Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

70 • Cynthia McDougall, Hemant Ojha, Raj Kumar Pandey, Mani Ram Banjade and Bishnu Hari Pandit
continual improvements in forests, resource management and governance,
and people’s well-being.
Understanding who ‘wins’ and who ‘loses’: tracking and assessing
participation and benefit sharing. During the PAR, the Bamdibhir and
Deurali-Bagedanda CFUGs developed a process to track and assess who
in the CFUG was participating in, contributing to and benefiting from
community forestry activities. This ‘equity assessment process’ was a
simple one that cross-checked participation and benefits against a wealth
and diversity ranking of all CFUG members. Very importantly, the ranking
as well as the ongoing assessment were transparent and accessible to all.
Although this tracking is a form of self-monitoring, we highlight it separately
to underscore its significance as a mechanism to make equity more explicit
in CFUGs. It helped forest users and committees observe the degree to
which CFUG decisions and actions (e.g., benefit distribution) matched
their stated objectives regarding equity. Furthermore, in some cases it was
used as leverage by marginalised users to hold the committee accountable to
its commitments to equity (as illustrated in ‘Outcomes: human capital’).
Planning to learn: including some aspect of ‘conscious learning’ in every
activity. Some action groups built the ACM element of ‘conscious and
shared learning’ into their activity planning by, for example, implementing
activities as small trials or experiments with learning questions, monitoring
their progress and adjusting their plans. Other groups, such as those
considering a bamboo handicraft enterprise and a sawmill in the Kaski sites
tried out a simple form of ‘systems analysis’ to help them assess potential
risks and identify uncertainties. The motivation for taking this learning
approach was to minimise risks and optimise outcomes by enhancing the
effectiveness of planning and actions. For example, one action group wanted
to establish a bamboo nursery to produce seedlings for the CFUG and for
sale but knew it was risky because past efforts had had minimal success.
They therefore developed ‘learning questions’ to research, including
reasons for past failures and specific technical questions about bamboo
seedling care and propagation. They conducted in-depth interviews with
the main caretaker of the previous nursery initiative and sought technical
information and literature from outside actors. As a result, their nursery
plants had a much higher survival rate.
The overall changes in structures and processes are illustrated in Figures
3-2 and 3-3. Figure 3-2 shows a common model of CFUG structures and
processes, drawn from patterns observed in the four main case study sites