D. Edmunds

Using scenarios to make decisions about the future : anticipatory learning for the adaptive co-management of community forests

Current trends to improve the adaptiveness of community forest management focus on monitoring past actions and emphasize internal dynamics. We show how scenario methods can be used to (1) enable managers to better understand landscape and larger scale forces for change and to work with stakeholders at these levels and (2) improve adaptiveness not only by responding to changes, but also by anticipating them. We review methods related to scenario analysis and discuss how they can be adapted to community management settings to improve the responsiveness and the collaboration among stakeholders. The review is used to identify the key elements of scenario methods that CIFOR will test among communities in Bulungan Regency, East Kalimantan, Indonesia and two villages in the buffer zone of Ranomafana National Park, Madagascar.

A Strategic Approach to Multistakeholder Negotiations

Environment and development practitioners increasingly are interested in identifying methods, institutional arrangements and policy environments that promote negotiations among natural resource stakeholders leading to collective action and, it is hoped, sustainable resource management. Yet the implications of negotiations for disadvantaged groups of people are seldom critically examined. We draw attention to such implications by examining different theoretical foundations for multistakeholder negotiations and linking these to practical problems for disadvantaged groups. We argue that negotiations based on an unhealthy combination of communicative rationality and liberal pluralism, which underplays or seeks to neutralize differences among stakeholders, poses considerable risks for disadvantaged groups. We suggest that negotiations influenced by radical pluralist and feminist poststructuralist thought, which emphasize strategic behaviour and selective alliance-building, promise better outcomes for disadvantaged groups in most cases, particularly on the scale and in the historical contexts in which negotiations over forest management usually take place.