ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the organizational changes that are required if management of conservation forests is to be genuinely collaborative and truly adaptive. Ecosystem management was originally used to describe approaches to management of the full complexity of ecological systems in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, but people were still treated as exogenous to the system. Conservation projects generally have been tolerated by host governments and local people rather than actively solicited. Project designers have been driven by the assumption that education and rationality would eventually lead people to support conservation. The influence of a powerful civil society was needed to bring about the reforms in the US Forest Service that led to the adoption of ecosystem management approaches in the Pacific Northwest. The proliferation of international initiatives to support conservation may also have shifted resources away from dealing with practical realities on the ground and toward a “mechanistic” one-size-fits-all view of conservation.
