Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

226 • Cynthia McDougall, Ravi Prabhu and Robert Fisher
Our basic hypothesis in this research—as outlined in Chapter 1—was that
the provision of opportunities for collaborative learning, negotiation and
planning could contribute to better management of complexity and better
negotiation amongst people with differing and competing objectives for
forest management. Based on the research presented in these pages, an
adaptive collaborative management approach does offer a viable approach
for enhancing the quality of governance in the complex conditions of
community-based forestry. Although the trends look promising, the short
duration of the research and the myriad confounding factors recommend
that we be cautiously rather than strongly optimistic about ACM’s ability
to enhance livelihoods for local people and achieve more equitable
governance and sustainable outcomes.
This brings us back to one of the reasons for wanting to share the learning
from the research: community forestry can be seen as a microcosm of global
environmental management. Just as forest-dependent people face the
challenges of increasingly limited resources, a growing multitude of resource
users, and dynamic natural systems, so too do nations and in fact the entire
global community. Diverse human systems are intertwined with—and
dependent on—each other and these natural systems. In the years since the
research began, it has become increasingly clear that although rigid, linear
approaches may be more readily managed by bureaucracies and top-down
policy frameworks, they cannot help rural communities achieve resilience
and well-being. It is time to move on from policies and practices developed
under paradigms of environmental control and ‘consequence-free’ action.
Just as the communities in this research have struggled to build their own
resilience, the global community needs to build its own collective resilience
through more humble, learning-based and flexible approaches that draw
on diverse and collective wisdom.
Endnotes
1 The reason for the difference between the Malinau initiative (Chap 5) and
the rest of the case studies: began earlier than the other three cases and was not part
of the ADB funded ACM project. As pointed out in Chapter 5, the project ‘sought
to empower local communities to increase their access and control over forest benefits and
decisions’ through ‘stimulating cooperation among stakeholders’. Unlike the other
three projects it did not aim to test ACM approaches to assess their effectiveness.
2 In this context ‘meso-level’ Signifies levels of governance between the ‘local’
or community level, where primary users and managers of forests are active, and the
national level where broad policy and legislation are developed and regulated.