Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

Chapter 6: Facilitating Change from the Inside in the Philippines • 163
The Philippine government wants to engage communities in forest
management for good reason: around 52 percent of the country’s land
area, or around 15.8 million ha, is forestland 1 (FMB 2002), and without
the involvement of local people, it would be hard for the government to
manage these vast forestlands on its own. The history of forest management
in the Philippines nevertheless reveals quite a different story. The right and
ability of local communities to manage these resources were not always
recognised and respected by the state. Space for community involvement
has been granted only in the past few decades. In fact, it took the Philippine
government more than three decades to develop its community forestry
programme. The umbrella programme, called Community-Based Forest
Management (CBFM), was launched in 1995, and its implementation still
faces many problems, particularly in dealing with the complexities of the
social, biophysical and political aspects of forest management. It is these
difficulties that the action research on adaptive collaborative management
sought to confront.
In this chapter, I describe how the adaptive collaborative management
approach and processes helped two communities and their local stakeholders
deal with the complexities of forest management. The research indicates
that by facilitating change from inside the government programme and
inside the local organisations that are responsible for managing the
community forests, the ACM approach and processes can improve the
implementation of community forestry in the Philippines. I point out areas
of community forest management that were specifically strengthened by
the ACM approach and process, and I describe the challenges that need to
be addressed for community forestry in the Philippines and for ACM to be
more broadly effective.
Community forestry in the Philippines
Historical sketch of forest management
The rich forest resources of the Philippines have been under the control of
the state government since the 19th century. The state, both colonial and
postcolonial, asserted its control over resources by mapping and zoning the
territories, enacting land and forest laws on the use of resources, establishing
state agencies to implement and enforce those laws and defining the rights of
the people over the resources (Peluso and Vandergeest 2001). The Spanish