characteristics of action research, with some authors specifically arguing
that all action research must be participatory (Kemmis and McTaggart
1988). This is somewhat problematic. Although it is difficult to see how
action research could occur without collaboration (at least in the reflection
stage) among members of a core research group, it is quite possible that
an action research process could occur without the active involvement of
wider groups of stakeholders in the formal research itself. For this reason it
seems desirable to differentiate between action research and participatory
action research (Fisher 2003b). The ACM project relied on a mixture of
PAR, action research and more conventional extractive and comparative
research to deliver insights that would be useful and generalisable. PAR was
introduced when groups were working on certain aspects of ACM, such
as improving action planning or collaborative monitoring approaches (see
Guijt 2007), or seeking to exploit an opportunity for income generation,
conflict management or forest improvement. Action research 3 was generally
used to promote, implement and test the application of ACM in forest
management. More conventional research methods were used for context
studies, historical timelines and comparisons of results across sites.
How can we demonstrate the validity and credibility of our findings? How can
we show that ACM interventions lead to changes in the lives of poor people
or the forests they depend upon? We would argue that it is not possible to
conclusively demonstrate any causal connection between an ACM process
and an outcome. As Hume showed in the eighteenth century 4 , causality is
a major challenge for science and philosophy. According to Hume, we can
only intuit a causal connection because two events regularly occur close
together in time. The challenge applies not only to qualitative research but
also to quantitative research. Statistical correlation does not prove a causal
relationship. Regardless of whether causality can ever be proven (a stillvexing
philosophical question), we would argue that, to show that causal