Adaptive Collaborative Management in Forest Landscapes

Front matter

The Earthscan Forest Library

ADAPTIVE COLLABORATIVE MANAGEMENT IN FOREST LANDSCAPES

VILLAGERS, BUREAUCRATS AND CIVIL SOCIETY

Contents

List of boxes, figures and tables xi Foreword xiii Acknowledgements xvi Contributors xvii Glossary and Abbreviations xxii

1 Adaptive collaborative management: Experiential and theoretical forebearers 1 CAROL J. PIERCE COLFER, RAVI PRABHU, AND ANNE M. LARSON

2 Local people’s perspectives on action learning: Impressions from the Amazon 31 JAMES JOHNSON AND BENNO POKORNY

Index

List of boxes, figures and tables

Boxes

1.1

Adaptive collaboration management — defined (from Colfer 2005a, 4)

3.1 Astory that shows a lack of understanding by researchers of reasons to collaborate

3.2 Researcher conflict due to different backgrounds

8.1 Equity and CBNRM

10.1 Elements of the SHARED approach

10.2 A global paradigm shift

Figures

2.1 Chronological overview of the reported activities.

3.1 Map showing the Barotse Floodplain.

3.2 Expected linkages between the global, Lusaka and Barotse Hub researchers.

4.1 Study sites.

5.1 Participatory action research process.

5.2 Lake Victoria Crescent covering the initial study districts of Mpigi, Masaka and Rakai.

5.3 Framework of implementation of ACM activities.

7.1 Sample completed reflection sheet.

8.1 Indicating perpetual evolution.

10.1 Map of Kenya, showing Turkana County.

10.2 The phases of the SHARED Framework.

250 254

34 64

69 89 108

109 115 175 188 248 249 xii List of boxes, figures and tables Tables

3.] Examples of factors that make NRM and agricultural systems complex

3.2 Levels of collaboration and their characteristics

3.9 Summary of dreams from the communities

4.1 Study areas (sites with ACM indicated by *)

4.2 Demographic characteristics of the respondents

4.3 Participation of women in forest management activities in ACM and non-ACM sites

4.4 Men's and women’s perceptions of the quality of their own participation in forest management activities

4.5 Factors that determine women's participation in forest management in ACM vs. non-ACM sites

4.6 Factors that determine men’s participation in forest management in ACM vs. non-ACM sites

4.7 Forest products harvested by women and men in ACM and non-ACM sites

4.8 | Perceptions on availability/abundance of forest resources

4.9 Gender dimensions of forest product and income use

5.1 Selected study sites (see also Table 4.1)

5.2 Attendance per community

5.0 Number of trees planted by men and women user group members, four years after the facilitation of ACM processes in 2015

5.4 Leadership in ACM groups in 2016

5.5 Women’s leadership roles in ACM groups in 2020

5.6 Status of ACM group activities in 2020

7.1 | MSF case studies in CIFOR/’s research (table by Nicole Heise)

7.2 Research-based indicators

7.9 "Local" indicators

63 67 73 90 91

99 100 101 111 113

Foreword

Jeff Sayer

Forests that for generations had been managed by the communities who lived in and around them are now the subject of actions by global conventions, multi-national companies and environmental activists. Forests are now expected to provide multiple goods and services whose nature and extent are constantly changing. Forest management has to adapt to changing external environments and changing demands — it has to deal with constantly moving targets. There is competition between the claims of the relatively small number of local stakeholders and a growing number of more distant “global citizens” with expectations for forests. These competing claims can only be effectively reconciled through intensified collaboration among all actors. We now have a cacophony of claims and counterclaims in an environment where attention spans have shortened and institutional memories are fading. Activists pursue the latest silver bullet solution to the world’s forest issues, and donors want problems solved within the time span of their ever-shortening funding cycles. Experts fly in and fly out and prescribe instant solutions. Emotions and opinions have more influence than evidence. Social media and academic publications allow advocates to exert an influence that is beyond their competence — too few people have “skin in the game.” Forests are subject to “whack a mole” interventions where the latest bright idea gains centre stage for a brief time before attention shifts to another silver bullet solution.

