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

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Abstract

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.

Introduction

Adaptive management is emerging from its origins re-shaped as an important paradigm for landscape management around the globe (Taylor et al., 1997, Maarleveld and Dangbegnon, 1998). In contrast to past work on scientific adaptive management (Holling, 1978, Walters, 1986), the new adaptive management seeks to be responsive to local demands and to facilitate collaboration among multiple stakeholders (Lessard, 1998, McLain and Lee, 1996). To highlight the bottom-up orientation and focus on stakeholders of this new approach, we use the term adaptive co-management (ACM) in this paper.

ACM relies on iterative social learning among stakeholders and the on-going adjustment of management decisions to be acceptable to relevant actors. Yet most of the attention to learning in ACM is on the monitoring of past actions. Anticipating and exchanging perspectives about the future can be an equally important source of learning. In this paper we show how scenarios can be used as a tool for adaptive co-management to enable groups of forest users to not only respond to changes, but also anticipate them.

We examine the use of scenarios for the case of community forest management. Community forest management refers to common pool forests where the people living near them have significant rights and responsibilities for management. Given the trend to devolve forests to local authorities in many countries, we propose that there will be an increasing need for new methods of decision-making at the level of the community. Yet community-level decision-making does not take place in isolation. It will be more effective to the extent it takes account of social and ecological processes at the scale of landscapes or larger, where multiple stakeholders are involved. In many cases, community members are not well-prepared to make decisions that take into account these wider scale influences. We believe there is a need for new methods to facilitate community-level decision-making that can account for risks and opportunities with origins at larger scales. These methods will need to enable learning among multiple stakeholders and be responsive to changing conditions.

We discuss first, what scenarios are, how they have been used and their application to community forest management. We then identify the features that make scenario analysis well suited for use within an ACM framework. We conclude by identifying the key elements of a method that the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) will test among communities in Bulungan Regency, East Kalimantan, Indonesia and Ranomafana District, Fianarantsoa, Madagascar.

Section snippets

What are scenarios?

Scenarios are stories or ‘snapshots’ of what might be. Decision makers use them to evaluate what to do now, based on different possible futures. The options for the future reflect either an extrapolation of current trends or introduced changes, such as policies and management plans.

Although the term scenario is associated with several distinct approaches for gaining information about the future (Millett, 1988, Fischhoff, 1988, Sapio, 1995) and its meaning has shifted with different historical

Elements of a scenario-based approach

Although the scenario method has existed for centuries in one form or another, the formalization of the method is attributed to the Manhattan Project around 1942 (Schoemaker, 1993, p. 194). Dissemination of the technique became more widespread with documentation by the Rand Corporation in the 1960s (Kahn, 1965), and development by SRI and Royal Dutch/Shell Corporation in the early 1970s. Scenario methods have since been adapted to scores of applications, including land use planning (Foran and

Purpose

Scenarios are more effective tools for learning to the extent their purpose is situated within a clear decision-making context. The context should be defined in terms of the issue requiring a decision and include the relevant time frame, location and actors associated with the issue. The issue might be concern about a potential disturbance to the community’s harvesting plans, unexpected NTFP market opportunities, impacts of the community’s forest on the larger watershed or the implications of a

Structure and drivers of the system

The second element common to scenario methods is the collection of information about the forces shaping the system. These include:

  • 1.

    The structure of resources, actors, institutions, events and relations among them.

  • 2.

    Identification of slow changing, predictable trends (such as amount of forest area, internal population growth and road infrastructure; whether these parameters are slow-changing needs to be determined on a site-by-site basis).

  • 3.

    Identification of uncertainties and potential major drivers

Generating the scenarios

Scenarios are generated based on an understanding of the system. The selection of the scenario themes may be based on any one of a combination of underlying logics, including cases demonstrating the implications of key uncertainties, desirable and undesirable cases or likely and unlikely cases. The array of scenarios to be compared should be directly linked to the decision issue and purpose of analysis.

For the purpose of adaptive management, we assume that the logic of greatest interest is

Implications of the scenarios and use by decision makers

The final element is the discussion and analysis of the implications of each scenario for making decisions. Though scenarios can benefit community-level decision-makers simply by bringing stakeholders together and facilitating the exchange of information, they are most useful to the extent they influence each stakeholders’ thinking and actions to enable coordination and improved management. The scenario must “come alive in ‘inner space,’ the manager’s microcosm where choices are played out and

Options in scenario construction

Although these are the basic elements of scenario exercises, the range of variation in scenario-related methods is broad. Several typologies provide guidance to key differences among methods (Huss and Honton, 1987, Bunn and Salo, 1993, Ducot and Lubben, 1980). The differences related to the purposes of scenarios are discussed above (see Table 1). Differences related to the methods for generating and analyzing scenarios are summarized in Table 2 and discussed below.

Although most reviews of

Lessons for scenario analysis in community forest management

We draw several generalizations about the application of scenario methods to community forest landscapes. We make these observations to inform research that CIFOR has initiated in Indonesia and Madagascar on the effectiveness of scenarios as a tool for ACM.

Working together with local communities, NGOs and other forest users, CIFOR is piloting the use of scenario methods in the villages of Long Loreh and Long Langap, Bulungan Regency, East Kalimantan, Indonesia and in the villages of Anjamba and

Eva (Lini) Wollenberg is a Community-Based Management Researcher at the Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia. Before joining CIFOR in 1994, she was with the Ford Foundation’s Asia Rural Poverty and Resources Program. She received her Ph.D. in Wildland Resource Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991. Eva began doing fieldwork in Southeast Asia in 1984. Her current research focuses on social learning among stakeholders and means for empowering forest

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    Eva (Lini) Wollenberg is a Community-Based Management Researcher at the Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia. Before joining CIFOR in 1994, she was with the Ford Foundation’s Asia Rural Poverty and Resources Program. She received her Ph.D. in Wildland Resource Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991. Eva began doing fieldwork in Southeast Asia in 1984. Her current research focuses on social learning among stakeholders and means for empowering forest communities in these processes, especially in the tropical regions of Asia.

    David Edmunds, Research Fellow (sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation), Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia. Received a Ph.D. in Geography from Clark University in 1997, has spent 5 years in Uganda, Benin and the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire) and is working on community-based resource management. He now works on a number of projects related to multistakeholder negotiations and devolution policy.

    Louise Buck is a Senior Associate at the Center for International Forestry Research, based at the Cornell University. Her research interests are in participatory and social learning strategies for the management of protected areas and agroforestry. She holds a B.A. in Sociology and Psychology and a B.S. in Recreation Planning and Management, both from the University of Colorado, an M.Sc. in Natural Resources Planning from Colorado State University and is completing her Ph.D. in Natural Resources Policy and Management at Cornell University. Her fieldwork has primarily been in East Africa, Madagascar and northeastern North America.

    Revised version of a paper presented at a Symposium on Adaptive Co-Management in Protected Areas. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, 17–19 September, 1998.

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