Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

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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.
Chapter 2: Adaptive Collaborative Management: A Conceptual Model • 23 ACM calls for a similar shift for government and NGO ‘service providers’, who in traditional approaches to forest management and development typically direct planning and decision making in local forest management, providing ‘blueprints’, ‘answers’, ‘knowledge’ or technical directives. Instead, these outside experts become collaborators and colearners who contribute to the local processes and plans in response to the needs of local actors (Box 2-3). They may take leadership roles in facilitating meetings and catalysing ACM, but leadership is also—and most importantly— drawn and developed from within local communities themselves. The facilitators—whether insiders or outsiders—help to link perspectives, goals and knowledge from different sources and engender a learning orientation in the management processes and plans. Box 2-3. New roles for external actors Although a change in the traditional roles of outside ‘experts’ in community forestry is necessary, this shift poses a dual challenge for bureaucracies. For example, in Nepal, government forest offices are traditionally (and legally) responsible for policing forests according to community forest user groups’ operational plans and principles of nonharm to community forests. With a shift towards increasingly community-led forest management and an ACM approach, they are also being asked to play a facilitative role, yet without exerting undue influence in the direction of their own interests. In addition, technical foresters are being asked to step outside their technical roles and become facilitators. Given that effective facilitation requires a distinct set of skill and attitudes, this can be problematic and needs on-going consideration. Conceptual model In this section, we return to the challenge articulated in Holland’s (1998) question at the beginning of this chapter: ‘How can the interactions of agents produce an aggregate entity that is more flexible and adaptive than its component agents?’ Our intention here is to offer an explanatory model of how innovation emerges from human agency. In doing so, we follow Holland (1998) on the construction of such models and suggest that the cogency and relevance of a model be tested on the extent to which it (a) discovers relevant and plausible building blocks and (b) constructs coherent, relevant combinations of those building blocks. In spelling out this challenge for our model, we are responding to the need in natural
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Chapter 4: Improving Forest Quality
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Chapter 7: Discussion and Conclusio
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CIFOR is a leading international fo
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