I have a confession to make: I'm easily seduced by book titles. So, while all the buzzwords in the title of this book may not get your heart racing, they were enough to prompt me to volunteer to read and review it. The editors define adaptive collaborative approaches as ‘a family of concepts that seek to combine research and various other ways of learning as well as seek out collaborative actions among diverse stakeholders operating at multiple scales of decision-making and action’. Further, they state that they see adaptive collaborative approaches as ‘a suite of strategies, rather than an absolute approach, which are employed to learn and muddle through complex systems to generate and facilitate innovations on various aspects of resource governance and management’.
And therein lies the rub. The editors’ multiple contributions to this publication suffer from an excess of jargon wrapped up in long and complex sentences. Perhaps this is inevitable given the subject matter. Indeed, in her chapter entitled The ups and downs of institutional learning, Carol Colfer reflects that the complexity of the language used by her social science team mystified their natural science colleagues. She reports this as one of the major challenges to the adoption of adaptive collaborative approaches within the Center for International Forestry Research. Less forgiveable are the typographical and editorial errors in the introductory chapter (and elsewhere) that in themselves may be enough to put the reader off delving deeper into the subsequent contributions. That would be a real shame given that there is much material of real interest here.
Chapter 2 provides a review of the conceptual basis of adaptive collaborative approaches and is therefore, perhaps unavoidably, dense. Things then get more interesting with chapters describing the lived experience of researchers and practitioners experimenting with these approaches in practice. Carol Colfer's contribution is a reassuringly frank and personal reflection on the issues underlying conflicts and collaborations between social and natural scientists within an international research institute. Helpfully she identifies four criteria for success, including identifying a problem of sufficient significance that participants are motivated to act, the importance of excellent facilitation skills, the need for an institutional environment that grants freedom to fail and to learn from those failures, and the crucial issue of sufficient time not just to understand context and build relationships but also for implementation, monitoring and review of planned activities.
Further chapters explore a wide range of case studies. These include: adapting the Farmers Field School approach initially developed with rice farmers in South Asia to the upland landscapes of Ecuador, community networks for floodplain management in Bangladesh, adaptive collaborative approaches in the contested forest landscapes of Zimbabwe, and forest governance in Nepal. Chapter 8 is a personal reflection of the use of action research in natural resource management by Robert Fisher, ex Deputy Director of the Regional Community Forestry Training Center in Bangkok. Fisher is an anthropologist and brings his experience as both an academic and a development practitioner to bear in highlighting challenges and lesson learnt. He also helpfully provides what he calls ‘pragmatic’ definitions of terms such as applied research, participatory action research and adaptive management, which are liberally used in the rest of the book but often with much less clarity.
The final two chapters, authored by the editors, attempt to summarize the challenges highlighted in the other contributions and to present what they refer to as a bold new future direction. Perhaps the best way for me to conclude is with one further quote, this time from the final chapter: ‘Paradigmatic rethinking is needed to move beyond biophysical reductionism, a linear conception of change, a thin view of participation, technical views of innovation and learning framed within existing assumptions and underlying institutional boundaries and regimes.’ With that, I'll leave it to you to decide if this is the kind of book for you.
