Agroforestry Systems 30: 315-340, 1995. 9 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. The theory of social forestry intervention: the state of the art in Asia M . R. D O V E Program on Environment, East-West Center, 1777 East-West Road, Honolulu, HI 96848, USA Key words: Asian forestry, community/farm forestry, deforestation, institutional issues, technology adoption Abstract. This study focuses on the major issues in current thinking about the theory of social forestry development in Asia. The first of these issues concerns the cause of deforestation. The governmental view is that deforestation is a gradual process driven by community-based factors, whereas the community view is that deforestation is a stochastic process driven by external, political-economic factors. The two explanations have different implications for where the 'problematique' of social forestry is located - in the forest community or in the forest agency - and how, therefore, it is to be addressed. A second issue concerns how and when social forestry interventions are carried out. The concept of a 'window-of-opportunity' for intervention reflects a widespread belief that it is important when interventions are carried out - with both the costs and benefits of intervention increasing as it is timed earlier and decreasing as it is timed later. A key determinant of the best time for intervention is the receptivity of the forest agency and the broader society. The purpose of intervention is to strengthen receptivity and other factors conducive to change, to hasten extant processes of change, and to minimize the possibility of a reversal of direction. A third issue is whether the focus of social forestry intervention should be on state lands or on community lands. While there are logical reasons for either foci, the continuing vacillation between them suggests the lack of a theoretical perspective with sufficient breadth to encompass them both. Whatever the focus, attitudinal change within the forest agency is usually mandated in social forestry interventions, but it is rarely accompanied with intervention in the underlying power relations, reflecting a continuing difficulty in viewing the forest agency sociologically. This lack of sociological perspective also is seen in the tendency to focus on adding resources perceived to be in short supply, instead of removing institutional obstacles including those within the forest agency - to the proper use of existing resources. The final issue involves the unintended consequences of social forestry intervention. These include redirection of the intervention as a result of bureaucratic resistance or negative feedback, and secondary consequences stemming from the dynamic responses by forests, forest communities, and forest agencies to changes in their relationship. Introduction: scope and methodology of the study A n y f o r e s t r y i n t e r v e n t i o n t h a t i n v o l v e s l o c a l c o m m u n i t i e s - w h e t h e r it is c a l l e d agroforestry, social forestry, farm forestry, or community forestry - involves the planned transformation of a dynamic inter-relationship among community, state, and the physical environment. The theoretical basis for planning such t r a n s f o r m a t i o n s is c o m p l e x a n d c h a l l e n g i n g . T h e t h e o r y t h a t a c t u a l l y is a r t i c u l a t e d in m o s t i n t e r v e n t i o n s ( h e r e a f t e r g l o s s e d u n d e r a s i n g l e t e r m , ' s o c i a l f o r e s t r y , ' f o r c o n v e n i e n c e ) is, b y c o n t r a s t , s i m p l i s t i c . T h e s e i n t e r v e n t i o n s h a v e 316 progressed through a number of different paradigms, beginning with a focus on idealized models developed on experimental plots, proceeding to descriptions of on-farm cultivation and use of trees, and most recently extending to political-economic analyses of the broader policy context. A relative dearth of theory characterizes each of these paradigms, even the most recent political-economic one. 1 Thus, whereas this paradigm may provide the politicaleconomic reasons for why a given social forestry program failed (or did not fail) to promote sustainable use of forest resources in a given time and place, it does not go on to explain why this failure is predictable (at certain times and in certain places-s-fdtr-certain types of programs). The analytic focus is almost always on the circumstances of the social forestry intervention, as opposed to the act of intervention itself. 2 This is not to say that this act is devoid of theoretical content, only that this content is implicit. The purpose of the present study is to make some of this content explicit and to outline some of the additional theoretical content that is needed. Scope of the study This study draws in general on the author's twenty years of research in this field, and in particular on analysis of data gathered during a 1992 review of the Ford Foundation's community forestry program in Asia 3 (specifically Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand). The Foundation's program has been at the forefront of international work on social forestry for close to twenty years. The review consisted of extended interviews, meetings, and field visits with, in each country, the Foundation's program officer for community forestry and its in-country grantees in academia, government, and the NGO sector (see Appendix: Methodology). The several dozen people thus encountered in each country represented the 'cutting edge' of thinking about social forestry development. The review as a whole thus afforded an unparalleled opportunity to assess the current state of the art in this field. The review did not reveal any consensus concerning this state. On the contrary, it revealed marked disagreement within the social forestry community about many of its most basic issues. This will be reflected here in my presentation of multiple views on a number of issues, favoring one view where I do and avoiding closure where i feel that I must. On the other hand, the review also revealed broad agreement on some of the most fundamental aspects of the evolving relationship between state, people, and forests in Asia. While the particular outcome of any given social forestry intervention is indeed likely to be 'very ad hoc, messy, and opportunistic' (as an Indian activist in the field put it), there is surprising agreement about the institutional form that this 'messiness' is likely to take, the place that it is likely to occur in the socioeconomic landscape, and the stage in the evolutionary schema at which it is likely to occur. Thus, social forestry developments that superficially appear to be disparate and unique are seen by the social forestry 317 community at a higher level of abstraction to be basically alike, to be similar products of recurring social, political, and economic processes. After a brief discussion of methodology, this analysis will begin with a discussion of conceptions of deforestation, contrasting an orthodox forestry view of it as a gradual process driven by local socioeconomic factors, with a community view of it as a stochastic process driven by external political and commercial ones. Next to be discussed will be the act of intervention by which the process is to be reversed, and here the focus will be on the importance of the timing of the intervention, the receptivity of its object, and the specific strategy (viz., acceleration of extant trends) employed. I will then discuss the substance of the intervention (viz., the proposed solution to deforestation), in particular the needed focus on the forest agency as opposed to the forest community, the focus on changing relations of power as opposed to changing attitudes, and the focus on removing obstacles as opposed to adding resources. Finally I will discuss the primary, secondary, and tertiary effects of intervention, highlighting the need to anticipate feedback effects. Methodology of the study One of the challenges of development studies is to suit the questions to the time and resources available. A brief, multination study raises this difficulty to the 'nth' degree. The sorts of questions that yielded us the most informative data were not - in the end - questions about tree species, yields, and farmer income (nor, in general, any quantitative questions). Ways of restructuring these questions so that they yielded more useful data involved asking who decides (e.g., farmer or forester) what species to plant and why, and is there agreement (between farmer and forester) about the direction of the program and, if not, why not? One team member noted