Adaptive Collaborative Management in Forest Landscapes: Villagers, Bureaucrats and Civil Society

This book examines the value of Adaptive Collaborative Management for facilitating learning and collaboration with local communities and beyond, utilising detailed studies of forest landscapes and communities.

Many forest management proposals are based on top-down strategies, such as the Million Tree Initiatives, Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) and REDD+, often neglecting local communities. In the context of the climate crisis, it is imperative that local peoples and communities are an integral part of all decisions relating to resource management. Rather than being seen as beneficiaries or people to be safeguarded, they should be seen as full partners, and Adaptive Collaborative Management is an approach which priorities the rights and roles of communities alongside the need to address the environmental crisis. The volume presents detailed case studies and real life examples from across the globe, promoting and prioritizing the voices of women and scholars and practitioners from the Global South who are often under-represented. Providing concrete examples of ways that a bottom-up approach can function to enhance development sustainably, via its practitioners and far beyond the locale in which they initially worked, this volume demonstrates the lasting utility of approaches like Adaptive Collaborative Management that emphasize local control, inclusiveness and local creativity in management.

This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working in the fields of conservation, forest management, community development and natural resource management and development studies more broadly.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Carol J. Pierce Colfer is currently a Senior Associate at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and Visiting Scholar at Cornell University’s Southeast Asia Program, Ithaca, New York, USA. She is author/editor of numerous books, including Masculinities in Forests (Routledge, 2020), The Earthscan Reader on Gender and Forests (Routledge, 2017) and Gender and Forests (Routledge, 2016).

Ravi Prabhu is a forester with thirty 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.

Anne M. Larson has been a Principal Scientist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) since 2012. She is currently the Team Leader for Equal Opportunities, Gender, Justice and Tenure at CIFOR and also co-coordinates the Governance of Natural Resources flagship of the Policies, Institutions and Markets (PIM) CGIAR Research Program. Anne serves on the Council of the International Land Coalition (ILC) and the board of directors of the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI).