Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

222 • Cynthia McDougall, Ravi Prabhu and Robert Fisher
Institutionalisation of ACM
Institutionalisation of the approach in the research sites
We have argued that ACM leads to promising signs of increased capacity
and that social learning and collaboration were the key to the process.
People began to address issues in a different way, and these new approaches
had some positive outcomes. However, our case studies describe short
interventions with external facilitators. Has the emerging adaptive
collaborative management approach been internalised by the local
communities and actors, and will it continue beyond the project period?
At least at the start, active outside facilitation was the key to initiating
adaptive behaviour and collaboration. But as the Indonesian study
points out, the transaction costs of facilitation are high, as are the costs
of participation, especially to poor people who lose valuable time when
attending frequent meetings.
The Malinau project had a core facilitation team of five people who
were involved throughout the project. This obviously helped to provide
continuity, but comparable levels of involvement would be hard to achieve
in many sites. Malinau was unusual in that it was a CIFOR research site,
where more intensive long-term involvement is perhaps easier than would
be common elsewhere. Furthermore, the team has had difficulty finding
others to take over the facilitation role as they try to phase themselves
out.
The Nepal case study chapter discusses the question of the institutionalisation
of adaptive collaborative management processes. It notes signs that people’s
changed attitudes and behaviours continued after the project ended,
although meetings were held less regularly. Preliminary findings from the
followup research phase are perhaps a more important indicator: leadership
of the process by local and meso facilitators—people trained, backstopped
and linked together by the project—has been strong enough to suggest
institutionalisation of the approach and ownership by the local community.
At the time of writing, the approach was being shared and facilitated in
dozens of new communities by local and meso partner facilitators entirely
under the initiative of these (unpaid) partners.