at one point that the review had led her to stop asking the question, 'What is the farmer's income under community forestry?' and ask instead, 'Who controls what resources coming in and out of community forestry?' The former is a question of accounting and is difficult to answer in a brief visit, while the latter is a question of politics, which is more accessible to study when time is short. The team - exhibiting the product-orientation of most academic and development work - asked many questions such as, 'What will you do with the trees you are protecting when they mature?' or 'How will you protect these trees from covetous neighbors when they are mature?' To most such questions, farmers replied, 'We will decide when the time comes' or 'We will deal with that problem when it arises.' The challenge to the team (or to any observer) on such occasions is to understand that the informant was not unable to answer the question, rather the question - with its emphasis on product as opposed to process - was the wrong one, and - most important of all - this 'wrongness' provides further insight into the informant's situation. The best data did not necessarily come from the best-orchestrated meetings. In general, whether meeting with government officials, scholars, NGO rep- 318 resentatives, or villagers, unstructured exchanges proved to be the most productive, where the review team was able to observe the process of interaction rather than just elicit 'answers.' A good example of such interaction occurred in India, when a large and diverse group of those involved in the joint forest management program was asked, one-by-one, to define 'joint forest management'. There was little-to-no-agreement in the definitions given, and there was interesting variation in the extent to which this variation was acceptable or not to the participants. Finally, some of the most productive situations were those in which the data-gathering context was disrupted. An example, again from India, involved an argument (ostensibly over local forestry history) between Forest Department officers, villagers, and NGO representatives, which will be described later in greater detail. This brief departure from 'publicity forestry' to 'reality forestry' provided exceptional insight into Forest Department-NGO relations in India. The problem The first and perhaps the most heatedly debated question in current social forestry discourse in Asia is the explanation of what degraded the forest resource in the first place. 4 What happened to the forests? The orthodox view of deforestation among government foresters in much of Asia is that it is a gradual process, and that the primary determinant is everincreasing and often illegitimate pressure by a growing local population on a finite resource base. For example, S. Shyamsunder and S. Parameswarappa [1987], two Indian foresters, write: Rural people . . . collect their fuelwood from local forests. This practice is carried out, legitimately or illegitimately, mainly by landless and submarginal farmers. Similarly, the huge cattle population, which is onethird of the world's cattle population, grazes on forest land, wherever possible. These two factors are mainly responsible for the state of India's forests. Increasingly, however, this view of deforestation is being contested by those who maintain that deforestation is driven not just by local factors (like population) but also by extra-local ones, and that it is less a gradual than a stochastic process. Thus, the Indian activist Madhav Gadgil [1989] (cited in [Masanoff, 1993] writes) The root cause of the ongoing disaster of deforestation lies in the radical transformation of the social system of resource use . . . The hallmark 319 of this system is the use of state power to systematically undervalue b i o m a s s . . , and organize its supply to those in power at highly subsidized values. Throughout Asia, both community members and an increasing number of outside observers are interpreting deforestation as the result of (often onetime) interventions or disruptions6 by external economic and political forces] For example, many farmers, officials, and academics in China say that deforestation of the countryside is relatively recent and is associated with several successive and distinct periods of policy change or uncertainty: one following liberation, a second taking place during the great leap forward, and a third occurring during periods of policy reform in the late 1970s and early 1980s [Menzies, 1993; Ross, 1988]. 8 In Indonesia, massive exploitation of the teak forests of Java is said to have occurred during politically disruptive periods following the fall of the Dutch colonial government at the beginning of World War II, during the post-war battle for independence by the Indonesian people, and during the post-independence battles between the national military on the one hand and on the other hand Islamic rebels who wanted to keep the forests closed to protect themselves, and communist rebels who wanted to open up the forests to give the land to the poor. Periods during which forests rights are transferred or obfuscated also are dangerous for forests. Thus, the forests in many parts of India are said to have been cut by feudal landlords before turning them over to the government during land reforms in the 1950s and then again in the 1970s. (The obverse of this also has occurred, involving so-called 'felling crazes' by tribal peoples, precipitated by government denial of tribal rights of forests [Devalle, 1993].) All of these cases show deforestation to be the result not of gradual local pressure on resources, but of momentary disruption of the institutional framework responsible for resource protection and management. 9 This debate is relevant not just to explaining past deforestation, but also to designing remedies to it and ways to avert future recurrences. Such designs will obviously differ if past deforestation was due to a short-lived commercial operation as opposed to a long-term process of unsustainable exploitation by the local population. In the latter case the 'problematique' is located in the local community, in the former case it is located in the broader society. In the latter case development planning should focus on developing the ability of local communities to live on a long-term, sustainable basis with the forest, while in the former case it should focus on developing the ability of these communities to block traumatic incursions from the broader society. If such incursions are the focus, policy goals might include developing the ability to predict subversions of and breakdowns in resource policy (such as are said to have taken place in China over the past one-half century) and developing institutions at the local level capable of averting their ill consequences. Another obvious policy goal, of course, would be to alter central structures of governance to reduce the incidence and magnitude of policy fluctuations] ~ 320 The evidence suggests that it is not necessarily the direction of change that matters, but change or fluctuation per se. n Is the forest community or agency the culprit? This emphasis on the importance of particular historical events tends to favor the farmers' vision of resource history over the foresters'. The attribution of deforestation to external events, of a political nature, emphasizes the political nature of the resource, and its protection and degradation. This emphasis shifts the blame for resource degradation from the local community to the broader society, in particular (in many cases) the Forest Department and commercial contractors. This shift does not go in-contested by the Forest Department, however. An example of this contesting was encountered during the study in Gujarat, India, involving a public meeting among Forest Department officials, NGO representatives, and local villagers. Part of the debate that occurred during this meeting is summarized as follows: Villagers: The surrounding forest was good until the commercial contractors came and cut it in 1972. Foresters: Commercial contractors have been outlawed in Gujarat since 1952; after which felling has been permitted only by village cooperative societies. Villagers: We have never had a village cooperative society for that purpose. Foresters: The felling must have been done by a village cooperative society to which you villagers belonged without fully understanding it. Villagers: The contractor who did the felling was a Parsi from Rajpoota who is well-known to you foresters. Foresters: We know this Parsi is a contractor, but you villagers must have hired him as your own subcontractor. This debate succinctly sums up the two opposing paradigms of forestry history: the villagers attribute deforestation to extravillage factors associated with the Forest Department, while the Forest Department attributes it to intra-village factors of greed, ignorance, and duplicity. 