Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

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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.
Chapter 2: Adaptive Collaborative Management: A Conceptual Model • 39 Box 2-6. Machine metaphor for postindustrial organisations Management theorist Senge (1990) concludes that the machine metaphor for organisational development is so powerful that it has shaped the character of most organisations. Organisations become more like machines than living beings because their members think of them that way, and that explains why a management style guided by the machine metaphor will have problems with organisational change. The need to have all changes designed by management and imposed upon the organisation tends to generate bureaucratic rigidity. There is no room for flexible adaptations, learning and evolution. One related aspect of this, as Capra (2002) points out, is that emergent solutions are created within the context of a particular organisational culture and generally cannot be transferred to another organisation with a different culture. This tends to be a big problem for leaders who are keen on replicating successful organisational change: they tend to replicate a new structure that has been successful without transferring the tacit knowledge and context of meaning from which the new structure emerged. This can lead to very mechanistic forms of organisation. In possibly one of the best analyses of the machine metaphor (although he does not use the term) as it applies to states, Scott (1998) has pointed out the dangers of such an approach, which can become dominant under four conditions: • An administrative ordering of nature and society in grand attempts at transformative state simplifications. States, he contends, dislike the natural complexity of ecosystems and social systems, because they cannot deal with it using their usual forms of organisation. • ‘High modernism’, which he defines as an ideology that borrows legitimacy from the sciences and technology and as a result is uncritical, unsceptical and unscientifically optimistic. Examples include big river projects and social engineering. • An authoritative state that has a capacity to act in the ways listed above. • A powerless civil society that provides ‘the level social terrain’ on which to build. Scott’s observations apply equally well to a great many of the small community development projects we see in our rural landscapes. Scott notes that ‘workto-rule’ protests effectively hamstring a state, industry or organisation precisely because the rules in themselves are never sufficient to make something work. Local knowledge, contracts and relationships allow an organisation to live and are what make the difference.
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