We are all bombarded with information relevant to decision making on forests. Trying to keep pace with the new material is like trying to drink from a fire hose. It often seems that people’s opinions on forest issues are inversely correlated with their knowledge. People who advocate for simple solutions usually don’t fully understand the complexity of the issues. There is an obsession with fighting threats and a lack of interest in long-term scenarios.

My enthusiasm for this book stems from the fact that it runs counter to these concerns. The authors of all of the chapters are people who do have “skin in the game"; they have all spent long periods in the field seeking better outcomes for local people and their environments, and they all know how difficult it is to achieve this. The authors have extensive experience from some of the world’s most contested forest landscapes, and they know that they are always dealing with wicked problems. There is no single “right” answer to xiv Foreword forest trade-offs; forest management is always challenged by the need to adapt to changing pressures and demands and by the need to ensure collaboration among a diversity of actors with claims on forest lands. The chapters in this book bring together decades of practical learning from a wide diversity of situations.

The book does not lead us to a simple recipe for adaptive collaborative management, and if it had done so it would have failed in its ambition. There is rarely any simple recipe that can solve forest conflicts. The book allows us to benefit from the long-term learning of accomplished scientists who have studied these issues together with local and global actors.

The concepts underlying ACM have been evolving over three decades and are gradually having an influence on the institutions that govern forest landscapes. The authors of this book have been central to that movement and have quietly nudged it in the direction of greater inclusivity. They are part of a process that has pushed forestry institutions away from their historical “command and control” view of forest management towards approaches that allow the emergence of governance systems that will broaden and sustain the range of benefits that societies obtain from forests. Government forestry institutions and the international agencies that support them have not been good at adapting forest management to deal with changing pressures and opportunities, nor at achieving the partnerships and collaborations that are essential to optimal forest outcomes. These institutions have not been good at learning; rather they have been locked into historically determined models of forest management. This is not only true of formal forestry institutions, but even activists have not been good at adapting and collaborating, and many have tended to be “single issue fanatics” who have been expert at shutting out any competing understandings of the issues around forests. The world has been limited in its ability to go beyond simplistic metrics such as areas deforested, the extent of old growth or primary forests, mean annual increment and annual allowable cut. All of these metrics derive from a narrow view of the world of forests and of the expectations of civil society. Fisher and Jackson in Chapter 9 of this volume argue that even activists have to learn and adapt.

Formal institutions and especially aid agencies have been wedded to the idea that multi-stakeholder fora should play a determining role in forest governance — yet Sarmiento Barletti in Chapter 7 explores the difficulties of making these fora work effectively. The importance of gender-disaggregated decision making on forests is explored in Chapters 4 and 5 by Bomuhangi et al. and Mukasa and colleagues, respectively, from Uganda — this is a subject that still requires a lot more investigation and where tricky trade-offs and long entrenched power dynamics have to be addressed.

Participation is a mantra of forest institutions that is challenged in Chapter 7 by Sarmiento Barletti, who points out that nobody argues against participation, but there are issues around who participates, how do they participate and how do we avoid tokenism. Saxena, cited in Chapter 7, coined the aphorism “You participate — but we manage.” Forestry institutions have often

Foreword xv been highly selective in what they have decentralized and how much control they have retained at the centre.

ACM requires deep engagement with local people. Mutimukuru- Maravanyika, Madzudzo, and Songe explore the difficulties of engaging people in research in such complex environments from their experience in the Miombo forests of Zambia. Johnson and Pokorny report on similar experiences in the Amazon. All of the authors are both scientists and practitioners, and the chapters in this book combine to present a wealth of real-world learning.