12 The tendency in forestry and development circles in general to allocate the responsibility for past deforestation to the forest community as opposed to the forest agency has contributed to an unproblematic view of this agency, even among outside observers. For example, even when it is obvious that the forest agency is responsible for the design of bad policy, or the bad implementation of good policy, there is a strong tendency even among agency critics to attribute this to institutional 'errors'J 3 Thus, members of the social forestry community in China say that the government's resource policy 'model' is good but the 'reality' is not. Similarly, in Thailand it is said that government 321 'policies' are good but their 'implementation' is poor. And in Indonesia it is said that the problem is a lack of 'flexibility' in the government institutions responsible for social forestry. The implication in all of these cases is that the 'system' is fundamentally sound and the only problem is a discrete 'flaw' in its operation. This implication (which is an example of Whitehead's fallacy of 'misplaced concreteness' [Whitehead, 1925] is inherently welcome to development planners, because it means that instead of having to take on and perhaps restructure an entire institution, the planner can accept the system and work within it. Because this stance is more attractive, there is a danger that it will be adopted uncritically. In order to minimize this danger, it is necessary to ask not just how to solve discrete problems, but how these problems arose. The working assumption should be, the problems an institution generates are the problems that it needs. The intervention Closely allied to the discussion of what caused the degradation of the forest resource is the discussion about how this cause is best addressed; and the first question to be raised in this regard is when it should be addressed. Timing A salient element in discussions of the timing of social forestry interventions is the concept of 'windows of opportunity'. For example, members of the social forestry community in Bangladesh say that there is now a window of opportunity for social forestry interventions in that country because 'the Forest Department is starting to realize that it must change or else it will disappear'. The 'window' is thus a point in time when development intervention is either more possible or more productive than would otherwise be the case. This concept is implicit in the familiar development rhetoric of 'being in the right place at the right time'. It implies that there are wrong places and wrong times; the right place and right time is thus delimited. (The idea that there is a limited time period in which deforestation can be reversed is congruent with the previously-discussed idea that there is a limited time period in which deforestation takes place.) The conception of the 'window' varies according to the nature of the temporal process that is being targeted. Thus, in some cases the 'window' may refer to matching and exploiting to advantage the timing of a discrete historical event (like a change in government); while in other cases it may refer to identifying and then taking advantage of, over a longer period of time, an evolutionary trend (like a forest department's loss of resource base and, in consequence, morale). In either case, the implication of the 'window' is that timing is important. The implication is that the window can open or shut, 322 therefore; the implication is that if intervention is timed too early or too late, it will not succeed. It suggests, for example, that an intervention that might succeed immediately after a change in government will not succeed long afterwards; it suggests that an intervention that might succeed when the forest under a department's jurisdiction is greatly diminished (e.g.) will not succeed if it comes (beforehand) when the forest is less diminished. (For a concept that is so heavily used in development planning, relatively little analytical attention has been paid to 'windows'.) A corollary to the idea that timing - early versus late - affects the success of interventions is the idea that early versus late timing carries different costs and benefits. In general, it appears that the later the intervention in a process of deforestation, the easier it is to carry out, since the problems (viz., lack of forest) are that much more visible and the alternatives are that much fewer. On the other hand, the later the intervention, the worse the condition of the forest base and the greater the cost in time and money of restoring it. Early interventions have precisely the opposite costs and benefits: they are harder to carry out, but the pay-offs are greater in terms of the greater resources saved and the lesser cost of restoring those already gone. TM If the trajectory of degradation is conceived as the swing of a pendulum, it is obvious that the farther out it swings (and the closer it gets to the end of its permissible arc), the less the force that is required to reverse its path, and the less its own movement is altered as a result. Checking the movement earlier on represents a major intervention in terms of both costs and benefits; checking it later on does not (Fig. 1). There is a trade-off between these costs and benefits in all interventions. There is another implication to early versus late timing (which is unique to the forestry sector) that does not receive much attention: the later the intervention, the less 'natural' the environment looks, and the more the forestry Trajectories: Intact Forest Resource ) ( Degradation Intervention ) ( Degraded Forest Resource Costs and Benefits of Intervention: EARLIER ( Higher: Costs and Benefits LATER ) Lower: Costs and Benefits Fig. 1. The costs and benefits of intervention early vs. late. 323 authorities may be tempted (albeit unnecessarily) to pursue an 'unnatural' intervention. An example is the Bangladesh Forest Department's program to replant degraded sal (Shorea robusta) forests with exotic tree species, which it justifies by saying that the soil and sal coppices are too exhausted to produce any more under a 'natural' regime [Khan et al., n.d.]. The less natural and more managed the intervention, however, the less likely it is to benefit the local communities. For this reason Bangladesh NGOs oppose the Forest Department's replanting program, maintaining that the degraded sal forests can recuperate if they are protected, and that this is more likely to benefit the local communities than the replanting program. As this example shows, one other cost of late intervention is the possibility that the 'return trajectory' will not be the one desired (e.g., a program of tree plantations versus natural regeneration). A final consideration in the question of early versus late timing involves the issue of receptivity. If attempts to change attitudes are made too early in a social forestry program, they may backfire and crystallize opposition to it; whereas if they are made later on in the program's development, when attitudes are more receptive to change, they may be more likely to accelerate acceptance of the program and its goals. (Training, thus, is likely to hasten the processes of change only if it is timed during the later stages of a program.) Most social forestry programs appear, indeed, to have two discrete developmental stages, distinguished in part by the extent to which participants believe in the program ideology. Such a belief is typically absent during the initial stage of program development, while it is ideally (if the program is successful) ever more present during subsequent stages. Receptivity A salient aspect of discussions of the timing of social forestry interventions is the concept of the 'receptivity' of the target population. There is much discussion, when planning social forestry interventions, of the dynamics of change in government forest departments and the impact of this on foresters' receptivity to social forestry concepts. For example, foresters in Thailand are said (by fellow foresters) to be 'on the defensive' and 'morally dispirited' because their sources of extra-legal income have been lost (as well, perhaps, to be fair, as their self-confidence regarding their mission); foresters in Bangladesh are said (again, by fellow foresters) to have 'low morale', so low indeed