 This is a production of Cornell University Library. Okay, I think a few of us are still trickling in, but I'm going to go ahead and get started. Hello, everyone. My name is Evelyn Ferretti. I am the Public Programs Administrator at ManLibrary at Cornell. I am standing in for Sarah Wright, our library director who has been, whose electricity has been knocked out, electricity in the neighborhood has been knocked out by this impressive winter storm we're seeing in the Finger Lakes today. So, thankfully though, the webinar format that we are in means that probably the most of the rest of us who are planning to be here today can be here today. So, welcome. This is the first book talk of the Cornell University Library's Chats and Stacks series for the spring 2022 semester. The library has another very impressive roster, lively roster of book talks lined up for the semester. So, I encourage you, I'm going to put in the chat. I'm going to type in the web page where you can see what else is coming up. I should note that we are continuing for the whole semester, we're going to be continuing the webinar format, and which means that many of us can attend from wherever. I just mean that the question and answers are going to be a question and answer portion of this book talk is going to be handled at the end of the discussion. At the end of the presentation, the formal presentation, you can type in your questions into the chat box on your zoom view, and those will be gathered and I will then present those questions to our speaker. So, final 20 minutes or so of the of the of the program today. So we're looking forward to a lively discussion. So before proceeding further and I would like to acknowledge, include an acknowledgement that Cornell University is located on the traditional home that homelands of the coyote. The Konoho Nation, the Cayuga Nation, the coyote Konoho are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign nations with a historic and contemporary presence on this land. The Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University New York, New York State, and the United States of America. We acknowledge the painful history of the coyote Konoho. Dispossession and honor the ongoing connection of the coyote people past and present to these lands and wars. And now it is my honor to introduce our speaker, Dr. Gerald, Dr. Carol, excuse me, Dr. Carol J. Pierce Colfer. Dr. Colfer is a senior associate with the Center for International Force Research C4 based in Bogor, Indonesia, and end of visiting scholar at the Cornell Southeast Asia Program. Having received a PhD in anthropology from the University of Washington, and a master's of public health with a focus on international health from the University of Hawaii. Dr. Colfer has dedicated a long and extraordinary career to work on issues of community based natural resources, magnet management, gender development, health and population. Over decades for international work has involved extensive field research in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia, as well as leadership roles in planning and implementing community centered approaches to sustainable forest management. The latter included the latter included her position as co founder and leader of the local people, devolution and adaptive clatter collaborative management program at C4, which involved partnerships in Asia, Africa and Latin America from 1998 to 2002. Dr. Colfer's publishing record is prolific, reflecting engaged scholarship that is committed to making the insights of ethnographic study and social science research a core part of any framework used to understand and identify solutions for problems of the environment and human health. Her articles have appeared in the International Forest Review, Agriculture and Human Values, Geoderma, Regional, Human Ecology, UNISILVA, the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography and the Borneo Research Bulletin and Ecology and Society to name just a few. She has published numerous books including her 2006 title, Politics of Decentralization, Forced People and Power, which has been translated into Chinese and Bahasa Indonesia. And more recently, the book, Masculinities in Forests, Representations of Diversity, published by EarthScan, Rotledge Press in 2020. Dr. Colfer's book talk today presents us with an opportunity to learn what proponents of this approach to forest management have learned since its early days, two decades ago, and what these lessons might contribute to making better progress on issues that are increasingly urgent consequence to humankind. Please join me in giving her a very warm welcome. Thank you. Also for the opportunity to talk a little bit about this book. And we're very excited about it. It's just come out in December. And I'd like to highlight my co-authors, Ravi Prabhu and Anne Larson. I have entitled this talk looking back at adaptive collaborative management. And as you can see the title of the book is adaptive collaborative management of forest landscapes, villagers, bureaucrats, and civil society. Here's a little bit of a roadmap of what I'd like to talk about today. First of all, I'd like to explain what we mean by adaptive collaborative management. It's an approach that has been used with various names, but many similar characteristics by many people and we're not pretending that we invented it. But we did develop a certain way of doing it in at C4, the Center for International Forestry Research. And I'd like to explain what we meant by it and also why we think it's important now. I'd like to then go on to talk a little bit about how the book came about, what prompted us to produce it, what's in the book, and then I'd like to talk also a little bit about what comes next. And we're working on a second volume, very closely related to this first one. Let's see if I can get this other stuff out of the way so I can read it. There we go. Oops. I'm first going to let you see the definition that we came up with in 1998 when we first began working on this approach. And I'm just going to read it to you so that you know what we're what I'm talking about. Adaptive collaborative management or ACM in our usage is a value adding approach, whereby people who have interests in a forest