Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

156 • Eva Wollenberg, Ramses Iwan, Godwin Limberg, Moira Moeliono, Steve Rhee and Made Sudana
This form of adaptiveness requires accepting a muddling-through attitude
and coping with resulting risk and inefficiencies. Learning opportunities
need to be built into schedules, with adequate time. Reflection processes
need to be creative and efficient to maintain their appeal. Facilitation
strategies need to be flexible enough to respond to changing opportunities,
yet not change so often that other groups do not understand the purpose
or direction of the work. In Malinau, adjusting strategies about once a
year seemed to work; these changes were incremental and built iteratively
upon earlier strategies. Adjustment does not mean abrupt departure from
objectives and established processes. Facilitators need to allow enough time
to really test and evaluate their strategies before they change them.
In the process of muddling through, relationships do not change easily.
Initial partner relationships establish the facilitator’s identity and alliances
in ways that are hard to change later. The tradeoffs associated with working
with one partner versus another need to be weighed carefully. We do not
believe it is possible for facilitators to work neutrally in multistakeholder
contexts (Forester 1989; Edmunds and Wollenberg 2001). In such contexts,
facilitators should be prepared to support marginalised groups in their efforts
to constructively confront those in power. They need to acknowledge their
biases and anticipate the possible tradeoffs in relationships this will create.
One option for trying to work more evenly with all stakeholders is to have
pluralistic facilitation—that is, a team of facilitators who themselves hold
diverse values that reflect different stakeholders’ interests. Each member
of the team would build relationships with different stakeholders. In some
ways, CIFOR’s overall project in Malinau approximates this model, where
different staff have gravitated to different stakeholder groups. Such an
approach is costly, however, and would be difficult to replicate. To the
extent that facilitators have to take joint decisions, their own leadership
and power structure biases will come into play.
The strength of the informal, muddling approach to enhancing cooperation
is that it can increase the relevance of facilitation to local circumstances.
Information is more accurate, in-depth and comprehensive and reflects
different perspectives from different groups. Facilitation more closely
mirrors how local policies are made and therefore enables the facilitators
to take advantage of different waves of opportunity to initiate new cycles of
work and engage different groups at times of maximum impact. It is easier
to carve out the space to work independently, as we did with villagers on
their land-use plans and proposals to government, and easier to monitor