that 'good people' are wanting to leave the service; and foresters in India are said (by an activist) to want 'to not be the bad guys anymore'. All of these comments were meant to suggest that the respective forest departments are ripe for change. The foresters' readiness for change appears to vary with broader factors too. In most of the Asian nations studied, forestry officers state that they need community forestry programming where (1) there are no forests left, (2) the remaining forests are seriously threatened by local communities, or (3) the foresters' welfare is jeopardized by conflict over forest 324 resources - as on Java, where the murders of forest guards in recent years have contributed to the embrace of some social forestry tenets by the State Forestry Corporation. A final factor contributing to readiness for change in the forestry community is the relative contribution of this sector to the national economy (and the trajectory of this contribution). Thus, the development of social forestry in Thailand appears to have been supported by the decline of the forestry sector in relative as well as absolute terms in recent years. As this last point suggests, receptivity to change in the broader society also is considered to be a factor in planning social forestry interventions. Of particular interest in this regard are catastrophic events that seize the public imagination and catalyze its commitment to changes [Cotgrove, 1982] (cf. [Kemp, 1984].). 15One of the best-publicized example of this is the November 1988 storm in Thailand [Pragtong and Thomas, 1990]. This storm precipitated violent floods and landslides, which the public linked to the loss of forest cover due to commercial logging, which in turn led to a nation-wide moratorium on logging in early 1989. (Compare the similar albeit less well-known role of the 1970 Alakananda flood in the early development of the Chipko movement in India [Guha, 1990], and the 1973/1974 drought in the development of the environmental movement in Africa [Eleri, 1994].) Less often linked to resource issues, but perhaps equally relevant, are more strictly political events like the People's Revolution in the Philippines, which toppled the regime of Ferdinand Marcos and resulted in the transformation of the old-style Ministry of Natural Resources into the more progressive Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Events such as these may be called 'revelatory crises': societal crises that highlight and express otherwise implicit strains or contradictions in society, 16 thereby opening up new opportunities for change. The opportunities may be momentary. For example, an Indian NGO described to us a year in which the drought was so bad that the local government felt obliged to waive all restrictions on development, which gave the NGO the brief opportunity that they needed to develop an innovative, community-based irrigation project. What matters in these cases is not necessarily the instrumental linkage between the crisis and attendant opportunities for innovation in resource management; what matters is the temporary neutralization of the normal constraints on change. Thus, it does not matter whether deforestation caused the November 1988 floods in Thailand; what matters is that it 'cleared the board' for new efforts to address the issue of deforestation. 17 Of course, such efforts are possible only if the crisis is not so severe as to destroy the system involved: compare Timmerman's [1986] distinction between 'epiphanies - surprises that are central and reveal essential characteristics of the system dynamics in a useful way' and 'catastrophies - surprises that destroy a system before it can make any use of the event'. 325 Direction A basic premise in these discussions of timing and receptivity to change is that the processes of change are underway and will persist, with or without the input of social forestry programs, because of broader developments in the larger society. The purpose of social forestry interventions is not to initiate these processes of change or make them possible, therefore, but to facilitate them, to make them (in effect) cheaper. The premise is that the forestry policies that have contributed to Asia's deforestation will change, but only after their failure has resulted in massive environmental trauma and a very costly negative feedback effect. ~8 The challenge to social forestry, therefore, is to bring this change about through less traumatic and costly means, and to do it without mitigating the internal pressures for further change. 19 As an NGO representative in India said, the social processes supporting community forestry programs are 'inevitable', thus 'our role is only to bring them about in an orderly, as opposed to chaotic, fashion'. It would be incorrect, however, to say that the only goal of social forestry interventions is to accelerate extant trends. A representative of an NGO in Bangladesh pointed out, for example, that the movement toward community forestry may be reversible, even if it is inevitable. One goal of social forestry intervention, therefore, is to minimize the likelihood of such reverses. Selection of the processes to be thus protected is done on a subjective, normative basis. The selection of any given desired development trajectory implies the nonselection or rejection of all other possible but undesired trajectories; and in the evolving relationship between society and forests in Asia today, multiple trajectories are possible. For example, the evolution of resource management on state lands toward a social forestry model, as desired by most of the activists and scholars involved, is not the only outcome possible. The development on these lands of mono-cultural, market-oriented pulp plantations (e.g.) is also a possibility, z~ Tribal activists in Kalimantan, Indonesia, say that it is not the natural timber concessions (Hak Perusahaan Hutan) that they fear, but the tree plantations (Hutan Tanaman Industri). The purpose of programming interventions, therefore, is to increase the likelihood of particular trajectories, of a particular future. The purpose of social forestry interventions in such circumstances is to try to tip the balance between alternative possibilities. An instructive example of this involves the written contracts that the Philippines' Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) - in the context of the national Integrated Social Forestry program - is giving to rural households and communities, granting them 25-year Certificate of Stewardship Contracts in exchange for conservation measures [Cornista and Escueta, 1990]. These contracts have enabled the recipients, in many cases, to turn away illegal 'wildcat' loggers who would otherwise ravage their forests. The contract appears, thus, to tip the balance between a trajectory of degradation for the 326 short-term benefit of outsiders, as opposed to a trajectory of conservation and long-term sustainable use by local communities. The solution When the question of how to carry out an intervention is answered, there remains the questions of its content and focus. The most obvious question in this regard is, 'Who is the target?' Focusing on the forest agency vs. the forest community There has been a partial shift in emphasis in forestry development in Asia over the past few years from programs on household and village lands to programs on state lands (Fig. 2). There are a number of important differences between the two types of programs. The first involves direction: programs on village lands involve a movement out of the forest, on the part of the forest department, while programs on state lands involve a movement into the forest, on the part of villagers. The former introduces forestry to the community, while the latter introduces the community to forestry. Just as the direction is reversed, so too is the purpose: programs on village lands bring the forest department out of the forest to save the forest, while programs on state lands (from the perspective of at least some proponents) bring the community into the forest to save the people (Fig. 3). The former aim to achieve their ends by (in effect) increasing state control over community lands, while the latter aim to do so by increasing community control over state lands. One analyst in India neatly summarized the crucial difference between the two programs, from the perspective of the villagers, as follows: programs on village lands give the state access to community land, raising the fear among the villagers that it will be lost; while programs on state lands give the villagers access to public land, raising the hope among them that it can be acquired. This shift from village lands to state lands is only the latest move in a long- I Village Lands V aoe I Lands Forest Department Moves Out of Forest I State ( Introduces Forestry to Community I Lands Commun,yMovesn,oForest, I ILands State Introduces Community (Life) to Forestry Fig. 2. The differences between programs on state vs. community lands. 