Forestry institutions are changing, and Colfer, Prabhu and Larson have been at the centre of changes that have permeated thinking and practice on decentralized forest management over three decades. Colfer and Prabhu introduced the concept of ACM to the international forestry narrative in the 1990s. The term ACM embraces a diversity of practices that engage a broad range of actors in decision making on forests — it is not a simple formula. ACM has accompanied a broad tendency to move the locus of decision making on forests away from the centre and towards the periphery. This decentralizing process allows for forest management to be adapted to local contexts, and every context is different. Conditions are constantly changing, and so are the demands that society places on forest landscapes; so the process of adaptation is continuous. Achieving better outcomes requires changing the behaviour of all the actors whose decisions determine the fate of forests. The intensity of collaboration among actors has to increase. Collaborative management requires that some actors, particularly state forest agencies, forfeit power, and greater responsibility has to be assumed by actors who are embedded in the landscapes. The science database, “Academia,” recorded a total of 2475 published papers on ACM when accessed in April 2021. The authors of this volume have been involved in much of this work and have certainly inspired the entire ACM movement. They have been responsible for a quantum shift in the ways forest management happens today.

We need diverse and sustained benefit flows from forest landscapes to meet development and environmental goals. Forestry and civil society environmental institutions will need to expand their competencies to deal with the multiplicity of contexts within which the world’s forests need to be managed. The lessons of decades of experience of ACM encompassed in this book will provide a rich resource for professionals and for building institutions. Global targets for forests to meet climate change, biodiversity, desertification and other goals will only be achieved if the management of all the world’s forests is much better adapted to local contexts and is driven by collaboration among the numerous stakeholders concerned. The work of Colfer, Prabhu, Larson and their colleagues, brought together in this volume, should serve to inspire and inform all those who seek sustainable futures for our forests.

Jeffrey Sayer Vancouver

We wish to acknowledge the support of our respective programmes and institutions: the two Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) programmes, “Policies, Institutions and Markets” (PIM) and “Forest, Trees and Agroforestry” (FTA); the Center for International Forestry Research, World Agroforestry and Cornell University (especially the Southeast Asia Program), have provided us with a variety of in-kind resources. We are grateful as well to all the authors who have contributed to this collection, all of whom have made their contributions without a specific budget being allocated for this work, and similarly, to the 20 anonymous volunteer reviewers (and two known ones). We also appreciate the efforts of the staff at Earthscan, Hannah Ferguson, John Baddeley and Nancy Antony for their consistently cooperative and encouraging words of wisdom and help throughout the publication process. Our biggest debt of gratitude goes to the communities — at various scales — who have contributed their time and effort in the adaptive collaborative management efforts described herein. We have all learned a great deal about the ACM process, among other things, from them, and hope that their efforts can have broader impacts among this book’s readers.

Contributors

Abwoli Y. Banana is a Professor in the Department of Forestry, Biodiversity and Tourism, School of Forestry, Environment and Geographical Sciences, Makerere University. Although with a background in wood science and technology, Banana has a wide experience in teaching and research in the fields of community forestry and in institutions that affect access and utilization of forestry resources in Eastern Africa. Over the decades, he has worked closely with scientists in CIFOR on forest tenure and gender in forestry management.

Allan Bomuhangi is currently a Climate Change Adaptation Specialist with the United Nations Environment Program — Technical University of Denmark (UNEP-D TU) partnership. His interests are in gender, climate change adaptation, forest management reforms and land property rights.

Jimmy Bushoborozi is a Graduate Student pursuing an MSc in Agribusiness Management at the Department of Agribusiness and Natural Resources Economics, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. He has worked with research projects focusing on sustainable land management, forest governance and value addition in semi-arid cereal crops. Bushoborozi also works with Hinterland Consults Ltd — an agricultural-based research organization.

Carol J. Pierce Colfer is an Anthropologist who has, since joining CIFOR in 1994, specialized in collaborative approaches, gender, health, governance and sustainable management of forests. She has extensive ethnographic experience in the United States, the Middle East and Indonesia and in international comparative research, mainly in the tropics. She is currently a Senior Associate with CIFOR and a Visiting Scholar in Cornell University’s Southeast Asia Program.

