Local communities are essential to the success of environmental policies, and yet many well-intentioned forest management proposals are based on top-down strategies disconnected from people on the ground. In contrast, an approach called Adaptive Collaborative Management (ACM) for forest landscapes attempts to better listen to local voices and build on communities’ knowledge and goals to collaboratively improve environmental planning.In a Chats in the Stacks book talk hosted by Cornell University’s Mann Library, author and editor Carol J. Pierce Colfer discusses the value of ACM as she shares research from her new book, Adaptive Collaborative Management in Forest Landscapes: Villagers, Bureaucrats and Civil Society (co-edited with Ravi Prabhu and Anne M. Larson Routledge 2022). Drawing from lessons learned over the past two decades in different areas of the world, including Uganda, Zambia and the Amazon, the book explains ACM’s holding power, how it connects issues of gender, tenure, and local perspective with forest management, and how it facilitates learning, collaboration and adaptation among local communities, practitioners, activists, policymakers and researchers.Colfer, who has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and an M.P.H. in international health, is currently a senior associate with the Center for International Forestry Research, (CIFOR) and a visiting scholar in Cornell University’s Southeast Asia Program. She has long ethnographic experience in Southeast Asia, the United States, and the Middle East and global, forest-related experience in criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management, adaptive collaborative management, and governance. Her interests include gender and diversity, people and forests, health and population, and conservation and development issues.
