Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

Chapter 6: Facilitating Change from the Inside in the Philippines • 197
extracted and control illegal activities. This experience showed that the
POs would monitor their natural resources if the results were meaningful
and useful to them.
DENR’s blueprint for monitoring, called Environmental Performance
Monitoring, was intended to help POs throughout the country evaluate
their progress and improve their management systems. Unfortunately, the
intent was not clearly communicated, and many POs perceived monitoring
as a new burden. The PO in the ACM site, for example, worried that DENR
would use Environmental Performance Monitoring as a tool to assess their
performance and penalise them if they scored low. The POs needed to be
involved in designing the monitoring system and experience for themselves
how it could help them. DENR staff cannot help every PO to develop its
own system, but they can encourage POs to tailor the current system’s
criteria and indicators framework to their local conditions and, more
importantly, adopt a hands-off policy with regards to the collected data.
Overemphasis on technical forestry and productivity
Gauld (2000) asserts that DENR’s strong emphasis on the technical and
productivity aspects of forestry indicates that the transition from a topdown
to a bottom-up approach is not complete. The POs in both sites
found it difficult to meet the agency’s technical requirements without
external assistance. In the Palawan site, DENR staffing constraints left the
PO with no choice but to hire a forester. This created dependency and
burdened the organisation financially.
At the same time, DENR has overlooked the social, economic and
institutional aspects of forest management. The agency was not fully familiar
with the community groups, their dynamics, their dependency on forests
and forest resources, and their experience in resource management, or the
different ethnicities, occupations and political interests of the community
members 11 . As the result, the granting of forest management rights to
people’s organisations often created divisions and conflicts between the
POs and other community groups. A PO, for example, may restrict the
forest-related activities of villagers who are not members of the organisation,
creating opposition to its work. Such conflicts could be avoided if DENR
staff did the groundwork necessary to understand the community and the
power interplay between the PO and other community groups. Knowledge