Description

A ComMod process was conducted in Nan Province, northern Thailand, in a 125 sq km sub-district where seven villages manage different types of community forests. They were officially founded almost half a century ago but are still vulnerable to deforestation. Inspired from the ReHab model familiar to many ComMod practitioners, the “CoComForest” (COllaborative COMmunity FOREST management) model was developed to represent community forest management (CFM) practices and non-timber forest product (NTFP) harvesting. The model was used as a computer-based role-playing game (cRPG) with 21 diverse stakeholders during a field workshop to support sharing of perceptions and knowledge among stakeholders and in participatory simulations to explore future CFM scenarios. Three different participatory gaming and simulation sessions were organized. The first one focused on the co-validation of the model with the participants. The model was used in the subsequent two sessions to simulate sc enarios based on the establishment of firebreaks and the introduction of outsiders intensively harvesting the local NTFPs. The results made the participants more aware of the negative impact of the intensive harvesting practices of outsiders accelerating the depletion of resources, whereas the prevention of wildfire by establishing firebreaks could increase the resource availability in the landscape. In the debriefing session at the end of the workshop and the individual interviews of the participants, most of the them considered the model as a useful common representation of the system they manage collectively and that its use in participatory simulations facilitated communication while searching for an adapted and acceptable collective action plan to improve CFM at the sub-district level in order to prevent the overharvesting of NTFPs by outsiders. In summary, the ComMod process improved adaptive capacity and collaboration of local stakeholders in CFM at the sub-district level. The rather generic and simple CoComForest model and its associated cRPG tool tested in this case study could be useful to facilitate the improvement of collaborative CFM at higher institutional levels or at other sites facing similar problems.