Ms. T. (Tendayi) Mutimukuru-Maravanyika: Can We Learn Our Way to Sustainable Management? Adaptive collaborative management in Mafungautsi State Forest, Zimbabwe

Can we learn our way to sustainable management? Adaptive Collaborative Management in Mafungautsi State Forest, Zimbabwe.

Although participatory resource management approaches have increasingly gained popularity, they have recently been criticized for producing disappointing results. With the conviction that participation is the only way forward, the Center for International Forestry Research initiated an Adaptive Collaborative Management (ACM) project in many countries to bring positive outcomes to participatory management. This is a reflexive study that analyses the ACM project and its outcomes in Zimbabwe. This study concludes that, if the ACM and other learning based approaches are to produce lasting positive changes in natural resource management situations, they must: be taken as  methodologies for empowering the poor and must explicitly aim to address issues of power; seriously address needs of local communities; be implemented over longer time frame; make huge initial human resource and financial investments, and facilitate the development of clear rules for management and effective means of enforcing them.