327 Village Lands Village Lands Village Lands Forest Department Attention State Lands Intent: To Save the Forest Community Attention Intent: To Save the People Global Attention? Intent: To Save the Forest?a ! State Lands I State Lands a E.g., as a global CO 2 sink. Fig. 3. The shifting attention between state and community lands. term dialectical relationship between society and environment at the local, national, and international level. This particular shift was a function of increased concerns about rural poverty. Growing concern about global warming and the desirability of preserving tropical forests as CO 2 sinks may lead to a shift in focus back to programs on community lands. Focusing on changing p o w e r relations vs. attitudes Whether the object is to bring the forest agency out of the forest or to bring the rural community into it, the agency's traditional attitude toward relations between itself, the forest, and the community is challenged. Almost all social forestry programs propose to address this challenge and bring about the requisite attitudinal change through retraining. However, in forestry (as in most sectors of development), training programs tend to ignore the politicaleconomic genesis of attitudes and, thus, the political-economic constraints on attitudinal change. If foresters hold the attitudes that empower them - and there is nor reason to believe they do not - then training alone will not change them. Indeed, training might even - by setting up clear oppositions - crystallize opposition to change. In order to change the attitudes that empower foresters, thus, the basis of their power relations first must be changed. The concept of achieving a 'critical mass' of converts (to the new ideas) is sometimes mentioned in this regard. However, it does not seem likely that a critical mass of foresters believing in social forestry will be attained, or will make a difference if it is attained, if the basis of the foresters' power relations has not been changed 328 first. On the other hand, if a critical mass is first attained of foresters practicing different relations of power, then the attitudinal changes are likely to follow. In general, then, the evidence suggests that changes in power relations must precede changes in attitude, not the reverse. Thus, an activist in India said that it is wrong to say that we must change official attitudes in order to implement social forestry programs; rather, he said, it is the implementation of social forestry programs that will change official attitudes. The suggestion that program implementation must precede attitudinal change on the part of forest agency participants suggests that programs initially cannot be 'sold' to agencies on their face value. A forestry agency is not likely to share the values that a social forestry program espouses at its inception (if it did, there might be no need for the program). This means that the agency cannot adopt the program for the reasons held by its proponents (the 'right' reasons), but only for some set of reasons compatible with the as-yet-unchanged foresters' attitudes (the 'wrong' reasons). This inherent 'catch-22' of social forestry development sheds some light on the prominent role in it of normative, promotional elements. The present analysis suggests that this normative emphasis is more appropriate early on in program development, while an empirical emphasis is more appropriate later on. This depiction of a development process that proceeds from obfuscation and non-commitment to appreciation and commitment, is not necessarily inconsistent with Korten's [1980] view (oft-cited in social forestry works) of an institutional 'learning process' but whereas the latter emphasizes the pedagogical nature of the exercise, the former emphasizes the changes in paradigms and politics that it entails. F o c u s i n g on removing an o b s t a c l e vs adding a resource This focus on power relations and the forest agency represents a shift in the basic conception of development interventions. A development intervention typically is conceived as the addition of some input or resource that is deemed to be in scarce supply, based on the premise that underdevelopment is due to resource scarcity. It is suggested here that another interpretation of underdevelopment is possible, which attributes it (at least in some cases) less to the absence of desirable resources than to the presence of undesirable power relations [Dove, 1993a]. Underdevelopment often is due to the position of local communities within relations of power that favor resource extraction as opposed to consumption at the local level, short-term exploitation of resources for the benefit of the few as opposed to long-term sustainable exploitation for the benefit of the many, and so on. The local community, according to this interpretation, is less in need of a helping hand up, than in having the hand that keeps pushing it d o w n removed. It makes a critical difference to the structure and content of development planning if the local community is seen as active but hampered, as opposed to passive and needy. 329 There is a related distinction with respect to the environment. Most resource-related development programs treat the environment as a passive entity. However, the success of natural regeneration through protection in India's 'Joint Forest Management' program [Malhotra, 1993] (and in similar programs in other countries) shows that this approach is incorrect. The environment is dynamic. It is also (in some sense) a 'player' in development; and often, like the rural community, the environment needs not so much to be given assistance, as to have interference (viz., intense resource-use) removed. Often, that is, the environment does not need to be acted upon but just left alone. There is an interesting analogy between the process of natural forest regeneration and the development of community-based forest management: in both cases the ideal role for planners may be not to add or design anything new, but simply to recognize the indigenous processes at work and support them where possible. There are further reasons for taking a modest, supportive view of intervention. Not only are development inputs often neither necessary nor efficacious, but they may even worsen the situation. No development intervention takes place in a context that is neutral with respect to political and economic relations. Every development context is politicized, and in consequence every development intervention is subject to partisan political pressures. The most common, undesired outcome of post-World War II development programs has been for inputs intended for the poor to be appropriated by the rich and used to widen the gap between them even further. Whenever development planning is brought to bear on a situation, therefore, there is a genuine risk that the existing balance of equity will be worsened. Recognition of this risk can be seen in the comment by one activist in Bangladesh, in response to a proposal to 'develop' the country's homestead gardens (the most successful agroforestry system in Bangladesh): 'For God's sake leave them alone!' Workers in social forestry are just beginning to ask whether there are, indeed, some circumstances under which it is better to spare community forestry the attention of a government development program. (A variety of indigenous means for shielding community resources from outside observers, for just these reasons, have been documented: see [Wiser and Wiser, 1970] on walls, [Carpenter, 1990] on pardah 'women's seclusion', and [Dove, 1990] on cropping systems.) Secondary effects There are structural reasons why some social forestry interventions go awry. The first of these involves institutional desire to avoid change. Reinterpretation One of the clearest lessons to be drawn from the past one-half century of development planning is that institutions use resources to avoid change 330 whenever possible. Some of the most noteworthy instances of this involve the 'reinterpretation' of social forestry projects by forest departments. An example can be taken from Indonesia, and the social forestry program that was developed to mediate relations between the state forest corporation responsible for Java's teak