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Learning from the cases

The significance of the case narratives in this volume is that they all demonstrate – in different ways, under different contexts, and across a wide range of resources – the potential of practical action to address both poverty reduction and resource degradation. Many rural poverty reduction schemes have had unexpected impacts on natural resource degradation. Economic policy reforms, which ease market access and boost commercial production, have encouraged the use of farming technologies which further degrade the resource base. Tenure reforms that provide incentives for sustainable exploitation practices and allow access to credit and input markets can result in further exclusion and impoverishment of the poorest rural people. Much of the prolific literature optimistically linking rural poverty reduction and environmental objectives in the past 15 years remains either wishful thinking or elaborate justification. These cases provide signposts for positive practice.

The case stories also show how research can lead to development and social change. The authors reveal the complexity of the historical and social web within which local action must be set, and the results of diagnostic analysis of community resource problems. But they also describe joint learning processes which led to the creation of new livelihood approaches; the development of new institutions for resource rights, planning and governance; the increased engagement of marginalized local groups in the political discourse of NRM; and the evolution of research paradigms towards more interdisciplinary and holistic methods and frameworks. The insights from these CBNRM research experiences come less from generalized analytical conclusions than from testing and modelling innovative development practice.

Rural development practitioners are trained in social or natural science so as to interpret the phenomena they observe, and also in technical application so as to design changes or interventions. In addition, they learn through the practical application of skills and by confronting complex, non-formulaic problems. The notion of learning through practice is fundamental to how we expect effective professionals to work (Schon, 1983), yet it is seldom made explicit. These cases provide helpful models for both researchers and practitioners-as-learners, demonstrating how informed action can serve both to reveal new knowledge as well as to direct good practice.

Case narratives like these have a particular value in learning for practice. The reality that professionals face is always ambiguous. Social science theory, which provides a useful basis for structuring observations, has a relatively low predictive value when it comes to the complexities of human affairs. The acquisition of practical knowledge for real expertise is always based on experience from cases (Flyvbjerg, 2001). We do not learn from cases because the solutions from one can be generalized to many others, but because the case experience provides an example which illustrates broader insights, demonstrates how complex relationships play out and provides clues to practitioners about how they can respond in their own unique context-dependent situations.

This concluding chapter will focus on interpreting what these action-learning studies accomplished. We are primarily concerned here with the application of research in development practice and change. For that reason, the discussion will be oriented towards practitioners-as-learners, and draws insights for rural poverty and NRM practice.

What happened?

In Chapter 2, I explained how the projects came to have a common starting point and a shared conceptual framework. Despite a wide range of political contexts and focus on different resources, there are also many consistencies in how they unfolded and what the main outcomes were. Across widely divergent settings, research teams struggled with novel PAR methods. They focused on the collaborative design of positive interventions to address local poverty. They worked with community groups to strategically build consensus and present a common political position in dealings with more powerful external agents; or they sought to differentiate local interests in order to assess how resource benefits were distributed. They helped to build capacity for NRM analysis and decision-making among resource user communities, government officials and researchers. They developed new institutions and processes for resource planning and decision-making, and they used field-level insights and experience to influence policy change and policy implementation.

The case chapters relate diverse paths through which the projects' CBNRM focus emerged. Sometimes this evolved from a starting point of on-farm productivity enhancement; sometimes from exploring a novel integrated resource management perspective (such as watersheds); sometimes from a crisis in a key common property resource system (such as fishery or pasture); and sometimes from a policy change opportunity (such as recognition of community resource rights). The learning value of the research projects was enhanced by results which were often unexpected.

Capacity building and learning were fundamental outcomes of the cases. Importantly, the learners were not only the researchers but also local men and women, farmers and fishers, government extension agents, local government officials and senior policy-makers. In the early stages of some of these CBNRM projects, capacity-building for the researchers themselves was a crucial objective. Many of the cases relate examples of how natural science research teams struggled at the outset to interpret and apply participatory methods in the field. As their experience reveals, participatory research skills are best learned in the field, through practice and reflection (Blackburn and Holland, 1998 draw similar conclusions). Throughout even the long-term research cases, it is instructive to see how research teams continued to identify capacity-building as an important rationale for the work, as they focused on new challenges such as conflict management, policy influence, communications and networking. Of course, they also applied and extended the conclusions from their own fieldwork as they built these additional skills.

In these cases, farmers and fishers also learned from the research. They demonstrated an increased general awareness and perception of natural resource systems and degradation issues. However, they also adapted new production technologies, gained experience with new marketing arrangements, as well as new forms of organization for the production, conservation and management of shared resources. Farmers and fishers are practical above all, so the value of experience as a teaching tool is hard to beat. Several of the cases report on the effectiveness of farmer-to-farmer learning, which became increasingly systematized. This experience was analogous to successful 'farmer field schools' organized elsewhere (CIP-UPWARD, 2003). As discussed in Chapter 9, these means may be most effective when government bureaucracies are especially resistant to change. Local resource users also started to recognize their political voice by acquiring skills in collective action, organization, innovation and advocacy, so as to demonstrate and argue for changes to government policy and implementation.

