Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

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154 • Eva Wollenberg, Ramses Iwan, Godwin Limberg, Moira Moeliono, Steve Rhee and Made Sudana The leader of another village said, ‘It seems whatever CIFOR plans, is what the government also had plans to do.’ These comments reflect our dilemmas, described above, in trying to work with government, as well as the limitations of a research organisation in engaging in ‘development’ or change processes. Introducing new ideas and facilitating partnerships are not always sufficient to create change. The outcomes affected certain groups more than others. We found that Punan villagers became increasingly interested in working with us and increased their participation and confidence in the intercommunity meetings. Because the field team lived adjacent to the two Punan villages in Loreh, there was much time for informal chats. Certain Punan individuals (men and elites) tended to visit our field team or ask for favors regularly. The more powerful ethnic groups seem to need CIFOR less and have interacted with us less over the years. Outcomes at the government level were more mixed. The head of the forest service was especially negative and implied he was completely unaware about our activities, despite our work with him and his staff in the reforestation program. Other government officials pointed to the increased conflict caused by the mapping and suggested that CIFOR created burdens for the government by raising people’s expectations. The head of the planning agency said, ‘If CIFOR goes, they will surely leave behind problems for the government and communities. They constantly give people dreams.’ In contrast, PMD made positive comments about how much CIFOR helped them. As with the less influential Punan, it seems that the less influential government agencies were more interested in working with us than the secure and powerful ones. That mix of views and interests in collaboration reflects the values of the different groups involved. In a project intended to empower a marginalised group, it may be difficult to avoid creating jealousies or threats to other groups. Facilitating collaboration requires specific strategies for dealing with each group. It also means being prepared to handle conflict with authorities and have your goals undermined by some groups. Like Castellanet and Jordan (2002), we believe that the biggest accomplishment of this type of action research is incremental changes in capacities and attitudes. Getting different groups to talk freely with each other about their needs is itself a big achievement (Hagmann 1999). We hope that over time, these incremental changes will lead to a critical mass of people who support a shared cause and ultimately real action.
Chapter 5: Muddling Towards Cooperation in Malinau • 155 Conclusion Models of adaptive collaborative management suggested by Chess et al. (1998) and others (Sinclair and Smith 1999; Wondolleck and Yaffee 2000) or even simple platforms for collaboration like multistakeholder forums (Hemmati 2002) are unlikely to work in contexts such as Malinau, or at least not generate socially just and long-term outcomes. These approaches presume functioning management systems, checks and balances for managing power and clear institutions for deliberation, reaching agreements and managing conflict. In Malinau and other places with weakly developed civil society or in newly decentralised states with low capacities, these conditions do not exist. The transaction costs of collaboration and the possibilities for cooption or unsustainability are too high. The alternative is to learn to work with spontaneous orders of cooperation. For facilitators this requires long-term investment in a more embedded and informal approach and expectations of small, incremental gains. We suggest that working with and enhancing spontaneous orders of cooperation requires its own methods of adaptive facilitation: being hyperflexible; being physically present and interactive with multiple networks; being aware of gatekeepers, events and motives; and maintaining close relations with those who support the gatekeepers. Where gatekeepers have different or opposing agendas, facilitators can create the space to manoeuvre for those who do share a common agenda by being less dependent on gatekeepers, maintaining a lower profile, working more informally and yet acknowledging gatekeepers’ authority and keeping them informed. It requires facilitating multiple processes targeted at the needs of different groups at different times. It may be necessary to build awareness about alternative procedures of governance and values of social justice, but facilitators should not expect such procedures and values to be easily or quickly institutionalised. Natural opportunities for forging connections between groups regularly presented themselves once we became involved and visible in the communities. We feel that working with these natural opportunities to accelerate connections among groups creates a more enduring impact. Such informal contacts are always likely to arise and can provide vast amounts of information about relationships, constraints and opportunities that are more difficult to see in constructed environments of formal multistakeholder forums.
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Copyright © 2007 by Center for Int
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iv • Contents Chapter 5. Muddling
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vi • Foreword problem solving. Th
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viii • About the Contributors God
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Acknowledgements In early 1999, two
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Chapter 1. Introduction: People, Fo
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Chapter 1: Introduction: People, Fo
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Chapter 2: Adaptive Collaborative M
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Chapter 3: Adaptiveness and Collabo
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Chapter 4. Shaping Opportunities fo
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Chapter 4: Improving Forest Quality
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Chapter 6: Facilitating Change from
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Chapter 7: Discussion and Conclusio
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CIFOR is a leading international fo
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