forests and the communities that live in and around these forests [Poffenberger and Peluso, 1989; Stoney and Bratamihardja, 1990]. Some of the actors in this program developed a proposal to focus its resources on areas where the government and the local villagers were in conflict over land rights, in the hope that the program's emphasis on communication, cooperation, and shared rights would help to alleviate the conflict [Machfud, 1989]. The state forest corporation accepted this proposal in theory, but in practice it used the program as an excuse to strengthen its hand and expel villagers from the contested areas. This outcome was probably inevitable: when the forestry institution has not been changed, any resource that comes into its hands (regardless of its intended purpose) will be turned to its own institutionally defined ends. 2~ A second example comes from India: some state forest departments there now maintain that rural communities should protect the forests for reasons of ecology, aesthetics, and religion, but not economy; they suggest that introducing economics into this relationship will corrupt the traditional relationship between people and forests in India [Pali, 1991]. This clever reinterpretation of social forestry programs gives the forest departments all of the program's benefits (viz., community assistance in protection) with none of its costs (viz., community sharing of forest products). By rationalizing this through the use of 'politically correct' environmental rhetoric, the departments put themselves ahead of the political 'curve2Z': they move themselves from a position (opposing community forestry development) that is clearly 'behind the times' to a position that appears to be ahead of them and that, as a result, is much more difficult to assail. It is much more difficult to criticize a forest department for overemphasizing the environmental ethic of traditional peoples, than to criticize them for not sharing responsibility for natural resource management with those peoples. Negative feedback Another way that the intended course of social forestry intervention can be frustrated is through a mechanism of 'negative feedback'. As defined within the study of cybernetics, while positive feedback amplifies deviations, negative feedback counteracts them [Maruyama, 1963]. 23 Within the context of this study, negative feedback refers to responses to change, which promote not further change but its cessation. Negative feedback can pose a problem in any sort of development interventionY but ironically, it may pose the greatest problem in interventions that appear to be the most benign, namely those that support existing developmental processes. The risk is that interventions will so amplify these processes as to undermine the forces that originally gave rise to themY 331 For example, some actors in the social forestry sector in India question whether the Forest Department's collaboration with NGOs is motivated by a genuine concern to restructure relations among forest resources, people, and government, or whether it is motivated by a desire to avoid internal change. For example, if the NGOs do social forestry for the Forest Department, as opposed to developing the department's capacity to do the job itself, it may lessen the incentive for change within the department itself (Fig. 4). The dilemma is such that a member of the social forestry community in China characterized the lack of NGOs in that country as a 'blessing', reasoning that in the absence of NGOs the government has no alternative but to come to terms with the need for restructuring its own stance toward forests and people. One activist in Bangladesh rated the risk of such negative feedback to be so high that he urged international donors not to give any assistance to that country's Forest Department, because without assistance the department would have to work with the local people. With such assistance, on the other hand, the Forest Department might be able to ameliorate its situation sufficiently to reduce the pressures for, and delay the onset of, structural change. 26 Positive (+) Feedback ) (increases activity) Forest Agency Activity + PoliticalEconomic I I Negative (-) Feedback (decreases activity) Pressures from Forest Degradation I I I I I Positive (+) Feedback (increases activity) ) NGO Activity Fig. 4. Negative feedback between NGO activity and forest agency activity. Tertiary effects It is important, thus, to anticipate all the consequences of intervention, not just those that are hoped for. The most conspicuous consequence of many social forestry programs - especially those with a strong focus on protection - is the increased vigor and thus value of the forest resource. This, in turn, has a number of consequences of its own, including the emergence of new patterns of resource-use. For example, as a natural forest cover is restored, 332 sources of nontimber forest products begin to reappear and traditional patterns for exploiting them reappear as well. There is, thus, a sort of coevolutionary relationship between the restoration of the forest and the development (or redevelopment) of patterns 'of forest-use. 27 Another direct result of the restoration of forest vigor and value is an increase in competition for the right to exploit it. The prospect for such competition clearly weighed on the mind of one leader of a community forest protection committee in India, whose thoughts are described as follows [Campbell, 1992]: He wondered aloud about the results of their activities. By protecting what was essentially a barren common land they had created a resource that was growing in value, and increasingly coveted by neighbors. Would this lead to conflict between villages? How could they avoid this? Was it worth the trouble? They needed to consult more with their neighbors and develop a better understanding of the implications this held for the future. In many parts of Asia, 'neighbors' are less of a problem than the rural elite. In Bangladesh, members of a Forest Protection Committee claimed that the village elite had brought a court case against them, saying, 'Who are you to protect forest? You are not foresters, you are not government officials, you are just villagers'. The committee members said that in addition to bringing nuisance lawsuits, the rural elite attack women members of Forest Protection Committees (thus dishonoring their husbands and male relatives) and then claim that the women attacked them. In the Philippines, landlords have brought lawsuits against not just the farmers participating in community forestry programs, but also the foresters who support these programs. 28 These consequences of restored forest vigor and value are relatively easy to predict (they are not, nevertheless, always predicted) and address in planning; less easy are secondary or tertiary consequences, such as those involving attitudinal change. On the part of the farmers, for example, the evidence of forest regrowth, and sharing in the fruits of this regrowth, have a positive feedback effect, increasing farmer enthusiasm for the program sometimes beyond that which program authorities desire, as when enthusiasm leads to a new sense of not just rights to, but ownership, of state forests. On the part of the foresters, one of the most interesting (and to some extent unexpected) changes in attitude pertains to their stance toward farmers. In India (as well as in other countries) there is some competition between the Forest Department and NGOs involved in the planning and implementation of social forestry projects. This competition might appear to be due to reluctance on the part of the Forest Department to embrace some of the tenets of social forestry. But there is another way of interpreting the source of this conflict, which is suggested by an unusual lament by a senior forestry official in India. This official explained that what worries the Forest Department is that 'If the NGOs 333 come in, we will lose the love of the people.' This is a mysterious comment, since traditionally the Forest Department did not have the love of the people to lose, quite the contrary. The mystery is illuminated by a subsequent comment from the same official: 'When the Forest Department loses not just the forests but also the villages, it is too much.' This juxtaposition of the loss of forests and villages gives us the key to understanding what the official is saying: the Forest Department did have the forests; it is losing them; and one way to keep this loss from destroying the department is to shift the basis of its power from control of trees to control of people. What the official quoted is really saying, therefore, is that if the Forest Department cannot control the forest, it must control the villages. 