Peter Cronkleton is a Senior Scientist (Anthropologist) at CIFOR and has worked as a researcher and development practitioner in Latin America and Africa for more than 23 years. Cronkleton is a specialist in community forestry, forest governance, tenure and policy reform, sustainable livelihoods and participatory approaches for development. He is currently based in Peru.

xviii Contributors

Kristen Evans is a Research Consultant at CIFOR. She has worked as a CIFOR researcher since 2004 on projects in Bolivia, Nicaragua, Vietnam and Ghana, primarily as a field team trainer and workshop facilitator in participatory methods such as ACM. She has a background in social science and biochemistry. She writes plays and puppet shows and raises chickens with her daughter.

Robert (Bob) Fisher is an Anthropologist who has worked extensively in community forestry and natural resource management in a number of countries in Asia and Africa, particularly Nepal, Thailand and Papua New Guinea. He was heavily involved in action research at the University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury, between 1991 and 1996, and was Deputy Director of the Regional Community Forestry Training Center in Bangkok (1997—2001). He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Sydney and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia.

William (Bill) Jackson is an Environmental Consultant with over 40 years’ experience in conservation and community management of natural resources. He is currently an adjunct Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast. He has worked on community management of natural resources in Nepal, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere in Asia. His PhD used an action research approach. He was the chief author for the Australia State of Environment Report 2016 and has held positions of Chief Executive of Parks Victoria and Deputy Director General of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

James M. Johnson, an independent researcher, has a background in agriculture and forestry. He has worked in community forestry and integrated land management across the Amazon region, largely in Bolivia, where he lives with his family, running a small farm, putting theory into practice while linking with policy and decision-making processes.

Anne M. Larson has been a Principal Scientist at CIFOR since 2012. She is currently the Team Leader for Equal Opportunities, Gender, Justice and Tenure there and also co-coordinates the Governance of Natural Resources flagship of the Policies, Institutions and Markets (PIM) CGIAR Research Program. She was based in Lima, Peru, until 2019 and is now located in Washington, DC. Larson serves on the Council of the International Land Coalition (ILC), the board of directors of the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) and the CGIAR Gender Platform Management Committee.

Elias Madzudzo is a Lecturer in the Sociology of Development and Migration at Great Zimbabwe University. He has applied participatory action research in research in development projects in the Communal Area Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (Zimbabwe); Fodder Innovation Project (Nigeria); Research into Use Project (Malawi); the Strengthening

Contributors xix

Aquatic Resource Governance Project and the Aquatic Agricultural Systems Programme (Zambia). Madzudzo's research interests include innovation studies, natural resources governance and ethnicity.

Cynthia McDougall was the Team Leader for the ACM research in Nepal while at CIFOR; she subsequently led the gender research theme at WorldFish, and now, the Stockholm Environment Institute’s Gender, Environment and Development team. She is an Interdisciplinary Social Scientist with over 20 years of experience in gender and social equity, food security and natural resource governance. Her particular interest is in mixed methods, participatory action research and gender transformative approaches and how these can leverage scalable shifts towards empowerment, equality, poverty reduction, food and nutrition security and sustainability.

Concepta M. Mukasa is a Programme Manager for Forestry and Environment in the Association of Uganda Professional Women in Agriculture and Environment (NGO) in Uganda. She is the holder of a masters in agroforestry and BSc forestry degrees from Makerere University Kampala. She has a postgraduate diploma in Forestry for Rural Development from ITC in the Netherlands. She has co-authored a number of infobriefs on community forestry and gender with CIFOR.

Tendayi Mutimukuru-Maravanyika is a Lecturer at Great Zimbabwe University, Masvingo, Zimbabwe. She is a natural resources management expert with several years of experience in designing and implementing participatory action research projects in forestry, fisheries and agriculture to deal with real-life challenges faced by African rural communities. She has worked in several African Countries including Zimbabwe, Zambia, Ghana, Ethiopia and Uganda.