agree to act together to plan, observe and learn from the implementation of their plans, while recognizing that their plans often fail to achieve their stated objectives. ACM is characterized by conscious efforts among such groups to communicate, collaborate, negotiate, and seek out opportunities to learn collectively about the impacts of their action. And this, this definition was published in the book the complex forest which I actually wrote while I was here on sabbatical in 2002 and three. And it is, it talks about what we had, we felt that we had accomplished at the end of the first phase of ACM at, at C4. And I also wanted to show you this, this image which has been kind of a guiding light for a lot of our work in the field. And as you can see in the, on the left side is the past and on the right side is the future. And this is sort of replicating a process that we would like to make into reality in the field. And it starts with observation and analysis, and then planning and this is all done collaboratively. Planning of certain actions that are appropriate for that particular context. So monitoring, what happens with those access actions and reflecting on how that is how it's going, is it going well is it going badly. If it's going well you continue with that action if it needs the adaptation you change it. And that kind of process goes on into the, into the future. And so this, this image has been really important for us to keep us kind of on track in, in not being stopped by, by constraints or failures, but rather coming up with alternative ways forward. I want to talk a little bit about why we initiated, why we initiated the idea or the approach at C4. C4 at that time was very much involved in very conventional research, a lot of a lot of conventional research also some unconventional, but there was really a bias toward coming up with generalizable results quantification. We were having a control and an experimental plot, typically. And so the ideas that we wanted to implement with ACM were quite alien at that time. And I just want to go through some of the things that we recognized and we wanted to build on when we were based on the, our experience working with communities. And where all of us had worked very closely with in the field with communities and with with villagers. And we knew there was a lot of local knowledge, a lot of experience that was valuable. A lot of motivation among local people to move forward in a positive way. And we wanted to build on that. We were also very aware of the fact that any kind of way of life of people is systemic that is one part of their lives affected another part, and that we wanted to look at at things in a holistic way. So we're extremely aware of the diversity out there at C for all of the research just about all of the research is a kind of comparative there often be a series of areas in Asia a series in Africa series in Latin America. And when you're doing that kind of comparison across the globe, mostly in the tropics on that ad. There was incredible diversity both in terms of human systems, but also in terms of the environment so it was extremely clear to us that there was not going to be a successful silver bullet, or single standardized way to address the problems that we were seeing. Another thing that we were really aware of was the dynamism or the change that we could see underway in the systems that we were looking at. And lastly, the, we were very impressed with the power that that rural people have a lot of the of the narratives at that time or about the poor victims there was this sort of sense that people were not able to that we had to do things for them we had to help them. And it wasn't that we didn't think we should help them but we did feel that people had a lot of power that was not being acknowledged. And that also there was a big serious inclination in most communities to learn people wanted to learn they wanted to act on their own behalf. And so all of these observations on our part were important as we began to come up with how we might address address the work that we were doing. And I hear that when we were starting, we had been working on a project on criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management, and we had divided it, this the work into human well being ecology and production. And as we, as we work we had worked on that for four years. And we were realizing that you could come up with criteria and indicators forever without having any necessary effect in the real world. We could come up with some kind of an approach that would allow us to, to work with communities to actually make changes in a positive way in communities but we also want to do research on how to do that. And so that's what we were trying to do. So much stuff on my screen I can't see what's here. Why, why are we excited now about what we're trying to do we're particularly excited about the fact that this book has come out now. And there are two reasons. One of them to particularly important reasons. One of them is that unlike in the early 2000s, when the world was really not very interested in these features that we were noticing and we felt were so important. And now there's a much broader recognition of the importance of those features that I just outlined that we were interested in people are recognizing the change and dynamism is all over the place. People are recognizing that people that communities are involved in systems that interact. We're aware that there's a there are useful links between people, people in the environment, many of the, much of the forestry research prior to, say 200 2000 was very oriented toward increasing the production of wood, and with a very narrow emphasis. And that has that has changed in recent years. There's also a much broader recognition that indigenous knowledge has something to offer that people actually know things about their environment that might be helpful. And it might be important to take into account when we're trying to, to make some sort of change or improve the environment for instance. And lastly, there's a lot of recognition that we need to be more inclusive that gender and equity of various kinds, whether it's cast a cast system or class system or ethnic difference. All