I am a historian of early modern Europe, especially 16th- and 17th-century England, and my work pulls together threads from different historical disciplines, including political history, the history of science and technology, and environmental history. I am fascinated by the ways that human history is intimately linked with the environment, and I am most interested in how early modern European states and empires worked to understand, manage, and profit from the natural world, especially with respect to using and conserving natural resources such as water, wood, and wildlife. I have chosen books that explore these issues in innovative and exciting ways.
I love this book because it does such a masterful job of demonstrating how peoples, states, and the natural environment are closely linked with one another.
The book is about early modern Venice and its mainland empire, its immense and constant need for wood, and the state’s efforts to ensure that need could be sustainably met in both the near and distant future. The Venetians came to understand nature through the careful conservation of a vital but fragile resource, and their government developed to meet that challenge.
Over four centuries Venice created a unique bureaucracy of forestry and forest management, staffed by experts and tasked with counting and maintaining all of the trees within its vast territories.
Wood was essential to the survival of the Venetian Republic. To build its great naval and merchant ships, maintain its extensive levee system, construct buildings, fuel industries, and heat homes, Venice needed access to large quantities of oak and beech timber. The island city itself was devoid of any forests, so the state turned to its mainland holdings for this vital resource. A Forest on the Sea explores the history of this enterprise and Venice's efforts to extend state control over its natural resources. Karl Appuhn explains how Venice went from an isolated city completely dependent on foreign suppliers for…
This topic, adaptive collaborative management, has been dear to my heart for nearly a quarter of a century (indeed longer if one includes my involvement in farming systems research and development, a similar agricultural concept with less emphasis on the environment). I have long felt that deep involvement with local communities is crucial if we want to avoid ‘the sins of the past’ in conservation and development. My hope and that of my colleagues has been that by involving local people in a respectful, iterative, inclusive, learning, collaborative process, together we can steer policies and actions in a benign direction that may in fact endure (unlike most such projects).
The collection focuses on communities in the tropics – specifically in Bolivia, Brazil, Cameroon, Indonesia, Malawi, Nepal, Philippines, and Zimbabwe – where the Adaptive Collaborative Management approach discussed in my own book was first used, in the early 2000s. The examples in this book focus on the centrality of learning in the ACM process. When we developed our version of ACM (at the Center for International Forestry Research), we imagined the monitoring would build on the literature on criteria and indicators in sustainable forest management (C&I). It did that, and more. This book shows the many ways that the program itself ‘walked the talk,’ using its emphasis on learning to expand our own approach beyond its beginnings—just as our own new book does.
The first book to critically examine how monitoring can be an effective tool in participatory resource management, Negotiated Learning draws on the first-hand experiences of researchers and development professionals in eleven countries in Africa, Asia, and South America. Collective monitoring shifts the emphasis of development and conservation professionals from externally defined programs to a locally relevant process. It focuses on community participation in the selection of the indicators to be monitored as well as community participation in the learning and application of knowledge from the data that is collected. As with other aspects of collaborative management, collaborative monitoring emphasizes building…
This topic, adaptive collaborative management, has been dear to my heart for nearly a quarter of a century (indeed longer if one includes my involvement in farming systems research and development, a similar agricultural concept with less emphasis on the environment). I have long felt that deep involvement with local communities is crucial if we want to avoid ‘the sins of the past’ in conservation and development. My hope and that of my colleagues has been that by involving local people in a respectful, iterative, inclusive, learning, collaborative process, together we can steer policies and actions in a benign direction that may in fact endure (unlike most such projects).
This book is the fourth in a series on forest decentralization globally, a series for which I edited the other three books. So I was gratified to see how this one turned out. I appreciate it because it provides some of the same contextual material on governance in Africa – an area I know less well – that the book by Moeliono et al. provided for Borneo. Some of the authors and one editor had also been members of the original ACM teams in Africa (in the early 2000s), bringing some of their own related insights into the discussion.
Many countries around the world are engaged in decentralization processes, and most African countries face serious problems with forest governance, from benefits sharing to illegality and sustainable forest management. This book summarizes experiences to date on the extent and nature of decentralization and its outcomes - most of which suggest an underperformance of governance reforms - and explores the viability of different governance instruments in the context of weak governance and expanding commercial pressures over forests.
Findings are grouped into two thematic areas: decentralization, livelihoods and sustainable forest management; and international trade, finance and forest sector governance reforms. The authors…
This topic, adaptive collaborative management, has been dear to my heart for nearly a quarter of a century (indeed longer if one includes my involvement in farming systems research and development, a similar agricultural concept with less emphasis on the environment). I have long felt that deep involvement with local communities is crucial if we want to avoid ‘the sins of the past’ in conservation and development. My hope and that of my colleagues has been that by involving local people in a respectful, iterative, inclusive, learning, collaborative process, together we can steer policies and actions in a benign direction that may in fact endure (unlike most such projects).