Esther Mwangi (deceased, 2019) was an environmentalist, public policy expert and scholar, with an interest in understanding how equity and inclusion influence livelihoods and conservation outcomes of forestry resources. She worked for CIFOR. From 2014, Mwangi was both the team leader for the CIFOR Nairobi Hub and a Principal Scientist with the Equal Opportunities, Gender, Justice and Tenure team (formerly the Forests and Governance Program). Together with Anne Larson, she led a comparative study on gender and tenure in Uganda and Nicaragua and “Securing Tenure Rights for Forest-Dependent Communities: A Global Comparative Study of Design and Implementation of Tenure Reform.” These two projects demonstrate the comprehensive and systematic approach to research for which she was best known.

Hemant Ojha is Associate Professor for the University of Canberra and a Principal Advisor for a Sydney-based research and development consulting firm, the Institute for Study and Development Worldwide (IFSD). From his early work in Himalayan South Asia, Ojha has worked progressively xx Contributors across Asia and the Pacific as well as in parts of Africa, with a strong focus on climate change, water security and natural resource management. With his cross-disciplinary educational background in natural and social sciences, he champions locally based action research and multi-scalar political economic analysis for positive impacts on climate resilience and sustainable development. He has taught at Australian universities with a focus on postgraduate student supervision and has conducted research in Asia and Africa on a range of environmental governance issues. His books have been published by Routledge and Cambridge, and he writes actively in both academic and public media. He has also advised and consulted for a number of international development institutions.

Benno Pokorny, a Professor for Rural Development at the Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Freiburg (currently with GIZ [Deutsche Gesellschaft ftir Internationale Zusammenarbeit] in Brazil), focuses on the question of whether and how natural resources in tropical and subtropical regions can be used effectively for sustainable local development for and with local resource users.

Ravi Prabhu is a Forester with 30 years of international experience. He began his international career with CIFOR and has been with World Agroforestry (ICRAF) since 2012 and is the Deputy Director General-Research. Since January 2020, he is also the Director of Innovation, Investment and Impact at CIFOR-ICRAF. He won the Queen’s Award for Forestry in 2005, presented by HM Queen Elizabeth II.

Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti is a Peruvian Social Anthropologist at CIFOR in Lima, Peru. He has worked with Indigenous Amazonian societies for the past 15 years, carrying out collaborative research examining their experiences of natural resource extraction ventures and climate change initiatives implemented in their ancestral territories, and related experiences of rights violations and socio-environmental injustice. Before joining CIFOR, Sarmiento Barletti held posts at the universities of Durham, St Andrews and Sussex in the UK.

Jeff Sayer is Professor of Forest Conservation in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, Faculty of Forestry, at the University of British Columbia. He was CIFOR /’s first Director General and held that office when our original ACM research was being planned and conducted. He has a long history of global involvement in conservation, ecology, and related policy issues, as well as considerable field experience.

Mwansa M. Songe is a Zambian Veterinary Pathologist, specializing in aquatic medicine. She is currently employed as a Veterinary Research Officer concerned with fish health at the Central Veterinary Research Institute in Zambia. Her work encompasses surveillance, management and control of fish diseases. Songe has previously worked in small

Contributors xxi animal practice, academia and international research institutions within the CGIAR. Current interests and activities include an aquatic animal health strategy for Zambia, mainstreaming aquatic biosecurity, emergency preparedness and contingency planning for aquatic animal diseases in Zambia and the region.

Alice Eunice Tibazalika holds MSc and BSc (Agriculture) degrees from Makerere University and postgraduate diplomas in management and in nutrition. She is working with the Association of Uganda Professional Women in Agriculture and Environment (AUPWAE), as a Capacity Development Officer, working on agriculture, gender and environment, and has participated in CIFOR projects.

