Methods and Tools
 

The Adaptive Collaborative Management Program (ACM) aims to promote social learning across stakeholders so that their ability to respond to highly dynamic situations and complexities improves. We take on dual functions: We build the capacity of partners to facilitate learning processes and at the same time observe the process from an ‘outer layer’ .

Contact person:

Linda Yuliani
Email: l.yuliani@cgiar.org

Decentralisation
  In the mid-1990s, before the ACM project, CIFOR already had a project on devolution. It was called ‘Local livelihoods, community forests and devolution’ and coordinated by Eva Wollenberg. The results from that work were integrated into the evolving ACM project. Meanwhile CIFOR continued conducting research on policy issues pertinent to decentralisation, through three additional projects:

Contact person:

Moira Moeliono
Email: m.moeliono@cgiar.org

Modelling
 From CIFOR’s earliest days, advisors have encouraged us to engage in modelling to strengthen our holistic and future-oriented thinking. ACM included a modelling component early on, in close collaboration initially with Jerry Vanclay’s work on the Forest Land Oriented Resource Envisioning System (FLORES). This work resulted in a special issue of Small Scale Forest Economics, Management, and Policy in 2003 (Volume 2, No. 2, May).

Contact person:

Herry Purnomo
Email: h.purnomo@cgiar.org

Conflict Studies
 When ACM began, all team members were aware that conflict was likely to be a significant issue: Forest management stakeholders have differing and competing interests, perceptions and ideas about how natural resource management should be carried out. More people are competing for fewer resources and there are more perceived resource arenas. Rapid sociopolitical changes such as globalisation and decentralisation have also brought with them enormous conflicting issues for resource management.

Contact person:

Yurdi Yasmi
Email: yurdi@recoftc.org

Grassroots Networking
  Forested regions in the developing world have historically been the object of competing resource use claims by groups seeking to extract precious minerals, petroleum, timber or nontimber products, to access land for subsistence and commercial agricultural and ranching, to develop tourism activities and, recently, to protect threatened biodiversity and cultural treasures. In this context of intense competition to control and protect the forest, forest-dependent people and their livelihoods may be pitted against conservation or development objectives. Frequently local people are blamed for forest degradation, lose access to resources or are outright expelled. However, at other times they respond collectively to defend their interests and to maintain forests that support their livelihoods. The Grassroots Assistance Project examined the conditions under which such positive outcomes occur and the resulting impacts they produce.

Contact person:

Peter Cronkleton
Email: p.cronkleton@cgiar.org

Collective Action
 

When ACM began we were very aware that stimulating and encouraging collective action would have to be an integral part of our research efforts. One central question has always been ‘how to do it’. Although various ACM sites tried various approaches, in 2004, CIFOR began to participate in CAPRI:Collective Action and Property Rights Initiative, a system-wide initiative of the CG system.

Contact person:

Heru Komarudin
Email: h.komarudin@cgiar.org

Rights and Resources
 The ACM work strengthened our awareness of the problems local people struggled with, in terms of rights and resource access. People living in and around forests were typically seriously disadvantaged. Their rights were often trampled and their resources were often extracted by external parties without much attention to local needs. Yet there were also encouraging signs. We wanted to get a better sense of what the problems were and how to address them more meaningfully.

Contact person:

Elena Petkova
Email: e.petkova@cgiar.org

Landscape Biodiversity and Livelihoods
 

Although ACM’s emphasis involved working with communities, there was an express concern with both the people and the environment. Many of the activities undertaken by communities were designed to manage their resources more effectively and benignly.

In 2007, CIFOR began working with the World Agroforestry Centre on a project called ‘Integrating livelihoods and multiple biodiversity values in landscape mosaics’. The project involved participatory action research as well as more conventional, empirical research in five sites around the world: Cameroon, Indonesia, Laos, Madagascar, and Tanzania. This work builds on ACM in its focus on people in their environment; and it builds on CAPRI in its dual use of participatory action research at the village and district levels.

Contact person:

Jean-Laurent Pfund
Email: j.pfund@cgiar.org

Climate Change Adaptation
  Although climate change issues were just a faraway twinkle in the eyes of the original ACM researchers, the relevance of ACM results to climate change adaptation has become increasingly clear. If we are to address issues of climate change, we will need the local and mesolevel co-operation and creativity that we have seen the ACM approach provide. This is confirmed by results of a recent case study in Mali, where ACM has been able to offer tools to facilitate the process from spontaneous adaptive responses to planned adaptation for the sustainable provision of forest ecosystem goods and services.

Contact person:

Bruno Locatelli
Email: b.locatelli@cgiar.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  
   
These activities continue to address, in various ways, the goals of the ACM programme, which were to achieve more sustainable and equitable management of forest resources and human well-being in a multi-stakeholder environment through the development and identification of a set of models, institutional arrangements, methods, tools and strategies to empower local communities.