Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

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212 • Cynthia McDougall, Ravi Prabhu and Robert Fisher • In the Philippines, where the rhetoric of participation and decentralisation was at odds with actual local control, the emphasis was on applying action learning to make small, incremental steps towards local decision making as well as increasing benefits from the forest. • In Indonesia, where radical decentralisation had occurred without an effective institutional basis for cooperation, the focus was on carving out clearer rights for local communities and building better multistakeholder relations. Reflecting differences in research teams and local priorities, in Jambi and Pasir this was more oriented toward the learning process and human capital, whereas in Malinau there was a strong policy and policy information emphasis. Ownership of facilitation roles In Malinau the ACM team facilitated throughout the project, from the period of observation to reflections on action learning interventions. The other ACM teams worked to more rapidly shift responsibility for facilitation to local actors. The short time available for these three cases explains why the most effective transitions to local ownership of the approach took place in the followup phase of the Nepal project—that is, after the project had formally concluded; there, all facilitation from the outset had been led by trained, backstopped, and networked local and meso-level teams. Time frames The work in Malinau commenced in 1998 and continued until 2002 3 . The other three projects ran for three years, between 1999 and 2002, plus a separately funded phase for Nepal that went from 2004 to 2007. The relatively short durations of the Indonesia and Philippines projects precluded large-scale changes or even assessments of the extent to which adaptive learning processes had been institutionalised. The project periods were actually shorter than they appear, given the time taken to establish project procedures and partnerships. The extension of the Nepal project into a second phase makes assessment of longer-term change more practical. As a result, any conclusions about outcomes are preliminary and suggestive. There was certainly not enough time to improve forest conditions at any
Chapter 7: Discussion and Conclusions • 213 significant scale or see measurable improvements in livelihood outcomes. Improvements in people’s capacities and social processes are much more evident. If we apply our ACM model to this analysis of similarities and differences, we should expect to find Nepal and the Philippines closer to material or instrumental action than Indonesia. The communities in the case study sites in Nepal and the Philippines would be more ‘empowered through self-organisation’ because they had already spent considerable time on ‘communicative action’, clarifying their vision of community forestry. In Indonesia, communicative action around community forestry (in the formal sense) was still in its early stages, and we might expect to see communities beginning to move towards some forms of strategic action as a result of finding their empowerment through a common meaning and purpose. Did ACM lead to change? Let us begin by asking how change might be discerned, given the relatively short duration of the projects. The clearest sign would be tangible evidence, especially at larger scales. This evidence would be that much more credible if the counterfactual could also be demonstrated, but such a baseline would have demanded at the very least a huge and ethically questionable investment in passive observation of ‘control’ sites, if not a parallel universe. And in fact, early reviewers of the project recognised the difficulties and advised against using a counterfactual. Thus, any evidence of change has to be based on a before-and-after comparison. This is indeed what all four case studies endeavoured to do. Problems of interpretation of changes and residual confirmation bias remain, although the latter was held to a minimum by focusing as much as possible on actors’ statements rather than researchers’ interpretation. Changes in institutional capital In all sites, researchers noted some strengthening of the local forest management institutions. In fact, in Nepal, two of the four research sites—sites that had been considered institutionally average or below average in 1999—received district forest office prizes in a competition for institutional development during the final research phase. Changes included
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Adaptive Collaborative Management o
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Copyright © 2007 by Center for Int
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iv • Contents Chapter 5. Muddling
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vi • Foreword problem solving. Th
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viii • About the Contributors God
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Acknowledgements In early 1999, two
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Chapter 1. Introduction: People, Fo
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Chapter 1: Introduction: People, Fo
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Chapter 2: Adaptive Collaborative M
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Chapter 3: Adaptiveness and Collabo
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Chapter 4. Shaping Opportunities fo
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Chapter 4: Improving Forest Quality
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Chapter 5: Muddling Towards Coopera
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Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

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