ABSTRACT
High-quality facilitation of social learning processes in Adaptive Collaborative Management (ACM) is key to the success of such processes, whether at community, service provider, managerial or policy level. Facilitation is a set of tools and techniques in communication. However, high-quality process facilitation for change is much broader than applied communication tools. It borrows elements from personal and organisational development and change management, and is linked to behavioural change psychology as well as community development, action learning/research and systemic intervention. Communities and forest users are complex organisational entities, often extremely heterogenous and conflictual. Change must be seen and addressed in this complex context. Only well-designed facilitation processes, skills and competences can produce successful processes.
The chapter unpacks good process facilitation based on long-term experience over three decades in Eastern and Southern Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. It elaborates how such facilitation competences can be developed within institutions and communities. Facilitation for change is the backbone of operationalising participation, engagement of people and collaboration. A successful intervention requires far more programme investment in developing good facilitation and process management capacity than typically planned.