sorts of differences in power among groups need to be taken into account. And all of these of course are important within within ACM so it's the world has become more hospitable I would say to the ideas ideas that ACM brings to bear. And the second thing that I wanted to mention is the, that there's, there's a recognition in the these various themes there's a lot of themes that are always there always fads and development and these are some of them are listed below restoration land grabs conservation climate change disaster relief these are all important topics that need to be addressed and they're recognized as important right now. And what I've found in the last few years is that these, the people who are working on these very important themes have begun to recognize that they need to work more effectively with communities. And, although, when you look at the literature, you read a lot about how important it is to involve local communities, very often the ways that are envisioned are extremely big. There's the idea yes we should be working with communities yes we should be involving them somehow in in these efforts, but how to do that is not not specified very clearly or even at all. And we feel that what we have put into this first book and also what we're trying to put into the second are extremely helpful in moving that forward. I at the right now I'm besides working on this these ACM books. I've been working on a book on restoration. And when I began, I didn't know very much if I felt like I didn't know very much about restoration. But in the last two, two to three years I've been reading a lot about it. And again and again I see how the kinds of insights the kinds of practices the kinds of understandings that we can gain from an ACM type process would be would be extremely valuable in those kinds of efforts and so that all of these things are making me quite pleased that we have been able to come out with this book at this time. But how did this book come about. Well, I, there are three of us involved as the editors and I, when we began to think about this, I was involved mainly in working on gender and intersectionality. That was the dive. I've worked on a variety of things over my career and that's where I was focused at that time. And most of my work has been in Asia, although I've done a lot of of cross area comparisons my long term experience and my feeling that my feelings of expertise I have worked more in Asia. And Larson who's the second other co editor. Her specialty is governance and equity issues and so she's done a lot on those topics. And her focus has been in Latin America. Ravi Prabhu is a silver cultures by training. He's worked in a lot of different top on a lot of different topics and he's a very broad minded person. He's been working in the agricultural sector, primarily in Africa. So we felt that there was a nice complementarity in our areas of expertise and also in the geographical areas where we were working. We kind of had a brainstorm in May of 2020. So we got the idea that maybe we should ask the people who had been involved in the work in the early 2000s, what they had learned in the interim, were they still working, were they still using ACM type approaches. Did they still think it had potential, what sorts of weaknesses had they discovered what sorts of things had they learned in the interim. We had about in the original prod ACM program in 2000s we had about 90 partners in 11 different countries. And I contacted as many of those as I could find, and just asked them. I said, we don't, we haven't figured out what we want to do for sure but we'd like to see if you have anything that you'd like to contribute to a possible book or a special issue or something. We did not specify really what sort of format or anything. And much to my amazement we got 22 responses in the form of abstracts. And we have gradually put those into 10 chapters in this book that we're talking about today. And we have 11 more underway for a second volume that we hope to publish later this year. And we'll see what happens with that. Moving forward to this year. But I've really when I was trying to figure out how to how to address this, how to describe this book. I started thinking about maybe the best way to do that is to consider the kinds of questions that these different chapters answer because those are the questions that they answer are the kinds of issues that the conservation and development researchers and practitioners who might use this approach would need to be dealing with. And I think that if we think about it in terms of the questions that they answer, it may be more directly applicable in people's minds. So that's what I've tried to do. Okay, the first question is why would we even think that a participatory approach would make sense. Why would that be. Why would that make sense. And so the three of us in chapter one. We kind of organized it as a sort of conversation among the three of us. And we each went back to what were the kinds of conceptual and theoretical bases that led us to think that the ACM approach would make sense. And so it's that chapter takes you through a lot of different kinds of approaches that led us to to create ACM and so it's one of the one of two kind of theoretical chapters in the book. The second one is, I do wish I could get rid of the extra things up here I wonder if I can move them doesn't look like it. Well, I'll have to guess what exactly what my question was there. But the real question is, how do villagers or how do farmers perceive the ACM process and that's what we were asking or that was the answers that that come out in chapter two. The first two authors Johnson and po corny. They were involved in 17 action research cases in these countries, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru on Amazon. And they brought farmers together after these projects had been concluded to ask them what their experience had been in participating in those projects. And the two authors took those kinds of responses that they got in these in these meetings that they organized with farmers, and they constructed a sort of stylized Bolivian farmer, and the chapter is organized like a journal or a diary. And it's interesting because it's sort