In many of the cases, government officials proved to be another important category of learners. The lessons they learned may have been slightly different from those of the researchers or of the farmers. For example, district-level extension staff realized that by providing opportunities for meaningful local participation, they could be more effective in improving productivity and reducing poverty (this is referred to in each of Chapters 4–11). Local government leaders who were engaged in the projects recognized the value of new processes for planning and managing natural resources. They endorsed or adapted new institutions which helped them meet their devolved authorities for resource management. In local pilot projects, senior-level officials recognized the strength of arguments for policy change and the evidence for feasible alternatives (Chapter 17).

Researchers also learned to adapt methods and tools, and even to develop new tools which crossed disciplinary boundaries on their problem-solving, interdisciplinary teams. This resulted, for example, in the modification of participatory appraisal tools to specific contexts.¹ The cases refer frequently not only to using and adapting PRA methods in the local context, but also to the refinement of wholly novel approaches. For example, most of the research teams had to learn, modify and apply methods of conflict management in order to proceed with institutional interventions. In Hong Ha and Ratanakiri, the researchers developed formal participatory communications strategies (Bessette, 2003). In China, research teams were able to strengthen the roles of local farmers and resource user groups by developing PM&E tools for them to use in evaluating the research work themselves (Vernooy, Qiu and Jianchu, 2003). Through experience and networking with peers, many of the teams learned strategies for policy influence and networking. This increased the effectiveness of their community-level interventions and the likelihood that local innovations could be more widely disseminated (see Chapter 17 for examples). Thus an important outcome of these CBNRM projects was the development of new methods and tools for effective PAR.

During the course of their research work, most of the teams generated interdisciplinary and participatory problem diagnoses. These built on the scientific knowledge and studies of the researchers, as well as the indigenous and informal knowledge of local resource users. They were validated with different groups in the community and with government officials. Having developed and validated priority problems with members of the community and government officials, the researchers were more or less obliged to follow up if they wished to maintain their credibility. Community priorities that could not be framed as researchable questions, or to which the researchers could not respond directly (such as school or road construction, seed funding for new activities), were often addressed by obtaining resources from other organizations or existing government programmes. But even when research was feasible, responding to community priorities sometimes stretched the researchers' usual disciplinary comfort zones.

Participatory diagnoses led to action, which was the core of the learning experience in these research cases. CBNRM action was, in the first instance, local in scale and context-specific. Local actions proved to be essential for learning and impact. This is the proof of concept: if the CBNRM process cannot generate local change, it has to be regarded as ineffective from a development standpoint. This is one of the areas that differentiate CBNRM from policy-oriented research. Many of the cases point to the importance of policy in shaping local possibilities for change. But the cases also show that without the tools and processes for implementing changes to local practice, policy reforms are insufficient.

As originally intended in the conceptual framework for the research, the project teams selected research sites where the population was relatively poor. The research developed interventions to address this poverty through resource management. But even though these were very low-income rural households, over time the researchers came to broaden their concept of poverty. Appropriately enough, in most cases the initial actions addressed rapid improvements to food production, water supply or basic income. But through socially differentiated analyses, some of the teams came to take actions on the problems of marginalized sub-groups in the community. Others recognized the importance of building diverse assets, such as social capital, access to credit, political influence, and human-resource skills in leadership, communication or organizational management. These asset-building activities by the research teams became important elements of the experimental community-level actions to reduce poverty.

Both production technologies and resource management institutions were the subject of innovation and testing in the research cases. Most of the cases revolved around issues in which these factors interact: the benefits of improved production systems and management practices for common property resources can only be realized if institutional reforms also ensure access to poor users (Leach, Mearns and Scoones, 1999). The cases document new awareness of social exclusion and community heterogeneity among the researchers, and often even among community members themselves. New processes for resource-planning and decision-making reinforced governance reforms by strengthening transparency, accountability and representation. Together with communities and resource users, researchers and local officials reflected on how well such new institutions were working and devised ways in which they could be improved. This obliged them to deal publicly with issues of governance, an experience which sometimes reflected poorly on the performance of the conventional administrative mechanisms of the state (Vernooy, Qiu and Jianchu, 2003).

Given these awareness-expanding lessons, and the importance of resource tenure and rights in these cases, the field lessons often led researchers and communities to policy engagement. Chapter 17 documents ways in which both the analysis of researchers and the novel experience in the field affected policy. Such impacts took the form of new resource tenure systems, legislated collective resource rights and the introduction of formal participatory planning processes, as well as extensive local reinterpretation of decentralizing policy implementation. All these policy innovations helped broaden the scope for local initiatives on resource management.

