Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

42 • Ravi Prabhu, Cynthia McDougall and Robert Fisher
if recognised and addressed, can engender adaptiveness and collaboration
and create space for effective action, but it can be unforgiving: if the
management system cannot or does not respond with enough flexibility
and swiftness—for example, as in the case of international efforts to stem
global warming—material outcomes will very likely fail to meet people’s
needs and expectations.
Enabling environment. An ‘enabling’ environment is the space available
to local actors to practice or develop an ACM approach. Here, we examine
an enabling environment in the political, social and economic contexts
within which ACM groups exist, and specifically, the exercise of power
from external forces or actors on these groups. Power in governance
and management has been defined and analysed by numerous insightful
theorists. Giddens (1984), for example, defines power in the sense of the
capability to ‘make a difference’ to a preexisting state of affairs or course
of events. Galbraith (1984: 13) suggests that ‘the exercise of power, the
submission of some to the will of others, is inevitable in human society:
nothing whatever is accomplished without it … Power can be socially
malign; it is also socially essential’.
Taking a broader view, Sen (1999) differentiates five instrumental freedoms
that constitute an enabling environment: political freedom, economic
facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees and protective
security. On a practical level, these freedoms would all contribute to an ACM
group’s ability to generate its desired material outcomes. The reason we
include this point here, however, is a more fundamental one: development is
the process of expanding human freedom. This is an interesting perspective
from which to consider approaches to natural resource management
and governance. If we see management and governance as intertwined
aspects of development—rather than technical tasks—then they are also
necessarily focussed on the unfolding of human freedom. With this as the
ultimate goal of material action, then the environment of a management
group must enable more than good management decisions: it must enable
creative processes that create meaningful space for all forest-dependent
people and generate ongoing, effective, long-term decision making for
people and natural systems.
Capacity. Capacity is a composite variable comprising the management
system’s attributes (norms, rules, institutions, leadership), as well as such
resources as knowledge systems, relationships, skills, financial capital and
any other assets that can be used to help a group achieve its goals. In