of, well, for one thing it very clearly portrays the, the difficulties the logistical difficulties that one has working in forested communities, which tend to be in remote areas, hard to access. So it's very clearly portrayed in that chapter. And it also shows very clearly the difference between what happens when you have a good facilitator, and what happens when you have one that's not so good as there's a change over the time of this imagined action research project. One of the reviewers said she really wanted to have all of her students read that because it portrayed the situation so clearly. In chapter three we wanted to know how on earth do you get team members in verse collaborating constructively many of you may know how difficult it can be to communicate across disciplines or across institutional cultures, or across ethnic groups or nationalities. There are all sorts of communication barriers when you're trying to communicate across these different expectations different patterns of behavior different sort of rules and regulations. So this chapter three by mutimukuru Maravanyika, Madduzo and song explains what happens in happened in a project that they worked on in Zambia it was a very complicated process, including researchers from a whole bunch of different countries from a whole bunch of different institutions from a bunch of different backgrounds, and a bunch of different ethnicities and so they, they outlined some of the difficulties they had in in collaborating and then they talk about how they address those difficulties and give some real guidance on how to do a better job than they were able to do. Another one that's been a really dear to my heart is this question of can ACM or can anything improve equity gender equity over time. And we have two chapters that looked at that issue. These, this is coming from a program that Ann Larson coordinated she and Esther money coordinated it in Nicaragua, and then Uganda these examples are from Uganda. Before boom, honey banana, we should be rosy, we'll Cassie, we'll Cassie sorry to basalica and one eat together, provide a quantitative analysis of ACM versus ACM sites in Uganda. And they took, they did a representative sample around the whole country, and they picked, they compared the results in the two kinds of sites, and they also compared results between men and women. So it's quite interesting, it's quite quantitative. And it's brief, because they were really trying hard to speak to policymakers. So, chapter five mucasa to basalica, banana, money and mutimukuru maravannica together, provide a much more qualitative and processual sort of analysis of ACM again in Uganda. They kind of they out they explain what they did and they explain what the results are looking at them at the time and then over time as well. So we can see what persisted and what did not persist. If there are mixed there's a mixture of results. And this was the research was originally done in the 2010s and then the assessment was in 2016 with some update more recently. How do how do people gain the skills that they need to conduct this sort of research. When we started. We had a little short workshop on participatory action research. But in retrospect, we really needed a lot more emphasis on training facilitators training participants whether villagers or our officials or NGO personnel. The approach with its processual orientation and its collaborative orientation is very alien to a lot of disciplines and to a lot of institutions. And this in chapter six cronkelton Evans and Larson look at their own progression that it's it's looking at three different research activity or ACM activities. So Bolivia was one that happened in the 2000s and the Nicaragua was a little later and Ghana was later still. And this this shows the progression of what they learned. They need what they learned they needed to learn and what other people needed to learn to do it very well. And I would reinforce that from my own experience trying to to implement ACM in a situation where the people did not understand. Many people in the in the team did not really understand what we're trying to do. How do we deal with power imbalances and this is, this is a tool. And this research here was based on work in Brazil, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Peru, working with multi stakeholder focus groups. And they, they worked with a number of them they did they explored the literature on such groups, and they came up with this tool. It's a simple tool. And I want to ensure greater inclusivity in these multi stakeholder groups, which is a problem in every multi stakeholder group I think I've ever been involved with there's always some people who have a lot more power. There always are some people who are marginalized and are afraid to speak up. And with good facilitation one can get around that, but it really requires some effort on this tool is a very practical. And we can use to to reduce the to to increase enhance inclusivity and in these multi stakeholder groups. So, why do power imbalances exist, and what sorts of mechanisms account for their persistence. In this paper this chapter was the second one that's quite, quite theoretical by McDougal and Ocha in chapter eight. They also go back to the literature and they, they look at what people have said about power deconstructing the concept and and how it, how power functions in communities. And then they apply that those, those kinds of ideas to their own long field experience primarily in Nepal. Ocha is from Nepal and Google has worked there for quite a while, and they use a lot of the ideas of Birdo Habermas and Kabir among others. This chapter nine by Fisher and Jackson looks at at ACM as action or as research and depending on what one, who one is talking to. It can be a problem for both. And so we work in non forest spheres. The action issue and research when action and research issue came up at C4 at the beginning, because C4 is a research institution and so everyone is obliged to be doing research. And we considered ACM to be, it could be just action, but we were doing research on how to do it. We considered it research but we had to argue and explain and it took us a long time to get, get it accepted within C4. And what Jack's Fisher