Finally, a crucial element of these case experiences is that they were transformative for the actors involved. Most cases document transformational recognition of processes and causal links, the exposure of power relations and the adoption of new roles by key actors. The research did not merely generate new data, it generated new perceptions of the problems.

The cases document examples where government staff adopted more facilitative, rather than regulatory and enforcement, roles. Researchers guided the enquiries of other learners. Farmers became researchers, agreeing on criteria and evaluating experiments. As well, women assumed new roles in resource-planning and decision-making. Finally, resource users demanded more responsiveness and accountability from local governments. These kinds of transformational changes opened up new avenues for creative endeavour which the actors would not have considered previously. Such changes demonstrate shifts in fundamental operating assumptions. These are not marginal or incremental changes.

None of the cases concludes that the problems are solved. Despite the strong desire of most of the research teams to solve problems, and despite the concrete accomplishments of the cases, each successful innovation generates a new set of challenges. The point is that technical innovations and new institutions can enable resource users, both individually and collectively, to adapt from a stronger platform of resource access, knowledge, experience and confidence. The cases document how CBNRM researchers have moved from an approach of designing optimal solutions to strengthening the capacity of poor communities for adaptive learning and collective action.

In the most advanced cases, despite continuing political tensions and dynamic ecological conditions, adaptive learning is becoming institutionalized. In Koh Kong province, for example, the new VMCs are becoming adaptive learners who are experimenting with new techniques and management interventions, and seeking technical advice to frame their options and interpret outcomes (Chapter 8). In the Tam Giang lagoon, members of the new Fishing Coalition are responsible for monitoring changes in resource conditions, in order to adjust plans as required (Chapter 4). In Cambodia, successful community forestry groups have developed their own outreach activities to share lessons with other organizations (Chapter 11). In Hong Ha, Vietnam, and in Changshun county, Guizhou, district officials are integrating new participatory diagnosis and extension tools developed by the research teams because they work better than previous practices (Chapters 5 and 9). There will continue to be changes in these situations, some for the better and some for the worse. But the status quo ante is no longer an option.

Explaining what happened

The research outcomes and actions described above can be characterized in terms of three qualities that can be linked to the ways in which the researchers combined science, participation and action.

1. The research was effective, in the sense that it posed questions which were relevant to the key actors and was able to develop innovations to address them.
   
   
2. The research results were adopted by resource users, local government organizations and development professionals such as extension agents or project staff.
   
   
3. The research was empowering and transformative in its effect on the actors who were involved.

One reason for the effectiveness of these CBNRM action-research projects was that they embraced the complexity of their cases, rather than seeking ideological or reductionist simplifications. As they gained experience, the research teams increasingly recognized the contradictions and anomalies, as well as the heterogeneity and dynamism, in CBNRM. They adopted pragmatic approaches to the specific histories of their different sites. For example, they recognized that indigenous environmental knowledge was of limited value in migrant communities (Chapter 8). As well, they recognized that although the concept of collective resource management had deep cultural roots, traditional practices could not be revived in contemporary contexts (Chapter 6). They identified divergent interests in the community, and in some cases exposed awkward inequities that otherwise might have remained buried to both community members and governments (Chapter 4, Chapter 10). They helped build transparency and accountability into new governance processes for CBNRM, while tying these to existing structures of local government (Chapters 3, 4, 8, 12). In these respects, the researchers succeeded because they did not dodge difficult questions.

But it was their characteristics as PAR projects which played the most important role. Both the 'participatory' and the 'action' in PAR crucially affected the outcomes described above. This is because participation and action were much more than methodological approaches or techniques of research. They conditioned the attitudes of the researchers and those of the other actors involved in the projects. They framed the interaction of the various parties and reinforced the learning processes that were essential to social change.

The participatory nature of the research work went far beyond engaging resource users in data collection or in testing interventions. Men and women in the affected communities became involved in defining the problems and setting research objectives, in identifying criteria for success, and in monitoring and evaluating changes. Researchers gave up some of their control in exchange for more effective outcomes. A number of the cases recount ways in which the research objectives and agenda changed after engagement with resource users who identified problems and priorities that the researchers had not seen. This strongly participatory nature of the research processes was challenging for the researchers. They have been trained and socialized for many years to understand legitimate scientific research as an elitist and reductionist activity, which demands specialized technical, as opposed to relational, skills (see a discussion of African experience in Opondo et al., 2003).

But it is only through participation that life and meaning are given to any phenomenon. This is partly related to the pedagogical maxim that most of us do not recall new information, even if told repeatedly, unless we actually process it by applying it in practice. The vital connection of neural synapses in the human brain which comes from acting on new information is obviously an important element of learning. Without processes of engagement and participation, any organized intervention is reduced to words on paper, or seeds, or fertilizer, or other material inputs. That is, the full comprehension of any phenomenon can only be grasped through personal engagement. To design an innovation which is likely to be widely and quickly adopted requires the participation of the users.