Butler and Shultz pull together authors who have worked on the American CFLRP, a broader scale attempt to implement a collaborative and adaptive approach in the US – with a different genesis, history, goal, and funding than my own work, entitled ACM. Yet, the similarities were fascinating, so much so that I wrote a paper comparing the two approaches. I was also fascinated to read this book, as I was in the process of gaining more understanding of the issue of forest restoration – especially as it relates to communities – which this book addresses.
This book assesses the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) and identifies lessons learned for governance and policy through this new and innovative approach to collaborative forest management.
Unlike anything else in US public land management, the CFLRP is a nationwide program that requires collaboration throughout the life of national forest restoration projects, joining agency partners and local stakeholder groups in a kind of decade-long restoration marriage. This book provides a comprehensive assessment of the governance dynamics of the program, examining: questions about collaborative governance processes and the dynamics of trust, accountability and capacity; how scientific information is used in…
This topic, adaptive collaborative management, has been dear to my heart for nearly a quarter of a century (indeed longer if one includes my involvement in farming systems research and development, a similar agricultural concept with less emphasis on the environment). I have long felt that deep involvement with local communities is crucial if we want to avoid ‘the sins of the past’ in conservation and development. My hope and that of my colleagues has been that by involving local people in a respectful, iterative, inclusive, learning, collaborative process, together we can steer policies and actions in a benign direction that may in fact endure (unlike most such projects).
The articles in this book provide a thorough understanding of the diversity of the local communities in this area of Borneo, their characteristics, and their conflictual interactions with government, industry, and other outside actors. The location is just north of the area of Borneo with which I myself have been periodically involved, research-wise, since 1979. Although the adaptive collaborative management program discussed in my own book initially intended to use this site as one of their own, the researchers involved chose a different path. Still, the book addresses issues of collaboration and adaptation, from a variety of perspectives; and I found the similarities and differences with the nearby area I know well fascinating. The book also documents a fascinating period in Indonesia’s recent history.
The devolution of control over the world's forests from national or state and provincial level governments to local control is an ongoing global trend that deeply affects all aspects of forest management, conservation of biodiversity, control over resources, wealth distribution and livelihoods. This powerful new book from leading experts provides an in-depth account of how trends towards increased local governance are shifting control over natural resource management from the state to local societies, and the implications of this control for social justice and the environment. The book is based on ten years of work by a team of researchers in…
This topic, adaptive collaborative management, has been dear to my heart for nearly a quarter of a century (indeed longer if one includes my involvement in farming systems research and development, a similar agricultural concept with less emphasis on the environment). I have long felt that deep involvement with local communities is crucial if we want to avoid ‘the sins of the past’ in conservation and development. My hope and that of my colleagues has been that by involving local people in a respectful, iterative, inclusive, learning, collaborative process, together we can steer policies and actions in a benign direction that may in fact endure (unlike most such projects).
This book is as much a manual as a book, but I particularly liked it because it provided me with specific examples of ways that local communities had been involved in forest issues – a topic I was struggling with how to implement in the late 1990s (as we developed the ACM approach on which my own book focuses). Carter’s book also had chapters on collaboration, on learning, on local management – all within a forestry framework, in a variety of tropical countries. As I glance through it again, to consider this description, I realize much of its contents remain relevant in 2022.
I worked in Indonesia much of the time between 1979 and 2009, with people living in forests. As an anthropologist, my work was initially ethnographic in nature, later linking such insights to policies relating to forests and people – as I worked at the Center for International Forestry Research in Bogor (1995 – the present). Although later in my career, I worked in forests all over the tropics, my real love remains with Indonesia, where I worked the longest and learned the most. My most recent research was in 2019, when I returned to the first community I studied ethnographically in 1979-80.
I share with John McCarthy an interest in how power operates in Indonesian communities and forests and this book provides a view of this as it plays out in northern Sumatra, ‘up close and personal.’ For me, it provided glimpses of very different ethnographic realities than what I had seen myself in other areas of Sumatra (West Sumatra, Riau) where I had lived for four years and supervised others’ research (in Jambi) as well. The recency of the 2004 tsunami and the separatist movement underway when the book was published lent urgency and excitement to McCarthy’s observations.
This book addresses the politics of environmental change in one of the richest areas of tropical rainforest in Indonesia. Based on field studies conducted in three agricultural communities in rural Aceh, this work considers a number of questions: How do customary (adat) village and state institutions work? What roles do they play in managing local resources? How have they evolved over time? Are villagers, state policies, or corrupt local networks responsible for the loss of tropical rainforest? Will better outcomes emerge from revitalizing customary management, from changing state policies, or from transforming the way the state works? And why do…
