Common Problems, Uncommon Solutions

Proceedings from the NGO Policy Workshop on Strategies for Effectively Promoting Community-Based Management of Tropical Forest Resources: Lessons from Asia & Other Regions
Villa la Maja, Baguio, Philippines, May 19 to 23, 1994

If you would like to order this publication, please contact Cameron Aishton. Remember to include your name, address, and phone number with your order.

The following is a procedural explanation for the benefit of those interested in how the workshop was actually arranged and how these proceedings are derived:

Marvic Leonen of LRC-KSK/Friends of the Earth-Philippines and Owen Lynch of WRI [now with CIEL], as convenors, welcomed the participants to Baguio and the workshop. After eliciting the various expectations brought by each participant, it became apparent that people were particularly interested in sharing their knowledge, advocacy skills and experiences on the ground and in policy making. By examining tales of success as well as of failure, the participants hoped they would be able to develop and improve workable strategies. A need to develop and identify criteria for measuring success of the advocacy was also expressed as was the possibility that an Asian network of public interest lawyers and other advocates of community-based management of forest resources be formed.

Over the course of the next day and a half, country-specific presentations were given by four geographically-determined panels of participants which are presented in Chapter II. The purpose of those presentations was threefold:

1) to present working examples of how legal and policy innovations have bolstered and in some cases legitimated and bolstered community-based resource management practices in their countries;
2) to identify, analyze, and highlight the major components of effective strategies for promoting community-based management; and
3) to disseminate information about both the successes and failures of those strategies to like-minded practitioners from other countries.

After each of the panels had made its presentation and fielded questions from the floor, a traditional Filipino token of appreciation, the bagsak (an open-faced slap of hands on tables) was extended to all the presenters. The session was then expanded into an open forum in which all the participants were invited to reflect upon, expand on, and brainstorm over whichever aspects of the presentations sparked their interst. These open forum discussions are summarized in Chapter III. It was in these open forums that many of the most memorable and enlightening observations and commentaries took place.

On the third day, breakout sessions went into greater and more extensive detail about three broad areas of consideration that became evident during the panel presentations and the open forums. Participants were free to join whichever of the three groups they wished. Later that day, the plenary session reconvened and rapporteurs from each of the breakout sessions presented a synopsis of their group’s collective deliberation. Questions were entertained from other participants, resulting in a further refinement of the principles and strategies that emerged. The highlights of those presentations are given in Chapter IV.

On the morning of the last day, it was the consensus of the participants that enough had been agreed upon of a specific nature to warrant drafting a series of principles to guide promoters of community-based forest management. These principles were hammered out through extensive collective discussions and cast into appropriate language by the legal experts of the LRC/KSK-WRI consortium. The resulting set of ten principles, christened "The Baguio Declaration", was approved by consensus and disseminated to the participants before they made their way back to Manila and on to their homelands and local communities, the real testing grounds of sustainable community-based forest management.

At the conclusion of the "formal" workshop fifteen of the participants went on a three-day field trip to the village of Sagada in Mountain Province. There, in the midst of the magnificent Gran Cordillera range, they were able to observe first-hand the prospects and constraints of community-based forest management in the northern Philippines.

For more information, contact: info@ciel.org.