Participation is how people build confidence, trust and essential communication skills. These skills are all empowering, so the processes themselves are important elements of social change and poverty reduction. Participatory approaches recognize and respect the agency of individuals: their ability to assess situations, make choices and change their behaviour in the face of constraints. Of course, participatory processes expose participants to politically charged and confrontational situations. Those in a vulnerable position can suffer from this exposure. That is why participatory processes need to be managed thoughtfully and respectfully. The research project context can help to level the playing field and provide judicious facilitation.

Sayer and Campbell (2004) argue that participatory approaches to resource management and livelihood issues are essential for effective research. Without them, scientists will miss key explanatory elements of a complex situation, will fail to unlearn erroneous assumptions and will continue to use their conclusions to promote interventions which are either inappropriate or unpopular.

Building trust, confidence and relationships may have little to do with the science, but it has a great deal to do with the process of adopting innovations. Intervention must start from where people are. The process of ongoing research, learning and adoption will not proceed without the required credibility and confidence in relations between community users of new knowledge and the generators of this knowledge.

Participation was not only important in the enquiry stage of the research, but also in the analysis and sharing of lessons. Most of the learning outcomes described in the previous section occurred through participation in the research effort, and through discussion of the meaning of these outcomes together, rather than through transmission of knowledge by reports, formal presentations or publications. This applies not only to the participation of farmers and resource users, but also to government officials and other external actors. It was the firsthand experience of field conditions, the inevitable modification of simplifying assumptions when confronted by complex realities and the practical adaptation of innovations by users interacting with each other that led to the most powerful insights.²

Research directed towards behavioural change is most effective when it engages the parties who are intrinsically implicated in such change. The research process can remain rigorous and analytical, but it responds to complex local conditions and priorities. In such cases, the insights from PAR have been followed by actions undertaken by resource users themselves, along with support from researchers or extensionists. Implementation, which is often left to other players, here became the central aspect of CBNRM research.

Taking action is messier than merely reporting on analytical conclusions. But it has a catalytic effect on the commitment of participatory agents and on the quality of the lessons learned. Because the researchers were not merely producing another academic or extension publication, they had to learn how to motivate people to make changes, to test new production systems or to organize so that they could implement new institutions. This kind of action depended on the accumulated goodwill of relationships between researchers and the communities. It required high levels of awareness and trust on both sides which could only be built over time. It was supported by the responsiveness of researchers and by the motivation and enthusiasm of resource users and community leaders.

The explicit social dimension of learning from participation and action in these CBNRM cases was important. Lessons were derived from theory, observation, analysis and testing – but also through interaction. The cases recount numerous different forums for local interaction around the research process. These included: identifying and validating problems with resource user groups where they existed already or facilitating their development where they did not; exploring gender-differentiated perspectives with individuals and women's groups; presenting conclusions to local government; sharing crop performance assessments between farmers; developing collective regulations for resource use; and interpreting outcomes to those inside and outside the community. These interactive processes stimulated discussion and challenged conclusions. They built consensus among different actors on problems, interpretation and results. They created opportunities for mutual exposure to participants in the research process who had very different worldviews and experience, such as local fishers and senior government officials. And in many cases, these processes created new opportunities for local people to interact among themselves. Indeed, as Vandergeest argues in Chapter 16, the research processes essentially redefined the community in ways that were consistent with its learning and action functions under CBNRM.

The roles of the researchers became altered by these processes. They remained community outsiders. But their role in facilitating the processes of learning and change was an important element in accomplishing the outcomes documented above. At different times in most of the projects, researchers were called upon to provide coaching and problem-solving for other learners. They also assisted with conflict management, awareness-raising, capacity-building, networking and policy support, as well as more conventional analysis and training.

An actor-oriented approach to development emphasizes the capacity of the poor and marginalized to assess options and take the initiative in their own self-interest. This approach is contrasted with an expert-oriented approach, which relies on specialized expertise to provide solutions to complex problems. These cases marry both approaches. Specialized expertise across multiple disciplines is essential in CBNRM research in order to diagnose complex social and natural system problems, to apply a broad menu of potential solutions and to integrate these in order to address multiple dimensions of these problems simultaneously. However, action is the true measure of the viability and effectiveness of conclusions and innovations. At the same time, it is the most effective way to ensure learning and continued adaptation. Only through action can innovations be institutionalized. This requires more than knowledge; it requires changes in behaviour, roles, attitudes, skills and capacities. In short, institutionalization requires transformation.

Combining science, participation and action generates strong learning outcomes and builds the capacity of organizations, in the ways described above. Many of the cases describe the process they followed as iterative cycles of investigation / reflection / planning / action / investigation / reflection / planning / action... The research teams themselves emphasize this research process and framework as being crucial to the successes they achieved. For a diagrammatic illustration of this process of participatory action research, see Figure 13.1 (or similar diagrams in Chapters 4, 5 and 11). Overall, we can think of this iterative process of participatory action as a model of adaptive social learning. It combines enquiry with interaction and learning by doing.

