Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

22 • Ravi Prabhu, Cynthia McDougall and Robert Fisher
stakeholders and depart, then combine the disparate bits of information
and views into a report and send back their recommendations (or, sometimes,
make the recommendations to others). In an ACM approach, any outside
experts help generate information for internal use, and only secondarily for
external use, and they interact with the local stakeholders in a facilitated
process. The process of linking and making sense of different perspectives
and knowledge takes place interactively, with direction from and the active
involvement of local actors. Local actors become proactive in identifying and
accessing needed information and knowledge, and this increases their power.
Box 2-2. Traditional versus adaptive collaborative management
In the background studies of the CIFOR and partner project in Nepal, the
research teams observed several commonalities in the forest management
and governance processes and institutions that preceded the ACM approach:
• Forest user group committees, the main decision-making bodies, were
dominated by men from local elites.
• Decision making was restricted to a small group or an individual
• Full assemblies of members, if held, were often used for rubber-stamping
or disseminating committee decisions.
• Decision making was based largely on existing information and beliefs.
• There were no mechanisms feeding back lessons from the implementation
of plans into the planning process.
During the participatory action research phase, the facilitators tried to catalyse
the following:
• the involvement of all relevant stakeholders;
• effective communication in multiple directions;
• joint actions;
• effective conflict management;
• the application of shared intentional learning to management;
• the use of a systems view of human and natural systems; and
• decision making that incorporated visioning and took into account
uncertainty.
One institutional change that emerged across the research sites during the
ACM projects involved the locus for decision making: it moved from the
committees of elite men to involve community members at the hamlet level.
The result was a corresponding increase in two-way information flow between
forest users and the committee, and more people had ownership of the
decisions taken. The processes that emerged contrasted noticeably with the
more linear ‘committee —› assembly —› implementation (or not)’ sequence
of events. In the ACM approach (as synthesised across the sites), forest user
group members developed an agreed shared vision of the future and then
used that to create ‘indicators’ for their group.