Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

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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.
Chapter 2: Adaptive Collaborative Management: A Conceptual Model • 33 Creating and maintaining connectivity. Recent literature from the fields of systems dynamics has stressed the importance of connectivity. Holling et al. (2000), for example, have presented a model of the adaptive cycle, which explains the dynamic of natural systems in terms of their connectivity and capital. Indeed, over the past few decades, research into living systems has revealed the importance of networks 6 at all levels, from the molecular to organisms to social systems. Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers (1998) provide a compelling argument for connectivity and networks when they point out that to facilitate emergence of novelty means first of all building up and nurturing networks of communication to better connect the system to itself. Carrying out experiments on a simulated network as part of this CIFOR project, Haggith et al. (2003) concluded that increasing the density of social networks increases the spread of successful ideas while speeding up the loss of ideas with no competitive advantage. In forestry, we understand ‘connecting’ as the process of linking social groups and individuals together to form communication networks around a particular forest resource or issue. In these networks, groups that reflect characteristics of ‘communities of practice’ (see above subsection) form dynamic hubs. An ACM approach enables connectivity in the forest management system in several ways. First, the approach includes processes that support stakeholders in seeking to understand what the effective ‘boundaries’ of the system should be for their purposes, so that the actors know who needs to be connected to whom. Second, collaborative monitoring, platforms for reflection (such as meetings to critically assess lessons learned from the implementation of plans), and opportunities for people to meet and discuss new information or to challenge existing ideas are explicit and regularised. Many other processes, activities and tools, such as study tours, can also encourage connectivity. ‘Connecting the system to more of itself’ has snowball effects. In the ACM research project, linkages amongst forest actors were made formally and informally in a variety of ways. In the Nepal project, for example, they included formal connections of resource users from diverse social groups within forest user groups, hamlets that created formal or informal crosshamlet linkages, and formal committees or self-generated action groups that established formal or informal relations with external agencies. These overlapping layers of connectivity (in conjunction with other ACM processes) appeared to spark new initiatives, such as activities to generate nontimber forest product income. Furthermore, in the research project in general, it appears that the increased linkages often triggered further
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Chapter 4: Improving Forest Quality
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Chapter 5: Muddling Towards Coopera
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Chapter 7: Discussion and Conclusio
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CIFOR is a leading international fo
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