History

ASB History

ASB has "learned" and adapted as an organization in response to scientific results, lessons of practical experience, better understanding of users' needs that has come through participatory engagement, and our own successes and mistakes. ASB has gone through at least 3 generations of learning.

ASB Timeline and Milestones 1990-2006

ASB: A learning organization

ASB has gone through at least 3 generations of learning:

ASB Version 1: Technological optimism

ASB was born out of recommendations from the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and the Agenda 21. ASB's initial perspective was:

Poor farmers destroy the world's tropical forests by applying primitive slash-and-burn methods to grow foodcrops. These unsustainable techniques mine soil nutrients and, ultimately, these poor farmers must move on to clear a new patch of forest, with large negative consequences for the environment. This cycle can be broken through better soil fertility management.

This hypothesis was rejected in the first phase of ASB by studies of forces driving deforestation at the various benchmark sites in the mid 1990s which show a "Pandora's Box Problem": smallholder productivity growth alone could-and typically would-accelerate tropical deforestation by making conversion to forest-derived land uses more profitable.

ASB Version 2: Win-win
The right mix of technological change, institutional innovation and policy reform at the national level could achieve development with conservation.

This win-win hypothesis was rejected by the results of the ASB tradeoffs matrix that emerged in the late 1990s , which revealed strong tradeoffs between local and national development objectives, on one hand, and global environmental concerns, such as habitat conservation and carbon sequestration, on the other.

This phase coincided with (and benefited from) the development and application of an integrated natural resource management (iNRM) research paradigm in the CGIAR.

ASB Version 3: Negotiation support
In the late 1990s, ASB partners (especially in Southeast Asia) initiated efforts to move beyond assessment of tradeoffs to management of conflicting interests across stakeholders and across temporal and spatial scales.

In this ongoing "negotiation support" era , ASB emphasis shifted from plots and households to landscape level analysis and an emerging focus on rewarding rural communities for environmental services that are not valued in the market.

Eight "win more, lose less" hypotheses were developed for the Rainforest Challenge partnership.

Organizational evolution to 2006
With the evolution of ASB hypotheses, there also has been a broadening of perceptions, both the disciplines and the range of stakeholders:

Disciplines in ASB
From soil science, agronomy and other biophysical disciplines predominance, to include more ecologists, economists, geographers, and other social scientists.
Range of stakeholders, potential participants and users
From an initial focus on farmers and NARS partners to include policymakers at various levels, environmental NGOs and civil society groups.

Broader perception of opportunities for impact was reinforced by more systematic analysis of ASB impact pathways.

Looking ahead: 2007 and beyond
ASB is exploring alternative means to leverage impact from its long-term engagement at benchmark sites spanning the humid tropical broadleaf forest biome. See more about ASB's future.