Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

210 • Cynthia McDougall, Ravi Prabhu and Robert Fisher
to have broken down, with no new ones yet to replace them. In Nepal and
the Philippines, on the other hand, decentralisation and devolution had
progressed, and whole ministries, government departments and sections of
civil society were devoted to ensuring frameworks for decentralisation.
Although community forestry had multiple stakeholders in each country,
the level of complexity and competition for the resources was far higher in
the Indonesian sites than in Nepal or the Philippines. This is because of the
higher value of Indonesia’s forest timber and the consequent rampant legal
and illegal logging.
Forest management and governance had reached a different level of
institutional maturity and stability in each community. Nepal and the
Philippines have formal and recognised local forestry institutions—the
community forest user groups and the people’s organisations, respectively;
however, these institutions varied, from community forest user groups
that were largely inactive and barely functional (in Nepal) to sites with
established human and institutional capacity (in the Philippines). In the
Indonesian sites the traditional institutions’ legitimacy had been largely
eroded yet no new institutions had evolved in which people could come
together to manage their community resources and negotiate with outside
actors.
The forests themselves were also very different—from the lowland
dipterocarp forests in Indonesia and the Philippines to mixed natural
and planted tropical montane forests in Nepal. The commercial value of
the forests varied as well, with high value driving competition and rapid
degradation in the Indonesian sites and a lower commercial value and
consequently more stable forest situation in Nepal.
Application to governance and management
In Malinau (Chapter 5) the research team was using an adaptive approach to
its own program of activities and facilitation, whereas the other three teams
focused on catalysing adaptiveness in the governance and management of
forest systems 1 ; that is, they encouraged adaptive collaborative management
by the groups they were facilitating. These three teams of course took a
collaborative, learning-based and flexible approach to their own research,
but this is not the focus of their chapters.