Tag: community involvement

This chapter begins with a look at the Greek concepts of ouroboros and triskelion, emphasizing the static versus dynamic nature of social phenomena, linking ACM to the latter. The authors systematically re-examine the chapters in this book, seeking clarity on what ACM is. They then examine how successful it has been in its various manifestations, highlighting both strengths and weaknesses. The next section looks in depth at two major African programmes to take the insights from ACM, usually conducted at a local level, to a broader scale or higher level, encompassing larger geographical areas (SHARED and Greening Africa). This section is valuable in its demonstration of some of the differences that emerge, but also the applicability, when one attempts ACM at grander scales. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on changing global paradigms and the philosophical implications of ACM for people’s lives.

Chapter 1 briefly introduces the concept of and rationale for adaptive collaborative management (or ACM), as implemented by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and its partners around the forested tropics. It then provides the professional trajectories of the three editors, an anthropologist, a forester and a natural resource governance specialist, showing how they came to consider this approach of value. Their respective experience in Asia, Africa and Latin America brings geographical and ethnic variety to their observations and conclusions as well. A third section provides the theoretical underpinnings for the approach, drawing heavily on anthropological and systems-oriented thinking. The authors build on theories and observations from the 20th century as well as contemporary approaches. The concluding section briefly introduces each subsequent chapter, laying out the contributing authors’ experience and improvements to the original version of ACM as implemented within CIFOR’s programmes.

This book examines the value of Adaptive Collaborative Management for facilitating learning and collaboration with local communities and beyond, utilising detailed studies of forest landscapes and communities. Many forest management proposals are based on top-down strategies, such as the Million Tree Initiatives, Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) and REDD+, often neglecting local communities. In the context of the climate crisis, it is imperative that local peoples and communities are an integral part of all decisions relating to resource management. Rather than being seen as beneficiaries or people to be safeguarded, they should be seen as full partners, and Adaptive Collaborative Management is an approach which priorities the rights and roles of communities alongside the need to address the environmental crisis. The volume presents detailed case studies and real life examples from across the globe, promoting and prioritizing the voices of women and scholars and practitioners from the Global South who are often under-represented. Providing concrete examples of ways that a bottom-up approach can function to enhance development sustainably, via its practitioners and far beyond the locale in which they initially worked, this volume demonstrates the lasting utility of approaches like Adaptive Collaborative Management that emphasize local control, inclusiveness and local creativity in management. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working in the fields of conservation, forest management, community development and natural resource management and development studies more broadly.

“See also Book Talk by Carol Colfer at Cornell University Library”.