Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

44 • Ravi Prabhu, Cynthia McDougall and Robert Fisher
environment, including the rules and resources that shape their situation,
is the key to their potential to enhance material action and their ultimate
well-being.
Conclusion
We began this chapter with the question posed by Holland (1998: 248):
How can the interactions of agents produce an aggregate entity that is
more flexible and adaptive than its component agents? We suggested
that this question is the challenge facing forestry in the new millennium.
In this chapter we have investigated this challenge by exploring how
seemingly independent agents—forest-dependent people and natural
resource managers—who are a part of complex systems can use processes
of communication, collaboration, learning and organisation to achieve
goals and adapt in ways that they could not have done on their own or in
a rigid or hierarchical form of organisation. The ACM group that emerges
from cycling through the phases of communication, strategic action and
material action, as we have defined them here, operates as a community
of practice whose defining characteristic is that it more closely resembles a
living entity than a machine, and it is—in Holland’s words—more flexible
and adaptive than its component agents.
Throughout this book, we recognise that the theoretical model we offer
is an attempt at explaining a much more complex reality. In reality it is
difficult to separate the phases of ACM neatly and distinctly. Although
the model suggests general progress—from communicative to strategic to
material action—these phases are not mutually exclusive in practice. Rather,
they are continuously interconnected as the group iterates back and forth
between phases and moves on cyclically when ready. Much of the iteration
is in response to real-world complexities, such as the miscommunications,
tensions and power struggles that accompany processes of communication,
negotiation and collaboration. These bumps in the road impede the
generation of common meaning, self-organisation and coordination for
material action.
In exploring an adaptive collaborative management approach as an
explanatory model of how innovation emerges from human agency, we
have attempted to satisfy Holland’s (1998) stipulation that the construction
of explanatory models lay out relevant and plausible building blocks. We