It is often assumed that having a community representative in a meeting or decision-making body concerning resource management assures that the communities' interests are being met. The purpose of this research is to show why most community representation in resource management processes has not been not effective. The intent is to provide suggestions for how to improve such representation, especially as opportunities for pluralistic input into policy making increase and the capacities of villagers to participate in such processes are greater than ever before (with increasing tools for communication such as maps, NGO facilitation etc). The conclusions should prove useful for improving the selection of representatives and their functions within policy-making.

Three questions are posed:

• Who are the representatives? E.g. number of people, formal or informal representative role, what is the structure of their organization, what is their function? With whom are they allied? Who do they represent and not represent?
• How are they chosen? E.g. self-appointed, appointed or through some democratic process? by the community or outsiders?
• Why are they effective or not effective? Criteria for effectiveness would include local people's criteria as well as the representatives accountability, legitimacy, communication practices (not just skills), and ability to create capacity for action or impact (involving social capital, influence,).

For each question, patterns would be identified in people's actual practices. Data would be collected in at least 10-15 sites In the Bulungan Research Forest area, focusing on community representation in concession dialogues (including their development programs) or with the local national park. If it is possible to focus on a specific issues, this would be on meeting community needs related to the local forest. If there is interest on the part of collaborators, we could expand such collection to other sites as well.

Consideration would be given to the nature of the policy issues, size of the community and degree of heterogeneity (and associated conflict) as contextual influences on the effectiveness of representation. Representatives behavior might also be explained in terms of their motivations, capacities and incentives.

The study would draw upon principles about representation in policy science and political science and try to apply these to the context of forest communities and forest resource management policies, especially in the tropics. Information might also be available from anthropology in relation to the selection of informants (often peripheral members of the community), or ethnic boundaries and the function of many village representatives as "gatekeepers" of information.

This study focuses on the relation between the community and the representative, recognizing that the factors affecting the effectiveness of the representative and other parties involved in the policy making process are equally as important and should be part of a second sub-study. The question of representation is thus just a first step in a chain of conditions necessary to ensure that communities have effective roles in the policy-making process.