Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

46 • Ravi Prabhu, Cynthia McDougall and Robert Fisher
work is very relevant to community natural resource management institutions. See,
for example, Ostrom (1990) and, with specific relevance to common property forest
management institutions in Nepal, Fisher (1994).
6 So much so that this has prompted Margulis and Sagan (1986) to remark
that contrary to earlier metaphors, life took over the globe not by combat but by
networking.
7 Capra (2002) specifically refers to this to taking place in open systems far from
equilibrium, characterised by internal feedback loops and described mathematically
by nonlinear equations. Prigogine and Stengers (1984) go on to suggest that selforganization
processes in conditions of disequilibrium correspond to a delicate
interplay between chance and necessity, between fluctuations and deterministic laws.
Although they were not referring to self-organization processes in social systems, their
observations nonetheless hold true under such conditions as well.
8 Naturally, people are engaged in material or instrumental action in all kinds
of approaches to natural resource management; however, they quite often arrive
meanderingly at that point through trial and error rather than a conscious, structured
use of phases of communicative and strategic action. In other words, actors may be
involved in ‘material action’ at any point, but if they engage in this in isolation from
the other forms of action, they may be forgoing the added value of collaboration and
structured learning.
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