Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

38 • Ravi Prabhu, Cynthia McDougall and Robert Fisher
lead to a ‘process fix’—a lot of thinking and talking about the problem,
without taking action to solve it.
In conclusion, phase 2 of the model suggests that by encouraging
communities of practice, connectivity and social learning, an ACM
approach can strengthen self-organisation, especially in terms of adaptive
capacity. The model in this way draws from Capra’s (2002) reflections on
natural systems. Capra suggests that self-organisation is manifested in the
spontaneous emergence of new structures and new forms of behaviour 7 .
Self-organisation—with an emphasis on adaptive capacity—thus
contrasts markedly with mechanistic models for organisations, such as the
hierarchies and top-down committees and leadership structures that have
historically dominated bureaucracies, development agencies and natural
resource extension services. These organisations reflect the machine
metaphor—a centralised command unit that determines the direction of
the organisation.
Contrast that machine metaphor with the metaphor of the living and
learning organisation, which according to Capra (2002) is characterised
by openness and a willingness to be disturbed to set processes of change
in motion. Such organisations have active networks of communications
and multiple feedback loops that can amplify triggering events and create
instability, experienced as tension, chaos, uncertainty or crisis. At this
stage the system (or organisational culture) may either break down or
break through to a new order, which may be ‘characterized by novelty and
involves an experience of creativity that often feels like magic’ (Capra
2002: 102). This explains why the long-lived organisations in De Geus’s
(1997) study exhibited characteristics of living systems, and it is just as true
for organisation that exist for the management of community forests, as the
ACM research has shown.
In the initial communicative action phase, by catalysing shared vision,
meaning and purpose, the ACM approach facilitates openness and generates
an atmosphere of trust in which ‘disturbance’ by new ideas is tolerated.
The second phase encourages and enables groups’ self-organising nature
to emerge. Linking these two phases is an underlying truth highlighted
by Capra (2002): the common notion that people resist change is wrong;
rather, they resist change that is imposed upon them. The success of the
ACM approach therefore relies on creating conditions in which necessary
change is not imposed but induced through the group’s own connectivity
and feedback loops.