Reflecting on challenges and implications

None of the various elements here are new in themselves. In particular, it is worth pointing out that the strongly interactive and participatory research strategy employed in these cases often owed much of its initial success to the application of new production technologies and systems which were originally developed using much more reductionist agricultural research frameworks. As the authors of the Bhutan case note in Chapter 10, the participatory field research methods led to new insights which could guide on-station agricultural experimentation, but did not eliminate the need for these entirely. The research project teams managed to put familiar elements together in new ways.

But CBNRM researchers and practitioners still face many challenges. One of the most difficult aspects of their work so far has been addressing social exclusion and inequity in communities. Researchers can be confronted with an apparent dilemma here. Not only can these be issues that communities would rather not deal with, but by highlighting power relations, researchers risk exacerbating resource conflicts. They may feel forced to choose between a socially targeted approach to collective action for resource management (as recommended by Beck and Fajber in Chapter 15), or an explicitly neutral position to avoid annoying elites whose support will be essential to reforms.

In the long term, this issue becomes more tactical than strategic. If power relations and other forms of social marginalization are strongly prejudiced against specific social groups in the community, then poverty reduction, resource governance and sustainable resource use will remain out of reach. If CBNRM processes are functioning, it may be more effective to capture social conflict within them, empowering disadvantaged players to engage more effectively in the inevitable political struggles. Eventually, the issues of exclusion and power relations have to be addressed in order for the fundamental objectives of poverty reduction and resource degradation to be achieved.

Another challenge which frequently arises in the field is dealing with government staff. The cases reveal how government officials have become engaged in the research projects, and how their learning has been helpful for the success of site-based work and the spread of lessons to other sites. But, except for Chapters 9 and 13 which specifically address this problem, the case studies mostly gloss over the frustrations involved. Despite formal policies which may be supportive, many government officials are antagonistic towards the devolution of NRM to communities. It threatens their power, and they may not trust the capacity of local decision-making to protect the resource base. There is no incentive for officials to move from the enforcement and approval of local actions to the facilitation of local management decision-making. Paternalistic attitudes and punitive relations towards community resource users are deeply ingrained in many government resource management agencies. Staff rotate through field positions quickly, never gaining much appreciation for local knowledge or context.

These issues can be very difficult to overcome. Little can be accomplished without meaningful support from senior levels of the bureaucracy, but even that may not be sufficient. The fundamental inconsistency between participatory, actor-oriented and learning-driven field methods on one hand and the hierarchical, structure-oriented and power-driven behavioural rules of bureaucracies, on the other, complicate efforts towards change. It is impossible to create effective participatory field interventions just by grafting the rhetoric into programme documents or training manuals. Nor is there much point in introducing participatory techniques if the underlying philosophy, practices and assumptions about power and agency in the organization remain unchanged. Policy goals can sometimes be invoked to build incentives for behavioural change, but these must penetrate an often impervious organizational culture. But despite their monolithic external images, most large organizations are heterogeneous. It is often possible to find committed, entrepreneurial innovators within the ranks. It may also be possible to generate some enthusiasm or recognition for new professional roles more consistent with support to CBNRM, especially among younger staff.

The CBNRM action-learning processes described in these cases were time-consuming and required substantial external resources and community effort. The researchers, different groups in the communities, government staff and other external groups all had different interests, assumptions and agendas. Initial responses by the communities were frequently superficial and dismissive. It was only after research teams had made a demonstrable commitment to learning from and change with the communities that they could gain respect, trust and shared commitment to innovation.

The research teams found that their initial efforts rapidly built procedural experience, and their own skills in managing participatory research and group dynamics improved with practice. As a result, they could expand their work to new communities with much less investment and effort than was required for the pilots (see examples in Chapters 4, 5, 9, 10). Their early successes also created a reputation for their work among nearby jurisdictions: this reduced the challenges of establishing their initial credibility. However, it remains important to emphasize that the case experiences suggest that scaling up CBNRM innovations relies first on scaling down. That is, it is important to get the pilot experiments right. This can be achieved by concentrating on mechanisms for meaningful participation, enhancing learning on the part of key change agents, and building sustainability of new institutions and processes before devoting a lot of resources to trying to repeat the experience elsewhere.