29 A key tenet of social forestry is that the future of the Forest Department lies in working with the rural communities. In this vision, people become the key 'resource' that the department manages. If the department's future indeed lies in managing this resource, then it is reasonable to expect it to compete for access to it (viz., for access to the villagers). Such competition is, therefore, a sign that some of the desired changes in power relations, and attendant changes in attitude, are taking place. Forest Department antagonism toward NGOs in these particular circumstances represents a positive feedback effect to social forestry intervention. Summary and conclusions We can now summarize and synthesize the key findings in this discussion of the theory of social forestry intervention. Summary A number of major theoretical issues are raised in current thinking about the theory of social forestry development in Asia. One major issue concerns the cause of the deforestation (which is the focus of the social forestry intervention in the first place): the orthodox view that deforestation is a gradual process driven by community-based determinants is opposed by a community view that deforestation is a stochastic process driven by political-economic determinants outside the community. The two explanations have very different implications for where the 'problematique' of social forestry is located - in the forest community or in the forest agency - and how, therefore, it is to be addressed. There is still some reluctance even in social forestry circles to problematize the forest department: even when it is accepted that the problematique is located within the department, it still is likely to be characterized as an institutional 'error' instead of a structural problem. 3~ A second issue that is raised concerns the way that social forestry interventions are carried out, especially their timing. The pervasive concept of a 'window-of-opportunity' for intervention reflects a widespread belief that it 334 makes a difference when the intervention is carried out, with respect to the stage of relations among forest, forest community, and forest agency. The costs and benefits of intervention do in fact vary with this timing, both increasing as intervention is timed earlier and decreasing as it is timed later. A key determinant of the appropriate time for intervention is thought to be the receptivity of both forest agency and the broader society - something that can be heightened by 'revelatory crises'. The purpose of intervention is seen as heightening receptivity and strengthening other factors conducive to effecting change, so as to hasten extant processes of change and minimize the possibility of costly (albeit temporary) reversals of direction. A third issue concerns the content and focus of social forestry intervention. The first question raised in this regard is whether the focus should be on afforestation on state lands or community lands. While there are logical reasons for either foci, the periodic shift back-and-forth between them suggests the lack of a perspective in social forestry that has sufficiently breadth to encompass them both. Wherever the focus lies, attitudinal change within the forest agency is typically mandated in social forestry interventions, but it is rarely supported with intervention in the underlying power relations. Like the above-mentioned tendency to view agency difficulties as 'errors' as opposed to structural problems, this reflects a perduring difficulty in viewing the forest agency sociologically. Consonant with this lack of a sociological perspective, interventior~s tend to focus on adding resources perceived to be in short supply instead of removing institutional obstacles - including those within the forest agency - to the proper use of existing resources. This is a function of a flawed paradigm of 'helping', whose application extends far beyond social forestry [Dove, 1993a; Edelman, 1974]. The fourth and final issue that was identified involves the unintended consequences of social forestry intervention. These can include the simple reinterpretation of programs and rerouting of inputs, due to inherent bureaucratic resistance to change. They also include the more complex and understudied phenomenon of negative feedback to (and thus undermining of) interventions: an example of this occurs when assistance that is given to a forest agency in need of change actually delays the onset of change. A final category is that of secondary consequences of intervention, resulting from the dynamic responses by forests, forest communities, and forest agencies to changes in the rules of their relationship. The near-complete absence of attempts to predict such consequences, in either practice or theory, suggests the poverty of social forestry theory as much as anything does. Conclusions Social forestry has evolved from an initial focus on the biological constraints of forest and trees, to the socioeconomic constraints of the community, and most recently to the institutional constraints of the forestry agency. The practitioners of social forestry have successively been sensitized to technology 335 which determines whether certain forestry interventions will work in a given physical environment - to the community - which determines whether the technology is appropriate to the given socioeconomic environment or not and to the polity - which determines whether physical fit, socioeconomic fit, or something else altogether is accorded importance. I suggest that it is now time for social forestry practitioners to be sensitized to theory - for it is this that will determine whether the technology will achieve, in the long run, what it is intended to achieve. Some of the theoretical points raised in this analysis are familiar from contemporary discussions of social forestry, but many are not. This analysis suggests that many of the most important problems in social forestry have little to do with forestry or biological issues in general, and much to do with systems analysis, state formation, and other topics from fields normally not associated with forestry. This reflects the fact that many of the major factors affecting the success or failure of social forestry interventions (e.g., people and polities) have little to do with forestry p e r se. This dichotomy between forestry issues and the determinants of forestry outcomes, in turn, may help to explain why social forestry has remained so atheoretical: there is a discontinuity in the field of social forestry between content and structure, between product and process. This is likely to be overcome only by a reconception of social forestry intervention as forays in social engineering that have much to do with society and environment, broadly conceived, and little to do with trees or forests in their narrowest sense. - Acknowledgements The field study from which this analysis partially derives was funded by the Ford Foundation, Asia Programs Office, New York City. The fieldwork was carried out jointly with Mary Hobley, Gill Shepherd, and Eva Wollenberg, and with the assistance of Renato de Rueda, Wimar Witoelar, Zhu Zhaohua (assisted by Ge Youli), Songpol Jetanavanich, Mafruza Khan, and N. C. Saxena, to all of whom the author is indebted for many valuable insights. The fieldwork was facilitated by the following Ford Foundation field staff, to each of whom a great debt of gratitude is acknowledged: Frances E Korten, Frances Seymour, Nick Menzies, David Thomas, Doris Capistrano, and Jeffrey Campbell. An earlier version of this analysis was prepared for the panel on 'Arboreal anthropology', Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, San Antonio, 10-14 March 1993. The author is grateful to Franz Schmithusen for constructive comments on an earlier draft, to Phyllis Tabusa and Marilyn Li for assistance with library searches, and to Helen Takeuchi and Dan Bauer for assistance with editing and graphics. The author alone is responsible for the contents of this report. 336 Notes 1. Cf. Nesmith's [1991] comment: 'Although there is considerable literature on social forestry, much of it is circumstantial and without theoretical context or content.' 2. For an example, see Poffenberger's [1990] collection, which 'problematizes' and theorizes about social forestry intervention as much as any recent work, and yet still does not directly address most of the issues raised in the present study. 