Glossary and Abbreviations

AAS Aquatic Agricultural Systems programme in the Barotse Floodplain in western Zambia — a participatory action research programme

ACM Adaptive collaborative management; an approach whereby people who have interests in a natural resource agree to act together to plan, observe and learn from the implementation of their plans while recognizing that plans often fail to achieve their stated objectives. It is characterized by conscious efforts among such groups to communicate, collaborate, negotiate, resolve conflicts and seek out opportunities to learn collectively about the impacts of their actions

action research Research carried out by a team encompassing a professional action researcher and members of an organization or community seeking to improve their situation. AR promotes broad participation in the research process and supports action leading to a more just or satisfying situation for the stakeholders (adapted from Lewin 1998, p. 4)

agency The human actor’s ability to learn, reflect and choose actions, even in the face of structural constraints

ALITAS A Bolivian NGO working on veterinary issues

Anlo Beach A fishing community in Ghana

AR Action research

auto-appraisal A structured assessment of local conditions, needs and opportunities, carried out by teams of community members trained as facilitators rather than by external technicians

Baganda Most common ethnic group in Uganda ACM sites (Chapter 5)

Barotse A floodplain in Zambia

Bioversity A CGIAR research centre situated in Rome, focusing on biodiversity

BOLFOR USAID’s Bolivian Sustainable Forest Management Project (mid-1990s—mid-2000s)

bolivianos Bolivian currency

Bonn Challenge The challenge to bring 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested landscapes into restoration by 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030

Glossary and Abbreviations xxiii

C&I Criteria and indicators

CAM Collaborative adaptive management — a similar approach to ACM, with a greater emphasis on the United States

campesino A farmer, in Spanish; peasant

CAPRI A CGIAR multi-centre programme on Collective Action and Property Rights

CARE International A non-governmental organization

Cedro In Bolivia, Cedro includes a number of species that belong to the genus Cedrela spp., especially Credrela odorata

CFM Collaborative Forest Management (Uganda)

CFP Community forest organization, Bolivia

CFR Central Forest Reserve (Uganda)

CGIAR Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research

chaco Crop land, Bolivia

CIDP County Integrated Development Plan (in Kenya, a government planning instrument)

CIFOR Center for International Forestry Research

co-generation (of knowledge) A process whereby a team or individual works together with another(s) to analyse and learn together

CRP Collaborative research programme

DDPI East Kalimantan’s Provincial Council on Climate Change (Dewan Daerah Perubahan Iklim), Indonesia

decentralization A process whereby authority (and sometimes budget) is moved from a more central institution to a more peripheral or lower bureaucratic level

DFID Department for International Development, UK

DGIS Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands

DoF Department of Forest, Nepal

doxa Bourdieu’s (1998) concept: “a particular point of view, the point of view of the dominant, which presents and imposes itself as a universal point of view” (p. 57)

DTI Design Techniques Implementation (a team in the Africa Regreening project)

empowerment A process in which people denied the ability to make strategic life choices acquire the ability to do so.

ethnographic Research informed by long-term involvement, observation, communication and systematic study in the communities of interest

extractive research Data taken from communities with little or no feedback of information or direct benefit to them

facilitation A crucial function within ACM to encourage and support an equitable interchange of ideas among stakeholders, including shared and/ or complementary decision making, and to move the iterative process forwards

FECOFUN A network of community forest user groups (Nepal)

xxiv Glossary and Abbreviations

FLORES Forest Land Oriented Resource Envisioning System — a simulation system designed for forest contexts (initially at CIFOR, led by Jerry Vanclay)

ForLive Action research project in Bolivia

FPIC Free, Prior and Informed Consent

FSR&D Farming Systems Research and Development

FSSD Forest Sector Support Department (Uganda)

