In search of common ground: adaptive collaborative management in Cameroon

In developing countries, forest management, sharing and collaboration has encountered major problems as reflected in Southern Cameroon’s forested landscape, which is challenged by differences in power, knowledge gaps, and competing land rights claims. The authors use Cameroon’s forests, as an integral part of research on adaptive collaborative management (ACM) across three continents. As both a research programme and a strategy for management, ACM seeks to understand the conditions under which forest stakeholders can learn and collaborate to adapt management in a conscious and continuous manner.
At its core, ACM seeks to explore the validity of cooperative and learning frameworks for addressing human wants and capabilities in the face of conflict, diversity and instability. The authors look at conditions that can lead to:

enhanced collaboration and adaptation or adaptive failures in forest management
collaboration as a tool for enhancing social learning and adaptation
the kind of approaches, methods and concepts that work in catalysing ACM interventions in various conditions
the effects of ACM processes and outcomes on forest and human well-being, and whether deliberate ACM intervention is useful or necessary to enhance forest and human well-being.

The authors identify three types of adaptive pressures in stakeholder relations namely assimilation, compromise and consensus. They argue that learning takes place when social actors interact, as social learning enhances the capacities of the learners and translates more easily than anticipated into local ownership of concepts and approaches. This is seen as a key to adaptation. 
The following recommendations are made by the authors to further enhance ACM:

community management systems require the integration of traditional and legal definitions of community, forest and resources
improve governance at all levels including rural areas to ensuring that social sustainability of community forests is a tool for local governance and economic development
effective facilitation enables social learning and adaptation but requires other collaborative incentives to translate into effective collaborative frameworks
adaptive management in multistakeholder forest situations is not likely without effective stakeholder collaboration and that collaboration will be limited without appropriate policy incentives and effective independent facilitation
iterative feedback loops between research, local experience and policy adjustments is the means for strengthening positive interactions between cooperation and adaptation.