Colfer and Prabhu build on concerns highlighted in the Glasgow Leaders Declaration on Forests and Land Use, recognizing the ‘wickedness’ of climate change and other problems bedeviling the Earth and its peoples. This chapter, in response, argues for the use of collaborative, bottom-up approaches where learning and adaptation are central features. These authors build on the longitudinal experience – some of two decades or more – of multiple teams of researchers who have worked at the community level using the ACM approach and highlighting their many enduring accomplishments. After a brief history of the collection’s development, Colfer and Prabhu argue for expanding these same kinds of processes (collaboration, learning) upward and outward. Rather than urging a substitution of large-scale action over community work, they argue for stronger links among micro, meso, and macro levels. The chapter also weaves an introduction to the book’s chapters into four topics of great importance in addressing environmental issues: (1) multiple scales and the exercise of power, (2) the value of excellent facilitation and learning, (3) collaboration in multistakeholder forums, and (4) inclusivity and intersectionality. The chapter concludes by identifying ways forward at the community and broader scales.
Tag: community forestry
ACM as a pathway to mitigate Jakarta’s flood impacts in a changing climate
This chapter assesses ACM’s potential as a pathway to address the flooding problem of Greater Jakarta, significantly exacerbated by land subsidence and climate change. It is based on a thought experiment by the authors to envision application of this approach to the problem and is not the result of empirical work. A background of Jakarta’s flooding is first provided and subsequently its framing as a ‘wicked problem’. Results of the thought experiment are then discussed, focusing on three questions: (i) Can ACM be applied, given Jakarta’s flooding governance structure? (ii) Will ACM’s social learning work for the flooding problem? And (iii) if ACM were applicable to Jakarta’s case, what operational indicators would apply? The chapter concludes with recommending a two-step ACM pathway: (1) adjusting the current flooding governance structure, for which leadership is needed with a long-term vision and the application of adaptive governance at the river basin scale; (2) shaping the enabling conditions for learning that stimulate creativity in and discovery of new problem framings and solutions outside the policy system. While the authors recognise the considerable challenges when applying ACM to the flooding of Greater Jakarta, the crisis stage it has reached necessitates adaptation approaches that can break the cycle of narrow, longstanding paradigms, policy beliefs, and maladaptive pathways.
Forest landscape restoration: A comparison of two participatory approaches
In this Occasional Paper, we compare a national approach designed to address restoration (the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program, CFLRP, of the United States Department of Agriculture/United States Forest Service) with CIFOR’s Adaptive Collaborative Management (ACM) approach, which was originally designed to encourage sustainable forest management (SFM). CIFOR’s version of SFM included equal parts forestry, ecology and human well-being, and in this case focused on the community level. This comparison – which argues that ACM can also contribute to restoration efforts – briefly alludes to the changes that have accrued in the tropics: from the rich, minimally-disturbed forests selected for study in the late 1990s when ACM began, to the current situation where the same landscapes are marked by land-use changes to huge expanses of oil palm and other commodities. This paper systematically examines both approaches, focusing first on the six conceptual similarities and then on seven distinct differences. It concludes with an examination of the ‘differences that make a difference’ in our experience. Most fundamentally, we conclude that both approaches need to broaden their focus: CFLRP would benefit from linking more closely with communities in all their diversity; and ACM should strengthen efforts to institutionalize its approach, while linking community-level involvement more substantively with broader-scale actors.
The power of possibility in landscape governance: Multiple lives of participatory action research in Kajang, Sulawesi
In 2016, Indigenous communities began to gain access to land rights in Indonesia’s vast state forests. The Kajang community of Sulawesi was the first to achieve such legal land status. Kajang also gained attention for its use of PAR to gain consensus across stakeholder groups in securing recognition. The jointly produced local regulation became symbolic for its ability to convene activists and local government, with Kajang Indigenous leaders at the center. This chapter revisits this process and describes two subsequent PAR initiatives aiming to support landscape governance and empower Kajang institutions. The research teams were directly involved in facilitating PAR processes. This team generated data through reflective discussions with each of the main stakeholder groups. Findings show that PAR continued to resonate beyond formal regulatory initiatives, translating into opportunities for pursuing sustainable landscapes. Also critically explored are contradictions and unintended consequences of normative approaches, especially implications for marginalized groups with limited access to land. The chapter thus points to design elements that change over the course of PAR and suggests some grounding principles for charting a course toward sustainable landscapes. Across PAR’s multiple lives described here, stakeholders continue to engage with PAR for its power of possibility.
Introduction to Chapter 11 “Changing the game”
In the previous chapter, Diaw et al. called for a change in the global economic system, which has so penalized African forest dwellers (and others). In this final chapter, Prabhu and Colfer call for a perhaps more dramatic change in the economic system, such that genuine stewardship – something many (not all) forest groups have practiced traditionally – be explicitly acknowledged and fairly compensated, in what Prabhu and some of his previous co-authors have called ‘stewardship economics’. Although this concluding chapter is not the place to flesh out the concept fully, we consider some of the vital elements in the proposed approach and how it might function as (part of) a logical ‘next step’ for ACM proponents.
