Focused on forest management and governance, this book examines two decades of experience with Adaptive Collaborative Management (ACM), assessing both its uses and improvements needed to address global environmental issues. The volume argues that the activation and the empowerment of local peoples are critical to addressing current environmental challenges and that this must be enhanced by linking and extending such stewardship to global and national policymakers and actors on a broader scale. This can be achieved by employing ACM’s participatory approach, characterized by conscious efforts among stakeholders to communicate, collaborate, negotiate and seek out opportunities to learn collectively about the impacts of their action. The case studies presented here reflect decades of experience working with forest communities in three Indonesian Islands and four African countries. Researchers and practitioners who participated in CIFOR’s early ACM work had the rare opportunity to return to their research sites decades later to see what has happened. These authors reflect critically on their own experience and local site conditions to glean insights that guide us in more effectively addressing climate change and other forest-related challenges. They showcase how global and regional actors will have to work more closely with smallholders, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, recognizing the key local roles in forest stewardship. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working in the fields of conservation, forest management, community development, 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.

Collaborative approaches to governance are being used to address some of the most difficult environmental issues across the world, but there is limited focus on the challenges of practice. Leading scholars from the United States, Europe and Australia explore the theory and practice in a range of contexts, highlighting the lessons from practice, the potential limitations of collaboration and the potential strategies for addressing these challenges.

In Canada and around the world, new concerns with adaptive processes, feedback learning, and flexible partnerships are reshaping environmental governance. Meanwhile, ideas about collaboration and learning are converging around the idea of adaptive co-management. This book provides a comprehensive synthesis of the core concepts, strategies, and tools in this emerging field, informed by a diverse group of researchers and practitioners with over two decades of experience. It also offers a diverse set of case studies that reveal the challenges and implications of adaptive co-management thinking.

The contexts range from farmer field schools, to floodplain management and community forestry.

The Complex Forest systematically examines the theory, processes, and early outcomes of a research and management approach called adaptive collaborative management (ACM). An alternative to positivist approaches to development and conservation that assume predictability in forest management, ACM acknowledges the complexity and unpredictability inherent in any forest community and the importance of developing solutions together with the forest peoples whose lives will be most affected by the outcomes. Building on earlier work that established the importance of flexible, collaborative approaches to sustainable forest management, The Complex Forest describes the work of ACM practitioners facing a broad range of challenges in diverse settings and attempts to identify the conditions under which ACM is most effective. Case studies of ACM in 33 forest sites in 11 countries together with Colfer's systematic comparison of results at each site indicate that human and institutional capabilities have been strengthened. In Zimbabwe, for example, the number of women involved in decisionmaking soared. In Nepal, community members detected and sanctioned dishonest community elites. In Cameroon and Bolivia, learning programs resulted in better conflict management. These are early results, but a wide range of recent research supports Colfer's belief that these new capabilities will eventually contribute to higher incomes and to sustainable improvements in the health of forests and forest peoples. The Complex Forest reinforces calls for change in the way we plan conservation and development programs, away from command-and-control approaches, toward ones that require bureaucratic flexibility and responsiveness, as well as greater local participation in setting priorities and problem solving.

Adaptive management is the recommended means for continuing ecosystem management and use of natural resources, especially in the context of ‘integrated natural resource management’. Conceptually, adaptive management is simply learning from past management actions to improve future planning and management. However, adaptive management has proved difficult to achieve in practice. With a view to facilitating better practice, this new book presents lessons learned from case studies, to provide managers with ready access to relevant information. Cases are drawn from a number of disciplinary fields, including management of protected areas, watersheds and farms, rivers, forests, biodiversity and pests. Examples from Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada, the UK and Europe are presented at a variety of scales, from individual farms, through regional projects, to state-wide planning. While the book is designed primarily for practitioners and policy advisors in the fields of environmental and natural resource management, it will also provide a valuable reference for students and researchers with interests in environmental, natural resource and conservation management.

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.

Restoring Forests and Trees for Sustainable Development utilizes a multidisciplinary perspective to analyze and discuss the various opportunities and challenges of restoring tree and forest cover. It examines forest restoration commitments, policies and programs, their implementation at different scales and contexts, and how forest restoration helps to mitigate environmental, societal, and cultural challenges. This book explores how restoration affects forest ecosystem services, contributes to biodiversity conservation, and generates benefits and synergies, while recognizing the considerable costs, tradeoffs, and variable feasibility of its implementation.

The debate over the value of community-based environmental collaboration is one that dominates current discussions of the management of public lands and other resources. In Community-Based Collaboration: Bridging Socio-Ecological Research and Practice, the volume’s contributors offer an in-depth interdisciplinary exploration of what attracts people to this collaborative mode. The authors address the new institutional roles adopted by community-based collaborators and their interaction with existing governance institutions in order to achieve more holistic solutions to complex environmental challenges. Contributors: Heidi L. Ballard, University of California, Davis * Juliana E. Birkhoff, RESOLVE * Charles Curtin, Antioch University * Cecilia Danks, University of Vermont * E. Franklin Dukes, University of Virginia and George Mason University * María Fernández-Giménez, Colorado State University * Karen E. Firehock, University of Virginia * Melanie Hughes McDermott, Rutgers University * William D. Leach, California State University, Sacramento * Margaret Ann Moote, private consultant * Susan L. Senecah, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry * Gregg B. Walker, Oregon State University