Given the effort put into building CBNRM institutions and collective action for resource management at the local level, how sustainable are these innovations? Some of the cases describe ongoing long-term research projects, while others are indeed already winding down or have terminated completely. There is no doubt that the engagement of an international donor, as in these cases, generates legitimacy for innovation and change which may disappear once funding and donor interest decline. However, all these cases document the embedding (sometimes still contingent or contested) of new resource rights, new planning and consultation processes, and production systems in the regular practices of farmers, the regular interactions of community members and the administrative mechanisms of government agencies. The innovations developed by each research team are no longer merely artefacts of a discrete donor-funded project. Naturally, without the patronage of an external donor, innovations such as these are vulnerable to political change and to the attrition of key personnel. Ironically, the more successful and widely applicable these innovative CBNRM pilots are, the more likely that their leaders will be diverted by other offers and career opportunities. This is surely a positive outcome, although it may pose challenges to local leadership succession.

In the cases presented in this volume, there is varied evidence of how communities will likely respond to diminished project engagement. In Cambodia, the VMCs in the coastal communities of Koh Kong are already taking initiatives to continue adaptive learning for resource management without project support. Occasionally, they need to be reminded of the main principles of CBNRM, as described in Chapter 8 when researchers emphasized that the process should be non-partisan. Like the Fishing Coalition in the Tam Giang lagoon or the herder organizations in Mongolia, they have gained legitimacy and recognition from the government through the project experience. As a result, now they are able to call on public agencies for technical support and other resources. In the case of ancestral domain in the Philippines, the new participatory planning processes and collaborative institutions for local resource governance developed by the research project have served as models for other municipal governments since the project's completion in 2001 (Chapter 12). The participatory learning framework developed by the IIRR to support community NRM processes has become a regular training programme offered by the institute, and has been modified, elaborated and offered commercially numerous times in different countries (Chapter 13). The reduction or termination of research support from the donor has not led to the erosion of these innovations.

Several kinds of support would be helpful to sustain nascent CBNRM initiatives as described in these cases. Researchers played a key role in participatory diagnosis, and the extension and facilitation of the community interactions with governments or other agencies. Now that the research teams have a greater understanding of the processes and tools, these roles are being taught and transferred to practitioners. Support is needed for the development of curricula, strengthening the field experience of teachers, as well as training and practice for both students and adult learners. These efforts can build on related skills in participatory development among other organizations and on the strengths of existing research groups.³

Communities which have already established new institutions for collective action and resource management will face less need for technical support or facilitation in planning and gaining government approvals. But the cases show that even after gaining support from government and establishing successful processes for resource planning and management, local organizations occasionally need external facilitation for dealing with difficult conflicts, and for addressing new challenges in dynamic ecosystems and economies. This suggests the need for new kinds of extension services, or service providers. Such services are not tied to site-specific projects or outcomes nor to sectors or technologies. They could be funded from government poverty-reduction programmes, which are typically targeted at regions in which CBNRM initiatives would be appropriate.

The cases also demonstrate the importance of enabling policies for CBNRM. The specific characteristics of local institutions for the adaptive management of common property and collective action will vary widely, and can really only emerge from the dynamic interaction of complex socio-economic and ecological systems (Ruitenbeek and Cartier, 2001). Prescriptive policies specifying the form and structure of CBNRM institutions would not only be inappropriate given the wide range of local conditions, but they would also fail to accommodate the adjustments needed to adapt to system changes. However, most of the cases clearly benefited from national policies that support decentralized resource management and representative, accountable governance at the local level. They also benefit from strong policy support for poverty reduction and social equity. In the case of Cambodia, participatory resource management plans designed to meet the specific conditions of ethnic-minority communities in Ratanakiri province proved so significant to local politics and planning that they were adopted in the national Seila programme of governance reform (Chapter 3). In Bhutan, new national CBNRM policies were informed by project research results. The new policies helped spread the PAR model and provided national resources for local implementation. These kinds of policy frameworks provide the flexible recognition and support needed to help sustain adaptive learning by CBNRM communities.

As a result of these research projects, new roles and expectations have been adopted by the key players associated with local resource management. Community resource management organizations created through the research projects will face difficult challenges, and in some cases may fail. However, in many instances, the precedents they have set are already being institutionalized. Data needs for resource management will continue, and may even grow as management interventions or resource conflicts become more complex. The need for action research in these communities will decline as they become adaptive learners themselves. It is important to remember that the sustainability of CBNRM does not mean entrenching permanent structures, but rather enabling the appropriate evolution of adaptive management responses over time. Persistence is a less useful criterion of sustainable institutional structures than is adaptability.

Another reason for optimism for the future of CBNRM in Asia is that, despite the modest scale of the early efforts, many of the researchers and the community organizations themselves are well connected to networks of information-sharing and exchange throughout the region. Local efforts are magnified and reflected through these networks, which are increasingly oriented to local-language users and to decentralized memberships of activists and, through them, community organizations. Small-scale, low-profile initiatives which meet the common needs of many marginalized rural communities may gain disproportionate recognition and influence.