3. Peter Gheitner, head of the Ford Foundation's Asia Program, described (in a personal communication) the Foundation's involvement in community forestry as follows: It (1) focuses on the poor and on the nexus between marginal lands and marginal peoples, (2) tries to respond to the diversity in the Asia region, the complexity of the social and physical environment, and the dynamism of both, (3) tries to identify key public agencies and make them key actors, viewing these agencies as the principal learners of the process, and (4) emphasizes the use of working groups to bring agency officials and social scientists (e.g.) together. 4. A prior question, that is beyond the scope of this study, is whether perceptions of forest degradation are correct, over-exaggerated, or under-exaggerated. 5. See also [Haeuber 1993; Jasanoff, 1993] on the forester-activist debate in India. 6. There is increasing evidence that (as a result of both anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic forces) stochastic or catastrophic rather than gradual change characterizes forest history (e.g. [Brookfield and Overton, 1988] and, indeed, the natural history of earth's environment in general [Berggren and van Couvering, 1984; Gould and Eldredge, 1977]. 7. Haeuber [1993] writing of India, maintains that deforestation is due neither to local population nor extra-local business interests, but to the wider policy context (viz., India's adoption of a 'traditional economic development model'). Similarly, see Inman's analysis [Inman, 1992] of the role of growth in national debt - in addition to growth in rural population - in explaining deforestation. 8. The association between policy changes and deforestation is recognized in one of Mao Zedong's purported sayings, which suggests that where the forests are in good shape, government policy is constant. Ross [1988] argues that the deleterious impact of policy change is such that the mere anticipation of such change is an obstacle to sustainable forest management. He writes that 'Many Chinese officials, including Vice-Premier Wan Li, [now] recognize that fear of policy instability is the most critical obstacle to improving China's forestry resource base' [Ross, 1988]. 9. Given the enormous number and variety of factors that affect relations between society and forests, it is wise to be wary of overly simple explanations. Some of them may be 'folk myths', which blame misfortune on an all-powerful (and all-rapacious) state, just as the state has its own myths that attribute all rural problems to the ever-blameworthy (and all-ignorant) rural population. 10. Writing of China, Ross [1988] writes that 'Foresters sadly appealed for simple continuity in policy to let the collectives plant and manage their trees without fear of interruption a critical factor in the case of plants that need years to mature.' 11. Ross [1988] writes of China: Regardless of the direction of change, it is important to stress that the process of change itself had a debilitating effect on forestry by muddying property rights and making them virtually unenforceable. Changes in property rights driving land reform created unavoidable uncertainty, which only worsened during the several waves of collectivization. In each instance the original owners often cut their trees down to forestall expropriation without fair compensation. 12. The existence of this paradigmatic opposition is attested to by abundant examples. Compare the account in the text with the following account by Anil Sadgopal, from the Sunday Herald (Bangalore), 21 July 1985, cited in [Anderson and Huber, 1988]: 337 Three years ago [1982], in a small study in the Bastar district in Madhya Pradesh, we asked some people this question: Which forces are responsible for the large-scale felling of forests in the district? Of course, the Conservator of Forests said it was the Adivasis, the tribals, who were encroaching upon the forests near the villages. They were burning fuelwood, building houses with the wood, stealing bamboo, and taking more than the allowed headload of timber. And we found, to our surprise, that a Hyderabad-based company was making a certain kind of steel for which it needed coal. To make that coal it had undertaken a large-scale contract, using wood from the forests of Bastar. We found that the amount of wood this company was using for making steel was more than the total amount of fuelwood used by the Adivasis in that district; yet this fact will never be revealed to you by the forest authorities. 13. This is a pervasive tendency, as the following quote from Repetto's [1988] widely-cited and otherwise reliable work shows: To a considerable degree, the policy weakness identified in this study arose despite well-intentioned development objectives. The shortcomings have been failures of understanding and execution. 14. An important topic for research is whether the payoff per unit of effort expended also is greater during earlier interventions. 15. Such events may correspond to stage two in what Downs [1972] called the five-stage 'issue-attention cycle' of environmentalism. His five stages are: (1) the pre-problem stage, (2) alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm, (3) realizing the cost of significant progress, (4) gradual decline of intense public interest, and the (5) post-problem stage. 16. The view of catastrophe as 'revelatory' of society is in keeping with research that attributes the origin of even 'natural' disaster more to culture than nature [Dove and Khan, 1995; Hewitt, 1983]. t7. I am grateful to David Thomas for this observation. 18. Mather [1990] suggests that most of the now-developed countries (e.g., Austria, Denmark, France, Hungary, Japan, the US) passed through a historic ~forest transition', the first stage of which consisted of a period of intense and widespread deforestation, which eventually precipitated a second, succeeding stage of reforestation to something approaching earlier levels. Panayotou [1994] argues that most nations undergo a similar transition, applying to all aspects of their environmental relations, which he calls the 'Environmental Kuznets curve' (analogous to Kuznets [1966] hypothesis that in the course of economic development income disparities rise in the beginning and then begin to fall). He suggests that the newly industrialized economies (NIEs) of Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico may soon move through this curve [Panayotou, 1994]. 19. Panayotou [1994] notes four reasons to intervene in national environmental transitions: (1) the duration of this transition may otherwise be so long as to occasion unacceptable economic costs; (2) it may be less costly to abate some degradation now than in the future; (3) some degradation may not later be reversible, regardless of the cost, and (4) certain levels of degradation may be inimical to economic development. 20. Cf. [Pragtong and Thomas, 1990; Puntasen et al., 1993] on pressures to use degraded forest lands in Thailand for commercial tree plantations. 21. See also Barber's [1989] analysis of Java's social forestry program in the broader context of the Indonesian state - one of the rare instances in which social forestry activities are analyzed in other than a narrow, local context. 22. I am indebted to Jeff Campbell for this observation. 23. Bateson [1958] writes that negative feedback 'depends upon there being within the circuit at least one link such that the more there is of something, the less there will be of something else'. 24. Positive feedback to change processes also can be problematic, as Mumford [1967] pointed out some time ago. 338 25. Not discussed here for reasons of space are the equally complex physical (as opposed to sociological) feedback effects. Poffenberger (unpub.) describes one as follows: Predictably, where social fencing and access controls have been established by societies, resulting growth of vegetation on the watersheds reduced run-off to the point that only heavy rains contribute to reservoir water. While the water table has reportedly risen in such communities, water entering the reservoirs has decreased. This may mean that exploitation of the increased water available through better catchment management should be done through the use of tube wells rather than tanks. 26. The possibility that government forest agencies will use external resources to avoid undergoing internal change has been raised by observers throughout Asia, which suggests that this is a real issue. 27. See [Dove, 1993b] on the concept of 'coevolution'. 28. At the regional level, the increased competition for restored forest resources may be manifested in an influx of migrants. 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