and Jackson have found found it in context where there were a lot more action oriented that the action oriented people complain that there's too much research or we don't want to be doing research and not doing action. And so there's a nice discussion of, of these kinds of differences, which everyone might have to deal with. There's also a good discussion about the relationship between participatory action research and ACM. Just another issue that comes pops up here and there. My own view is that participatory action research is a practical tool for using within an ACM umbrella, but some people turn those around and look at it a different way. And then lastly in this chapter they provide some excellent examples of action research are outside of for us so you can see the different ways that it can be used in agriculture in in a variety of spheres. And then the last chapter, how can we scale up ACM processes and this is something that many people are worried about right now, because much of the research has been much of that ACM action slash research has been done at the village level and I am still convinced myself that you need to start at the village level you need to have that involvement that we also need to figure out better ways to move up and out. And people are thinking about about how to do that. So in this chapter we review the books contents, it's the lead author is Prabhu, Prabhu, Larsen and Koffer, and we look at two different ongoing attempts in East Africa. One of them is sort of at the county level, and one of them is a broader level effort that looks at across a number of, of a number of countries. And this, this image, it's, it's very similar to the, the, what we call the worm the iterative process that I showed you at the beginning, except it's looks like it's in one spot that that was one of my criticisms of the image that should be moving over time. And I'm going to switch and just for a little bit more time on on this ACM are that means revisited to this is the book that's underway right now, which we're tentatively calling adapting to common cause community well being for us and sustainable futures. And we have plans for four chapters on Indonesia and five on Africa so it'll be more specific to geographical locations. There's a very nice chapter on facilitation approaches that really shows how empowering good facilitation can be with most of the examples from Africa. A couple of chapters on scaling up one of them looks at using ACM in a Jakarta in the context of Jakarta's flooding Jakarta is sinking and the sea is rising. And so it's really a huge problem. And then also there's one looking at the Canadian model forest program if you're familiar with that. Jiao had been has been working in Central Africa, particularly in Cameron. And in this chapter he talks about what they have accomplished, trying to work at a broader scale. Some of the chapters that I'm most excited about and that I hoped at the very beginning that we would be able to do involve revisits return visits to the places where people have worked before. Yuliani et al is talking about talks about the process of formalizing a particular area as under the management of the community where they work and that eventually happened took a long time. Liswanti et al is looking at the same area both of these are in Sumatra. And she's looking at how trust which was established in the early 2000s or mid 2000s in that same area has persisted over time. And the, this is a more bureaucratic orientation looking at multi stakeholder forums and, and the persistence of trust, based on this ACM And then the third one in Indonesia is by Fisher et al. And that looks at the durability of a participatory action research process in Sulawesi in 2011 and then they evaluated in 2016 and again recently. And there have been three iterations of these focal focal focus groups of this particular focus group as, as it's a trap a tat, or looked at different topics. And the examples from Africa cause and I cause and I at all look at the challenges and opportunities that emerged in the political chaos of Zimbabwe Zimbabwe was has been such a difficult place to work between 2000 and 2020 and so it's very interesting and bringing up the problems and the whatever solutions were able to be found not that was not too optimistic. And the last one here is by the gunu. She looked she looked at the collaborative force management program in Uganda, which is at least on paper looks very similar to ACM. And she studied what happened from 2006 to 2013 with some more recent updates now. And I think with that I will leave it for comments and questions so we have some time for interaction and not just me. Thank you so much Carol that's wonderful such a wonderful rich, both across space and time. Look at a really important approach to the issue of force management. So, again, my name is Emily ready I will moderate questions here in this section of the talk. You should feel free to type in any questions that you have for Carol in the chat, the chat box and I will go ahead and post, then present them to Carol, and give her a chance to answer. So we do have one question. So far and it is, do you have this is Peggy asking a question do you have experience using ACM in the United States. I'm interested in how this could help increase citizen investment in urban forests or urban green spaces. Maybe have you seen ACM successfully applied to an urban forest urban green space setting. I have not, but I did look at. What's it called now collaborative forest landscape restoration program. That was a large restoration program by the US by the USDA by Forest Service, or not I guess it's USDA, but it was trying to do something very similar to ACM in the US context. I wrote a paper actually which we haven't we were going to put in this book but there were so many other interesting offerings that I did I just thought well we'll do something else with it. But it looks at ACM and this collaborative forest landscape research research for restoration program and exam it compares what they did what they did and what we did. And there are a lot of similarities and also a lot of differences that but. So it's kind of hard to summarize right now but I certainly think that ACM can work