Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

20 • Ravi Prabhu, Cynthia McDougall and Robert Fisher
the diverse interpretations of experience, knowledge and learning. (Social
learning is further explored in the subsequent sections of this chapter).
In sum, in ACM, gathering information and negotiating outcomes take
place as part of a single integrated and collaborative learning process.
Learning is not, after all, just about collecting information, but about
deciding what it means. Where the information means different things to
different people, the attribution of meaning works best if it is discussed and
negotiated interactively.
Joint or collective action
By definition, adaptive collaborative management involves action that
is agreed upon and supported by multiple actors. The need for joint or
collective action reflects the complex nature of forests, people’s overlapping
interests, rights and responsibilities, and the resulting potential for tensions
between local, meso and national levels of governance as well as between
private, government and civil society institutions. Even within one local
area, the ‘common property’ nature of community forests (whether legally
designed community forests or not) demands that if actions are to be
acceptable to most forest actors, they will need to be jointly agreed, if not
jointly carried out.
One foundational aspect of joint or collective action (and the whole
governance and management process) is the need to assemble the ‘right’
actors. This is challenging, not in the least because the definition of those
actors is subjective as well as time, context and issue dependent.
Wollenberg et al. (2001) identify problems associated with collective
action (‘collective agreements’), including the fact that transaction costs
in achieving them may in some cases outweigh their immediate gains.
Furthermore, they point out that the more powerful members in a group
tend to take over and control such agreements. They note that it ‘takes
more time, human energy, and material resources to identify all the
relevant forest interest groups, develop platforms on which their interests
can be accommodated effectively, and coordinate interests in a way that
respects the legitimacy and autonomy of each of them than it does to
simply manage forests as though they were the sole responsibility of the
government’ (Wollenberg et al. 2001).