An assessment of Participatory Forest Management inspired by adaptive collaborative management in Malawi
This chapter begins with a description of Participatory Forest Management (PFM) in Malawi and its legislation and related projects – laying out the similarities between the legislation’s ‘standards and guidelines’ and adaptive collaborative management (ACM). The first author was the lead researcher in the Center for International Forestry Research’s original ACM work in Malawi and has been a consistent advisor to the Government of Malawi. The authors then provide a summary of each of the numerous studies undertaken to assess the efficacy and value of the approach there. Building on these findings, they examine the intended outcomes of PFM, from the standpoints of livelihoods, strengthened forestry institutions, community participation in forest management and ecological health. They summarize by recounting eight lessons that have been learned in the process; and conclude with enthusiasm for the ACM/PFM approach, in recognition that more could still be done to improve it.
Sustaining adaptive collaborative management processes: Challenges and opportunities from Mafungautsi State Forest, Gokwe, Zimbabwe
An adaptive collaborative management (ACM) project was implemented in Mafungautsi State Forest, in the Gokwe South District of Zimbabwe between 1999 and 2006. By 2005, significant collaborative momentum between local resource users and officialdom at various levels had been created. Over the same period, Zimbabwe experienced unprecedented changes associated with its land reforms, profoundly impacting natural resource management. State forests became frontiers for contestation for land and forestry resources between the state and land-hungry, internal migrants and those displaced when the forests were reserved. This chapter examines the earlier ACM processes against the backdrop of this national meltdown. Interviews and desk study yielded longitudinal data that tracked nuances in the dynamics and endurance of ACM processes. The study provides important insights that can enhance ACM efficacy and functionality under a unique ‘test’ environment characterized by severe economic and socio-political stress, lessons presumably also applicable under more normal conditions. Despite these political economic factors that had a profound impact on local ACM processes, residual elements of ACM remained around Mafungautsi. Forestry Commission (FC) management still considers ACM a policy option, albeit in largely rhetorical terms. We conclude that ACM can contribute to dealing with the complex situations faced in this forest and elsewhere.
Changing the game: An economy built around stewardship
This chapter begins by reiterating the calls by the Glassgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use and others for more effective attention to climate change. To respond to these calls, we argue that globally we will need to change ‘the game’ from one based on commodification to one that recognizes the systemic nature of human and natural life and builds a caring economy of stewardship. We then summarize elements of the ACM experiences described in this book that demonstrate the need for better cross-scale collaboration as we seek more enduring transformations than we were able to accomplish by focusing only on the local. We examine some of the history, nature and value of what Prabhu has called a Stewardship Economy in the next section, making the point that both the natural and human elements and related relationships among them need greater attention. We include examples of existing stewardship that emerged ‘in passing’ in the ACM experience, despite the earlier absence of explicit attention to such issues. We conclude with the need to develop mechanisms, such as a ‘stewardship dividend’ to reward those who demonstrate such care.
Responding to Environmental Issues through Adaptive Collaborative Management: From Forest Communities to Global Actors
Focused on forest management and governance, this book examines two decades of experience with Adaptive Collaborative Management (ACM), assessing both its uses and improvements needed to address global environmental issues.
The volume argues that the activation and the empowerment of local peoples are critical to addressing current environmental challenges and that this must be enhanced by linking and extending such stewardship to global and national policymakers and actors on a broader scale. This can be achieved by employing ACM’s participatory approach, characterized by conscious efforts among stakeholders to communicate, collaborate, negotiate and seek out opportunities to learn collectively about the impacts of their action. The case studies presented here reflect decades of experience working with forest communities in three Indonesian Islands and four African countries. Researchers and practitioners who participated in CIFOR’s early ACM work had the rare opportunity to return to their research sites decades later to see what has happened. These authors reflect critically on their own experience and local site conditions to glean insights that guide us in more effectively addressing climate change and other forest-related challenges. They showcase how global and regional actors will have to work more closely with smallholders, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, recognizing the key local roles in forest stewardship.
This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working in the fields of conservation, forest management, community development, natural resource management and development studies more broadly.
Examining support for the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in the context of REDD+ in the DRC, Indonesia and Peru: A comparative analysis with recommendations for further progress
Key messages
- Cancun safeguards were established to – at a minimum – prevent the most harmful impacts (“do no harm”) on the territories, livelihoods and sociocultural lives of the Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs) that steward forests where REDD+ interventions are implemented. However, these safeguards are to be interpreted by each country based on their own legal frameworks and policy priorities.
- Comparative analysis of the rights of IPs and LCs in the legal frameworks and policies of the DRC, Indonesia, and Peru – three of the four countries with highest tropical forest cover – reveals different levels of recognition and respect for the rights of IPs and LCs in the context of REDD+.
- These different engagements with the rights of IPs and LCs, and divergence from rights recognized under international agreements (e.g., UNDRIP), reveal that progress from safeguards that ‘do no harm’ to ones that aim to ‘do better’ will be challenging and uneven.
- ‘Doing better’ requires greater effort, starting with a reconsideration of REDD+ proponents as duty bearers and communities as rights holders with the capacities and mechanisms to hold the former accountable (e.g., monitoring of rights obligations including access to participation and benefits).
- Further reflection at the level of the UNFCCC is needed to decide whether safeguards should ‘do better’. This would require laying out levels of ambition more clearly and transparently, providing clearer guidelines and more stringent requirements for REDD+ countries, and a more robust monitoring of their compliance.
- The evidence of the impact of IPs and LCs as stewards of forest landscapes of high biodiversity suggests that safeguards that ‘do better’ by supporting their self-determination and access and control of their ancestral territories, will not only be transformative in terms of equity but also will support REDD+’s wider goals.