Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

32 • Ravi Prabhu, Cynthia McDougall and Robert Fisher
How connectivity, communities of practice and their abilities to learn shape
adaptive collaborative management is represented in Figure 2-3. During
this phase, visions are turned into plans that can be turned into action. A
considerable amount of institution building takes place, and the norms,
rules and technical guidelines for management are articulated or refined.
Communities of practice. Wenger (1998) describes a community of
practice as characterised by three features: mutual engagement of its
members, a joint enterprise, and a shared repertoire of routines, tacit rules
of conduct and knowledge over time. Thus it has self-organising and selfgenerating
webs of communications, a shared purpose and meaning, and a
shared culture that results in the coordination of behaviour and creation of
shared knowledge. In communities of practice we can recognise the ‘living
elements’ of natural resource user groups.
Relatedly, De Geus (1997) studied 27 long-lived corporations and identified
common characteristics 5 . He concluded that resilient long-lived companies
are much like living entities, with two main sets of characteristics. One is a
strong sense of community and collective identity around a set of common
values—in other words, a resilient organisation is a community in which all
members know that they will be supported in their endeavours to achieve
their own goals. The other set is openness to the outside world, a tolerance
for the entry of new individuals and ideas and consequently a manifest
ability to learn and to adapt to new circumstances. According to Capra
(2002) the aliveness of an organisation—its flexibility, creative potential
and learning capability—resides in networks or ‘informal communities
of practice’. The formal parts of organisations depend on their informal
networks for their aliveness. (We elaborate further on networks in the
following subsection).
In an ACM approach, one process goal is thus to identify and/or catalyse
the emergence of such living elements of communities of practice in the
group because these elements form the critical nuclei of all action. In fact,
we suggest that the aliveness of local forest management institutions—or
other organisations—is very much dependent on the degree to which the
group embodies the features of communities of practice. Working with—or
within—a community of practice is not always straightforward, since their
informal and dynamic nature often makes them challenging to understand.
However, ignoring or working against such communities of practice would
limit the sustainability of forest management, if not potentially jeopardise
it altogether.