Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

Chapter 2: Adaptive Collaborative Management: A Conceptual Model • 27
context: the capacity to facilitate the emergence of novelty. This means
creating conditions for innovation, rather than giving directions only, and
using the power of authority to empower others. Here we see leadership
and facilitation being linked to communication and the mental models of
the individuals involved in managing or utilising the resources.
Mental models. Forest stakeholders (or as we referred to them earlier,
members of the ACM group) typically vary significantly in their beliefs,
values, attitudes and knowledge—their ‘mental models—associated with
the forest resource and each other. The model emphasises the need for
the stakeholders to understand the individual and social constructions of
their forest-related reality. This emphasis is rooted in the hypothesis that
governance or management reflects the underlying mental models of the
group members—or at least those of the dominant members. Any desired
change in governance, management or outcomes is reliant on changes
in the group’s mental models 3 . We further explore this here by drawing
on some of the literature related to cognition and multiple perceptions of
realities.
According to Maturana and Varela (1987; Maturana 1980), perception
and, more generally, cognition are not simply representations of an external
reality, but rather the nervous system’s iterative process of interaction with
its environment. Varela et al. (1991: 140) express this as follows:
We must call into question that the world is pre-given and that cognition
is representation. In cognitive science, this means that we must call into
question the idea that information exists ready-made in the world and
that it is extracted by cognition.
Claims of ‘objective realities’ must be met with scepticism. In adaptive
collaborative management, ‘reality’ is first individually and then socially
constructed. It follows that we can only know and act in the world as we
understand it through our subjective and constructed perceptions (Cantril
1960).
Thus, in this model we suggest that within a group of forest stakeholders
there are multiple perceptions of reality, each rooted in the cognitive
capacities of individuals. These perceptions are subject to culture-bound
conceptualisations that depend on the symbolic—generally linguistic—
systems in which they are embedded. As Whorf (1952: 21) points out,
We cut up and organise the spread and flow of events as we do largely
because ... we are parties of an agreement to do so, not because nature
itself is segmented in exactly that way for all to see.