In transferring CBNRM experiences, however, it will be difficult to reduce them to standardized guidelines or checklists that can be easily conveyed in new contexts or made routine for large-scale replication. CBNRM practice does not work like that. Initially, many researchers and practitioners sought simple rules and blueprints for their research fieldwork. But once they became comfortable with the approach, they recognized that such short cuts tend to circumvent the fundamental premises of CBNRM, which are meaningful participation, responsiveness, context and adaptation. Methodological pluralism, multiple and flexible tools, and supportive attitudes are all approaches which can be fostered through practice to build and spread CBNRM expertise.

Sharing knowledge in this field will be challenging. The most powerful and difficult lessons from the cases were lessons which probably had to be gained through experience. On the one hand, this demonstrates the importance of practice in learning. But on the other hand, for problems that are widespread, it would be helpful to strengthen alternative methods of learning which might be able to reach a larger audience more quickly. A wide range of teaching and communications approaches is probably needed to strengthen the dissemination of outcomes.

The path to sustainability then is to build a body of skilled CBNRM practitioners through training and experience; support continued networking and information-sharing among resource user groups and with government to share that experience; and build enabling policies for CBNRM consistent with decentralization, poverty reduction and local governance reform. All of these measures are easily supportable by governments or by international donors, and involve only modest expense.

Still, even with the insights from these case studies, the task of building effective CBNRM practice appears daunting. The process is complex, idiosyncratic and generally inconsistent with the capacities and structures of existing government organizations. While the challenges are significant, the key lessons from the cases are that despite challenging situations it is possible to take sensitive and practical action towards CBNRM. Although such action is not always successful, it is a good way to gain support and recognition. Sometimes it is the immobilizing effect of daunting challenges that is the biggest barrier to change.

Directions for practice

The main lessons of this volume for practitioners point to practical processes for adaptive social learning. Local resource-management contexts are always complex, because they involve not only dynamic and poorly understood ecosystems, but also implicit social institutions and inequitable power relations. However, responsive action does not have to address all this complexity at the same time.

The simple foundations of effective CBNRM practice lie in values of mutual respect, trust and learning, rather than power. Because existing relations between the various actors are generally based on power, this change takes time to develop. Actions to build awareness, share knowledge, validate knowledge claims and pilot interventions are undertaken to strengthen these values, using participatory methods which themselves help to change attitudes.

Conventional training for field practice encourages the separation of discrete elements of complex systems, reducing them for specialized analysis and solution. However, these cases suggest that practitioners should embrace complexity without needing to analyse every aspect of complex local systems. The crucial elements of the system demand urgent analysis and intervention. But after this, researchers should be prepared for surprises and will need to act, learn and adapt. Authors of these case studies and their teams encouraged learning by all the partners, not just the researchers. Iterative social learning can help integrate complex and dynamic interdisciplinary problems across space and time.

Learning itself is often less of a barrier than expected, if learning opportunities are built on these foundation values. Most people like to learn, and the different actors involved in CBNRM have many incentives to do so: income enhancement, risk reduction, political power, increased confidence, career recognition and opportunity. Behavioural or role change can be harder than learning, and requires practice. Here, processes which build on shared intention, collaboration, consistency, observation and reflection in collective action seem helpful. These are some of the central elements of management, and in cases where these local management elements can take root, they helped to solidify learning and change.

Note that control of these processes was not particularly significant in affecting outcomes. Learning processes moved at different paces and in response to different pressures. Contention was inherent in the political dynamics of decentralized resource management. Sometimes, learning processes were driven by farmers, sometimes by researchers, sometimes by government agencies. However, the successful innovations in each case depended on details which had to evolve with the projects in the field. These considerations included who was engaged, how conflicts could be addressed, production systems preferred by male or female farmers and the nature of political support for tenure change. Such detailed strategic choices, crucial to the research outcomes, arose from creative exploration, from interaction and from opportunity, not from the carefully planned predetermined objectives of either the researchers or the farmers.

While CBNRM is mainly concerned with managing common property resources through collective action, practitioners have to pay attention to productivity issues on private lands. This is not only because initial income gains are important to strengthen precarious local livelihoods, but because the common and private resource holdings interact ecologically. Specific constraints which the poor face in terms of access to and use of resources have to be addressed. Attention should be given to disentangling symptoms from causes and effects with those people who are most involved. Suggested improvements need to be subject to technical validation and joint investigation, while recognizing that criteria for success may be different for different actors.

Building successful innovations from a small number of sites to much broader applications can involve both horizontal scaling (outward diffusion to adjacent or comparable sites) and vertical scaling (gaining support from senior levels of government). Either strategy can be effective. But programmatic approaches to these efforts, driven by external government or donor targets, can actually frustrate the local process of participatory learning and systemic co-evolution which is essential to success. Scaling up has to be driven by the same factors that lead to local success: supportive attitudes modelled through practice, capacity-building and leadership (see also Blackburn and Holland, 1998).

