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Despite efforts and investments to integrate weather and climate knowledges, often dichotomized into the scientific and the local, a top-down practice of science communication that tends to ignore cultural consensus knowledge still prevails. This paper presents an empirical application of cultural consensus analysis for climate risk management. It uses mixed methods such as focus groups, freelisting, pilesorting, and rapid ethnographic assessment to understand farmers' knowledge of weather and climate conditions in Barangay Biga, Oriental Mindoro, Philippines. Multi-dimensional scaling and aggregate proximity matrix of items are generated to assess the similarity among the different locally perceived weather and climate conditions. Farmers' knowledge is then qualitatively compared with the technical classification from the government's weather bureau. There is cultural agreement among farmers that the weather and climate conditions can be generally grouped into wet, dry, and unpredictable weather (Maria Loka). Damaging hazards belong into two subgroups on the opposite ends of the wet and dry scale, that is, tropical cyclone is grouped together with La Niña, rainy season, and flooding season, while farmers perceive no significant difference between El Niño, drought, and dry spells. Ethnographic information reveals that compared to the technocrats' reductive knowledge, farmers imagine weather and climate conditions (panahon) as an event or a phenomenon they are actively experiencing by observing bioindicators, making sense of the interactions between the sky and the landscape, and the agroecology of pest and diseases, while being subjected to agricultural regulations on irrigation, price volatility, and control of power on subsidies and technologies. This situated local knowledge is also being informed by forecasts and advisories from the weather bureau illustrating a hybrid of technical science, both from the technocrats and the farmers, and personal experiences amidst agricultural precarities. Speaking about the hybridity of knowledge rather than localizing the scientific obliges technocrats and scientists to productively engage with different ways of knowing and the tensions that mediate farmers' knowledge as a societal experience.

Social network analysis gives a rigid assessment of network structure while cultural theory helps explain management outcomes in more detail. The combination of these methods provides significant and alternative insights about the complexity of water pollution management. Applied in the case study of the Calumpang Watershed in the Philippines, two types of relations were evaluated, namely, resource sharing and cooperative activities. Factors affecting cooperation and the creation of bridges were assessed in social network analysis, while cultural theory was used to reveal the underlying views of key actors on the nature of the river and its management. Evidence showed that cooperation was significantly influenced by resource sharing regardless of institutional affiliation, while bridges were created by becoming the pools of information and resources in the network. Using cultural theory, this study found out that local government officials dominantly have a mixture of hierarchist and egalitarian views characterizing belief in both rule-bound and group-motivated actions to solve the water pollution problem. However, their egalitarian views on management did not manifest in the current network. The study concludes that collaborative partnerships for water pollution management can be facilitated by promoting resource flow, utilizing influential bridges in the network, and understanding the unconventional values of government actors. Combining social network analysis and cultural theory is recommended to generate a more critical assessment of the institutional complexity of pollution and other water issues in watersheds.

© 2020 Elsevier Ltd Participatory forestry needs to revisit the notion of what "participation" means rather than uncritically follow the technobureaucratic guidelines of baseline assessment and monitoring. In this study, we are concerned about materialism and idealism in the policy and practice of participatory mangrove rehabilitation in the Philippines. The analysis is based on the review of mangrove policies and a case study of a successful project, the Katunggan Ecopark. Empowerment does not necessarily follow a bottom-up strategy, but is given as an impetus by the traditional authority after capitalizing on the rhetoric of participation and limiting the decision-making power of the members of the community during the incipient stages of the project. This has put the local communities to work despite having anxieties over the project's positive promises. Social cohesion, a volunteer network, and the community's sense of ownership of the success of the project that was not previously felt before, can be gained through evidence from the material success of rehabilitation. With the transformation of the denuded area to a mangrove forest, power was decentralized from the local government authority to the people's organization. Recognizing the difference between the materialist and idealist perspectives and learning to negotiate between the two can significantly inform pragmatic approaches to environmental policy and governance. More studies that reflect on the inconsistencies and biases of the materialist-idealist divide in both policy and practice should be done to further our understanding of a dynamic, flexible, and transformative participatory process.