Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

30 • Ravi Prabhu, Cynthia McDougall and Robert Fisher
outcomes which we expected anyway at the outset.. The corollary of this is
that most possible outcomes are not covered by conventional monitoring
systems because they are not expected. Furthermore, the understanding of
processes and forces underlying the outcomes is not necessarily increased.
In contrast, the purpose of monitoring in an ACM approach is to continuously
generate a better understanding of system behaviour and to facilitate
learning about how to manage it better. The ACM model hypothesises
that a collaborative monitoring approach, which uses iteratively and
jointly developed and tested local indicators, will be more effective in
addressing this challenge than conventional approaches to monitoring in
many contexts. Not only do such types of monitoring systems incorporate
diverse mental models, but they also focus on critical processes as well as
the outcomes or impacts of these processes, as understood and defined by
the local stakeholders (Box 2-4).
Box 2-4. Collaborative monitoring
Collaborative monitoring is a process that groups use to improve the
effectiveness of decision making about their resources and to accommodate
their views. They do this by developing a common framework for observing
the effectiveness of their plans and unexpected outcomes. They negotiate their
vision or aims, agree to collect information, share it, reflect on and analyse the
information and apply the resulting learning as the basis for their on-going
planning.
In her thorough analysis of collaborative monitoring, Guijt (2007:10)
makes the following points:
Monitoring that involves critical reflection on information - and not
just data collection - is pivotal. Continual information input - about
the state of the resources, about how they are being used, about how to
work together in making decisions, and so much more - is crucial. But
if collective action is to ensure, then collective sense making through
critical analysis of information is essential.
If we consider monitoring from a systems perspective, there are two central
components of control: feedback and ‘feedforward’. Feedback deals with
things after they have happened and seeks to correct the situation so that
the undesirable outcome is changed. In feedforward, attention is directed