Building policy influence from field lessons is an important enabling and scaling factor. Practitioners need to recognize opportunity in policy flux, develop networks and allies, and test new ideas in the field. In addition, they must provide evidence, and engage government staff and policy-makers in project learning in various ways. Participatory methods build local voice and confidence, but practitioners can play an important role in giving direction and focus to this voice. Implementing policies to decentralize NRM does not mean that senior governments have no role. Instead, as the case experiences demonstrate, technical support, data management, legitimacy, oversight and sanction are all important roles for senior governments in their dealings with community resource managers.

Directions for research

These cases have demonstrated new and effective ways to connect science, participation and action. They illustrate how researchers can play facilitative roles in helping other actors to learn from interdisciplinary innovations. They point to processes which build confidence and creativity in integrated NRM at the local level, while also dealing with the challenges of political conflict. Beneficiaries of these research projects were, in the first instance, poor local farmers and fishers who were able to capitalize from more secure individual or collective tenure, improved productivity and better resource management to improve incomes.

But there were many public goods generated from this research as well. Reducing natural resource degradation generates benefits far beyond the local level. Watersheds are stabilized, erosion declines, and the quality of water and other resources increases. The protection of the coastal habitat such as mangroves encourages marine biodiversity and strengthens stocks of commercially valuable fisheries. Social and gender analysis focuses community and political attention on marginalized members of society to address fundamental issues of human rights and equity. Local governance reforms build capacity, transparency and accountability, as well as strengthen the delivery of a variety of services. Participatory processes build citizenship and social engagement. These are all examples of public goods that are both essential to development and outcomes of the research cases presented here.

The task of action research shifts as CBNRM takes root in a policy context of decentralization and local governance capacity-building. From the introduction of basic awareness and baseline information, coupled with the challenge of introducing and gaining support for innovations, researchers must now devote more attention to monitoring outcomes. Development of criteria and indicators for resource management and for local livelihood outcomes offer important opportunities for extending participatory research methods. An important element of monitoring outcomes is to focus research attention on groups that are not benefiting from the resource management changes. By continuing to examine the nature and allocation of benefits after the introduction of CBNRM reforms, researchers can contribute to maintaining open and adaptive governance processes and verify that targeted interventions have the intended effects.

A particularly challenging area of CBNRM practice is the transformation of the role of government officials. They evolve from being leading actors and enforcers of natural resources and rural development decision-making, to becoming technical consultants, facilitators and guides to local planning and management. The difficult area of sorting out performance expectations between local and senior levels of government will need research attention. Another aspect of this is the clarification and elaboration of new roles and opportunities for government agencies at various levels as CBNRM practices gain strength. These might include roles in strengthening collaborative learning processes, managing and sharing information for local decision-making, enforcing sanctions to support local resource management practices and continuing to build a broader public awareness of outcomes. All of these are areas to which applied research can contribute.

Most of the cases in this volume concentrate on the learning that must accompany a broader awareness of resource management problems and the implementation of novel institutional solutions, at both the local and higher levels of governance. These exercises have only begun to explore some of the linkages between the ways local communities used their natural resources and external forces for change. For example, the influence of international markets for high-value commercial products was a key factor in driving the enclosure of common property in several cases.

However, other external factors create constraints and opportunity for local resource management action. Global climate change may increase the severity and frequency of extreme climatic events such as floods, droughts or storms, which force communities to introduce changes to their conventional resource management strategies to adapt to higher risks. Opportunities for new products and markets will affect potential returns to collective management, or else change the balance of investment between collective and household-managed resource assets. Changes in national and international economies affect opportunities for migration and off-farm income generation. These, in turn, affect available household labour and capital for local agricultural production or investment in resource management.

Conflicts in resource management regarding claims of tenure and jurisdiction, as well as in development goals, will continue to be prominent features of rural development. In some respects, the decentralization of management decision-making creates even greater potential for local conflicts. The development and institutionalization of conflict management processes to accommodate collective and household resource management, and to adapt to dynamic external conditions, will provide researchers with important opportunities to contribute to high-priority governance issues. This is an area of work that will benefit from the participatory action methods and social learning processes recounted by the cases in this volume.

These CBNRM experiences demonstrate that applied research which engages local actors respectfully as partners in an iterative process of social learning can have transformative outcomes far beyond drawing scientific conclusions. Poor farmers and fishers in the most marginal parts of rural Asia have been able to improve their livelihoods, reduce risk and halt or even reverse environmental degradation. But they have also introduced new institutions of resource management which reinforce local government reforms and challenge national policies of resource management.

These experiences demonstrate the potential of applied research to deliver a wide range of productivity and public-goods benefits. However, outcomes are not guaranteed. The form and function of local resource management institutions are neither universal nor fixed. The political and economic gains of the poor are contingent and vulnerable. These research cases are particularly valuable because they demonstrate how applied research can build the capacity for adaptive learning by local resource users, as individuals and groups, to meet the continued challenges of dynamic change in their environment.

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