| PPPRegional planning has long asked how to combine local control and regional resource management. The international trend to decentralize governance and promote co-management or other stakeholder-based approaches to regional landscape management is consistent with emerging collaborative spatial planning theory. Regional landscapes could be managed through flexible networks of governmental and customary institutions (Healey 1999, 2006). Through dialogue, parties assert multiple cultural perspectives, share knowledge, and forge shared landscape values and commitments. Therefore, over time one would expect shared plans to be voluntarily implemented through the respective authority of partnering institutions, communities, and agencies. Other planning theorists fault collaborative planning for assuming speech is undistorted, for neglecting issues of formal and disciplinary power, for glossing over historical and cultural contexts, and the for ignoring the centers of power where decisions are actually made. More fundamentally, both co-management and collaborative practice often assume that indigenous and other participants share an interest in agreement. Political economists have found that co-management and stakeholder approaches inaccurately assume egalitarian indigenous and community partners that may actually deploy co-management and other institutions in the continued competition for resources (Agrawal and Gibson 2001 Leach et al. 1999).This case study of protected area co-management at Mt. Pulag National Park, the Philippines, explains how and why local governments and indigenous communities used a collaborative, decentralized local governance and indigenous rights provisions to strategically pursue their own interests and divide the landscape, despite a plan to protect its shared cultural and ecological importance. Focusing on overlapping park, ancestral domain, and municipal boundary conflicts and drawing from other cases, the study concludes that Philippine decentralization law provides financial incentives for competition that outweigh the locally perceived benefits of co-management in this context. Overlapping, ambiguous, and inconsistently implemented laws provided multiple alternatives to implementation of agreements, especially without a stronger regional governance institutions and attendance to cultural and historical context. Findings support the need for continued research that focuses on power and the interrogation of assumptions made by advocates of collaboration and decentralization. |