in the US. As far as doing it in urban context this this paper that's coming up looking at ACM in Jakarta I think will be interesting to see. Probably some of that would be applicable in the US and some not. One of the big differences I found in the US, we're so focused on formal institutions, whereas in developing countries very often you're either creating an institution to do this kind of collaborative work or you're, you're working with very informal ones. And I think that that makes a difference. You know I like working with informal ones and some of the stuff that I've seen from the US Forest Service trying to work collaboratively with communities has been very difficult because what you get they send out a call and they say, come and collaborate with us but a certain number of people actually answer that call. And there's this whole, you know, 95% of the community that is voiceless really. And they if they want to they can go but if they go to the meeting then they're marginalized further because they don't speak that language they, they maybe not used to speaking in public I mean there's all kinds of constraints that we haven't been very good at addressing I think. So I think to use ACM we'd have to get better at overcoming those constraints in the US going everywhere really. Thank you. So then we have a question from Louise Silverling. Could you give an example of ACM in the field and how it worked I think we're asking for more specific concrete specific specific experience you might have had story that you can tell us share with us and and then she asks, do land rights figure into ACM considerations. I'm going to use the example from Sumatra that that is going to be in this next book. The, the, we had facilitators who they didn't actually some of they sort of lived in the community, the idea would be to have them live in the community. My original idea was to build on ethnographic research and we have not really been able to do that because we didn't have the anthropologists, but we did have, we were able to ensure that people were in close and regular communication with the communities. And in that situation, originally, they began separating men and women, and having separate planning groups with the two, with with the two genders, because otherwise the women would not have really been had the opportunity to speak up. And so the men and the women came up with different ideas of what they wanted to do. And the facilitator helped them with that process and that included helping them included facilitating so that everybody had a fair chance to speak and to make their views known. And it also involved linking them with outside actors who sometimes had resources that they could use, and also had some knowledge sometimes, you know, there was a sharing of knowledge between the facilitator and the communities, both ways. And those, those groups in both the men and the women picked what they wanted to do and work on it and one of the things that the men particularly wanted to work on but the women were involved in this as well, was they had an area of kind of sort of sacred forest it was an area that they wanted to protect for the long to manage in a sustainable way so they could still get materials out of it, but they also wanted to protect it and they wanted to legitimize and formalize their own rights to that land. And so, at that time, Indonesia was just opening up to the possibility of local people having any rights over communities. I mean over land, forest lands, sorry. And so they started this process and, you know, they work through the county level and then they work through the Kabuk-Paten level and they work in the end they work through the through Jakarta, but this took in this case it took about 15 years. And they did finally get the right to to manage that land. So that was one, one example of the kind of thing that that we did they didn't all take that long. Thankfully, something odd is popping up on my screen. There were also a lot of smaller that you know people would like for instance in the same community, the women wanted to to market their handicrafts and so they got the facilitator brought in some people to help them improve their handicraft patterns and skills. And then they had the they made links with other parts of the local level government or the mid level government who helped them to send their materials to fares. And, and then one of the problems was they didn't want the women the husbands didn't want the women going on their own. And they saw that problem by bringing groups of women together. You know, they were they were sort of a process of, okay, what's the constraint and then we figure out a way to solve that constraint, and that kind of process went on for all the time that the ACM was going on. Great. Thank you so have a couple more questions here. This is from Jim, Jim, so I thank you for an inspiring thoughtful talk. In your view, how does or can ACM deal with the short term is a problem of development, particularly political and bureaucratic cycles 10 years, and can communities themselves before the timeframes resource intensity of ACM. Well, I guess. It takes, it does take time, but everything takes time. And there are actually some, some, there is some evidence that people succeed at what they're doing. And I guess my own interpretation of the, or my own conclusion is, I see so many cases where we come in and we have an answer. We try to, we say, okay, for instance, this business in restoration of having of, okay, we're going to plant a million trees. Well, I don't think that's going to work. And I think, and a lot of people don't think that's good, not, I mean a lot of people think that's not going to work. And I think this slow process of working with people it builds capacities that then can continue after, after you're gone and that's that's what not so much this first book but the second book is showing how these skills that people have gotten have allowed them to continue doing interesting and but not beneficial things in the interim so I think it's very hard to prove to say okay, you can't with ACM you, it's probably impossible to start at the beginning and say, this is what we're trying to do. And then at the end, you succeeded or you