Local Monitoring: A Potential Tool For Collective Action Learning In Common Resource Management

Abstract

"This paper argues that monitoring is a potential tool to facilitate collective action and learning between the communities and other stakeholder. It also argues that for monitoring initiatives to be sustained, the process of developing monitoring system should be initiated at the grass-root level by the communities and other concerned local stakeholders in a participatory way, based on their shared common concerns, and for their own purpose. This paper will first outline CIFORs adaptive collaborative management project, its concept, and the importance of monitoring in this kind of management. This will be followed by a brief description of the site in Palawan, Philippines, where local monitoring system was developed by the community and local stakeholders. The following sections describe the processes that the community groups and other local stakeholders went through in their joint efforts to develop local monitoring system, how the bottom-up development processes provide a platform for collective action and learning among the participants, and present several observations made during the implementation of this monitoring system. The last section of this paper puts forward the lessons learnt from this initiative and the challenges that the PO faced in sustaining their efforts."