Assessment of an iterative process: The double spiral of re-designing participation

The procedures for reforming forest policies and programmes as promoted through the international dialogue on forests are addressing hard challenges to forest administrations, which are basically still working along a very different scheme for decision making (top-down and command-and-control systems, with no evaluation of the results). One of the most relevant conceptual frameworks to address the issue of forest governance reform under such conditions is the mixed model which tries to link the deductive instrumental and the communicative approaches in a progressive process for change. In the mixed model, the basic structure of the decision making process is a chronological deductive series of steps whose content is defined through a negotiation procedure. The monitoring of the implementation of the forest policy reform aiming at a permanent adaptation to the changes in the context, including those brought from the reform process itself, is provided by the means of participatory assessments along the chain. The mixed model is especially adapted to the follow-up of the National Forestry Programmes, which are supposed to be carried out through an iterative and participatory scheme. As most of the time the deductive and communicative approaches are not completely fitting to each other, the process of re-designing the forest programme works as a combination of outward and inward spirals (the double spiral), revealed by evaluation procedures. The experience of the evaluation of a complete cycle of forest policy development in Kyrgyzstan (Central Asia, ex-USSR country), an 8-year case history of implementation of the “mixed model”, is presented. The paper explains why the mixed model was used as a basis for the process of forest policy reform in Kyrgyzstan, and how in this framework the various forces expressing participantsʹ interests were alternatively balancing from collaborative learning (outward spiral) to target oriented strategies (inward spirals). The paper also shows how the evaluation exercise carried out after 5 years led to a re-definition of the participatory procedures linked with a re-construction of the forest administration authority.