Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

64 • Cynthia McDougall, Hemant Ojha, Raj Kumar Pandey, Mani Ram Banjade and Bishnu Hari Pandit
Enhancing adaptiveness and collaboration
In this section, by contrasting the status quo with the ACM-based
innovations, we explore the nature of the changes that local people,
researchers and other actors made to the CFUG decision-making and
annual planning cycle during the PAR phase of the research. They
include changes to annual and ongoing CFUG decision making and the
implementation of decisions relating to forest management practices, such
as the development and enforcement of rules and regulations, the election
and turnover of committee members, benefit sharing and forest protection.
The shift in approach to planning and decision making was the heart of
the participatory action research. Taken as a whole, it illustrates movement
towards increasingly adaptive and collaborative institutions and processes.
Status quo community forestry practices
Our research teams explored the governance and management practices in
the case study sites to ascertain patterns of inequity in decision making and
benefit sharing. The extensive background studies clearly indicated that
all four main case study sites, selected as being average for their districts,
also shared difficulties in organising equitable practices and outcomes.
Furthermore, the patterns were also very similar to those observed in the
comparative case studies. One predominant pattern was the domination
of decision-making processes by local elites, typically wealthy, higher caste
men 16 :
Members of the local elite held the important positions in the executive
committee of the CFUG and … constituted the dominant influence over
others with regard to decision making. Consequently, the interests and
needs of the poor and disadvantaged might be ignored and sacrificed for
the sake of the ‘common goals’ set by a small vocal section of the society.
(Kaski ACM Team 2002: 9)
Another common pattern was the tendency for planning and decision
making to be ad hoc, based on interests of those involved at that moment
but not necessarily linked to any larger plan or lessons from experience.
These and other salient patterns found in the main case study sites prior to
shifting to an ACM approach are outlined in Table 3-2.