failed. What happens is you say these are some of the kinds of things we want to do this worked and this didn't. And that you know donors don't like that governments don't like that but that does seem to be the way that it plays out. Now one of his questions was about the timeframe of the bureaucracy. What was that again. Let me go back. Yeah, let me go back to that one. Yes, there's and can communities themselves before the timeframes and resource intensity of ACM. But what was the other question. Oh, sorry, it was the pride of that was with the short term. So in your view how does or can ACM deal with the short term is in problem development particularly political and bureaucratic cycles and 10 years. Can communities themselves before those timeframes of you know fairly resource intensive process, the ACM can be the ACM. We don't really know what we, I'm convinced that they, that there's no real alternative. I mean, I think that we've shown again and again and again that our attempts to just just send out our answers. I've not been working. And I think we can show that some of the of the intensive things can work. And also, I think if we, if we don't do this kind of fine tuning things to the local setting, we're bound to be to just have failure, continue to have failure after failure because we try to do something that doesn't make sense in that context whether it's a social reason for not making sense or a biophysical reason for not making sense. So I just think there's no alternative I recognize that it takes a long time. And I don't know if we have enough time, but I don't think we have enough time to fail the other ways that we fail all the time either. So I have more faith that in, I have a lot of faith in local people's abilities to adapt and I think this is one way to make it happen. Fair enough, fair enough. And I should clarify that question was from Javit Mir, not Jim Loisoy. So that was a little bit of a mix up there. So just so you know, and Javit does have another second question. Interesting Carol. Thanks. I always wonder about how the unspoken unstudied civil war drug trafficking drug and human trafficking problems impact ACM related to force management in many parts of the world. I appreciate your insights into this tough issue that seemed to be so important in their communities, pointing out I guess that the conflicts and the severe, you know, severe developments that can social sort of the fishers and the fractions that can affect the process as well. I was surprised with ACM I was expecting to have a lot more trouble with that sort of thing than we did. You know, if you live in a community, you become friends with the people and you develop rapport you develop, you learn to understand whatever you need to understand to cope in that setting. And of course, I'm sure there are places where you wouldn't want to do ACM wouldn't be safe. Like, I don't think we didn't go where the shining path was when we were working in, you know, in that part of the world. But, but you can work. I think we looked at high conflict areas and low conflict areas and we found that ACM worked best in the intermediate areas because if there was no conflict and no one had a, had a motivation to do it if there was too much conflict like in Zimbabwe, you ran into all sorts of problems that were pretty impossible to to address. I think a more of more troubling it thing to my mind is what's going on around the area where you're working this this example I gave in Sumatra, where the people got the legal right to manage their area is surrounded by oil palm everywhere. And now that's an act that is has happened outside the power of the people it wasn't there doing it's oil palm companies and the government that has made that happen. And so, that's another reason that I think that is the scaling up idea is so important we have to figure out ways to when we have a success somehow spread that that process to a broader area. To address that kind of issue. So I guess the answer is we haven't really had to deal with a lot of these problems that that he specified. All right, good thank you. So we have another question from Jose or peace. Carol do you know any common problems to adapt ACM to Latin America I think what's being asked is are there are there certain things that are specific to the application of ACM in Latin America, these versus other parts of the world. I can just think of some of the things that have popped up in our in our Latin American settings, one of them was this issue of of training. But the people I know who've worked in Latin America have really emphasized the importance of training people in the ideas of ACM, because it's very alien to a lot of the training that that people get. It's not only in Latin America but it had popped up a lot in Latin America. Another issue is the one of of sort of machismo. There's been there've been the examples that I can think of where you had some backlash where women who were being who are finding themselves somewhat empowered by the process were then beaten by their husbands. That happened a couple of times, not not common, but it happened in Latin America and I don't know if it's happening in any of the other areas of the world. Those were the two then also some of one of the place in Bolivia, there was this idea that the forest was really a place for men, not for women. And so they had to come up with if they wanted to make the benefits from the forest to be more equitable I had to come up with other ways of one of the ways they came up within Bolivia was to have the make the men's salaries from the logging activities they were doing public. And someone would know how much was their husband's got and could argue for their forgetting a share but prior to that the men had been able to just wasted if they wanted to. But that's not also limited to Latin America either. A little bit related to that I have a question for you as well. I think it's is it. Are there certain lessons or generalizations you could maybe make about what some of the factors are that make ACM more successful more likely to succeed and really have this lasting impact and lasting sort of institutes and lasting process. Is there something that makes that a little more likely that you can, you