GEF Global Environment Facility; established in 1992 to help tackle the Earth's most pressing environmental problems

gender “Gender [is] a sociocultural system that organizes the practices and relationships that play out among humans, and between humans and their environment, infusing them with power and meaning that refers symbolically to sex and sexuality" (Paulson 2016, pp. 1—2; or see Chapter 8. fn 3)

GoU Government of Uganda

governance Ways and institutions through which people/groups express their interests, exercise rights and obligations and mediate differences

GPS Global positioning system

ha _ Hectare

hacienda Cattle ranch, Bolivia

How are we doing? A participatory tool for use in multi-stakeholder forums to help monitor progress towards the group’s goals (Chapter 7)

ILRI International Livestock Research Institute

inclusivity Ensuring that all relevant individuals are “at the table" and have an equitable voice

indicators Actions, results, feelings, etc. monitored to assess progress towards goals that have been chosen (can complement or replace reflexivity)

Ingeniero Professional agricultural technicians receive the university title of ingeniero agronomo, which 1s abbreviated to Ing.

INRA National Institute of Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria), responsible for defining land rights and granting titles, Bolivia institutions A framework of rules for achieving particular social or economic goals; organizations refer to the specific structural forms of such

institutions

interdisciplinary Coordination among disciplines in problem formulation, analysis and interpretation, characterized by mutual acceptance and understanding, SOMETIMES applying other disciplines’ methods and approaches; Interdisciplinary research may lead to new questions and methods

interpretivist A view of the world as subjective — a result of human interpretation and construction

iterative reflection Cycles or loops where conscious phases of group reflection are interspersed with information collection and analysis

IUCN International Union for the Conservation of Nature

IWMI International Water Management Institute

Glossary and Abbreviations xxv learning loops Process of planning, action and reflection (here, in support of natural resource management)

LDD Land Degradation Dynamics (a geospatial analysis team in Africa Regreening)

LLS Livelihoods and Landscapes Strategy (an IUCN program)

Mafungautsi A state forest in Zimbabwe where ACM was conducted in the early 2000s

M&E Monitoring and evaluation

management Management is to an organization or sector (like forestry) what governance is to society at large (see “governance’’)

MBO Management by objectives

MEL Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (more narrowly, a project team in Africa Regreening)

MOU Memorandum of Understanding

MSF Miulti-stakeholder forum; also called multi-stakeholder platforms

multi-disciplinary People from different disciplines collaborate to address a jointly identified problem, interpret results, from the perspective of one dominant discipline

multi-stakeholder forum Purposely organized interactive process that brings together a range of stakeholders to participate in dialogue, decision making and/or implementation regarding actions seeking to address a problem they hold in common or to achieve a goal for their common benefit

NAFP Nepal Australia Forestry Project

NFA National Forestry Authority, Uganda

NFTP National Forest and Tree Planting, Uganda

NGO Non-governmental organization

Nitlapan Institute of Research and Development of the Central American

NTFP Non-timber forest product

Nuevo Horizonte Fictitious community where participatory action research was carried out in Bolivia (Chapter 2)

panchayat Local government, Nepal

PAR Participatory action research; a process of systematic inquiry that is collective, collaborative, self-reflective and undertaken by participants seeking to answer questions about real life concerns to improve their wellbeing

Pedro Martinez Fictitious farmer collaborating in participatory action research efforts, Bolivia (Chapter 2)

positivist A world view in which the world is seen as objectively “out there” to be investigated, without researchers themselves being part of it

power Refers to the ability to act, including influencing and controlling events and people. Socially, one can differentiate power over, power to and power with. ACM seeks the latter two xxvi Glossary and Abbreviations

PROMETE An NGO, Bolivia

Proyecto Pollito A project dealing with chickens, Bolivia

RACCN Nicaragua’s Northern Caribbean Autonomous Region

Realist Synthesis Review A method allowing for the systematic, comparative analysis of how contexts affect an initiative’s outcome, revealing “what works, for whom, in what circumstances, and why”

REDD+ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation, forest Degradation and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries -- intended to contribute to addressing climate change