know, a few things that you'd be looking for. In terms of probably promising context, context, or applying that we when we first started ACM and 2000 we had seven dimensions that we were looking at and they were what the one the conflict one sticks out because that was really clear that when there was too much conflict or no conflict that was less likely to to be interesting to to the communities. I don't think there was anything else that was really there were we looked at the issue of heterogeneity because like Nepal had super heterogeneous communities and some of the others were very homogeneous, that didn't seem to work in in both of those contexts that didn't seem to matter to me. I mean, you had to take it into account but it was quite easy to do to deal with. There was the kind of forest that didn't seem to make any difference population pressure it was okay to, you know, that didn't matter. The, the will it you know you have to get an agreement from the community so if a community didn't want to do it then it wouldn't be any point in trying to do it. And I suppose if the, if the government didn't want you to do it that would also be a problem we haven't run into that much to my surprise. I thought we would run into that but we didn't. The, you know, the issue of good facilitation is so critical I mean to me that was that was the difference between the ones that worked and the ones that didn't was if you had good facilitators and if you had regular interaction with the communities that you had to have that that was a really foundational part of the process. Very good so we have another question from Louise here. Where do you see ACM fitting in institutionally is, is it C4's idea to get governments to incorporate the process into extension, or do you see ACM as more of a donor, funded activity. What I'd like to see really is to have it institutionalized in the, in the governments of the different countries, or with NGOs, I mean it would work either way if the if the governments are so dysfunctional which sometimes happens of course, and maybe doing it with NGOs works better. It in our, you know, repertoire I guess you'd say of sites we had, we had everything we had things that were purely donor driven we had NGO stuff we had government, you know, groups running it. I didn't see any pattern in some working and some not working but it seemed to me what what we've learned is a way to do development do conservation things collaboratively with communities and I would like to see that being adopted by projects and by governmental I think extension would be great if we could get extension to change its views from so much you know so much top down, we're teaching them that's that's not going to work I don't think we've got to have a an attitude of, we learn from them and they learn from us you know, it's got to be a marriage of the two kinds of knowledge. And this to that that's that's for sure. So, and then this question from Patty I think we have time for just one or two more Patty. And I apologize for mispronouncing that have ACM villages interacted with one another. Would it make sense to engage a cluster of nearby villages for scaling. I think Patty, I know Patty and she's got some excellent ideas for scaling and I think that would be wonderful. We have not done any we have. We have not done any we did do some we had when we were when ACM was in its heyday you know in the 2000s. We had funds so we could bring people from one village to another and they could share things that they had learned that were useful. And I think that holds a lot of promise. Patty has some neat ideas of finding and you can correct me if I miss misrepresenting you Patty but of finding situations that are working very well and then expand, you know, extending that information to others and trying to get other groups to take that up. And I think that's an excellent thing to try we haven't tried it. In that way in Zimbabwe when in the 2000s, the government at one point was very interested in what was going on and they decided to do ACM and eight other districts, but just about that time the whole country blew apart and so it didn't really happen. I don't know exactly what happened but nothing happened I think. But I think that's an excellent idea and to me we really need to be experimenting with different ways that we can expand the successes on a small scale to a bigger scale and I don't know how to do that we tried a little through the through sort of county level things that we had a project called landscape mosaics. And I was so disappointed in how it worked be partly because it was never really understood by the government that there was no willingness to, to get to give some power and authority over to local communities, or to local actors. We sort of had to be in our in our, you know, we had to stay in control and that's not going to work. I don't think. Well that's that's that's kind of our final question there. I think they're all great questions I really enjoyed, I really enjoyed being the moderator for these and and hearing and hearing Carol's response so thank you so much Carol. We, this was a wonderful update about work that affects both local forest communities and really frankly, our planet. I think we're out of time to be brought up to speed on the promise being made with these important endeavors so thank you really appreciate that thank you for presenting thank you audience for being participants for being here. Before closing our program today I'll go ahead and mention the Dr Colfer's talk has been reported and will be available for viewing in a couple of weeks time on man libraries YouTube channel so for those who might have missed her talk, or would like to see it again, the URL that I'm going to try to post more successfully right now in our in the chat is here. That is the YouTube link that you can go to. And, and then once again, for those of you who might want to attend talks that the library is hosting for the rest of the semester when a university library you can go to this link. If you interested in those future talks go to that website and for it right now thank you so much for coming us coming and joining us today and goodbye. This has been a production of Cornell University library.