A new open-access toolkit, Participatory Approaches for Engaging Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples in Conservation, has been developed by the RSPB Centre for Conservation Science to support global conservation practitioners. It has resources and ideas for a wide range of users, including fundraisers, practitioners and community organisers involved in planning or delivering conservation programmes with local communities. The toolkit is introduced in this blog by Sorrel Jones...
Conservation efforts are about building social-ecological systems that are healthy and resilient: able to sustain biodiversity and ecosystem functions alongside a thriving human population. The “social” side of this equation is usually where the biggest challenges – and greatest opportunities – can be found. An important aspect of this is the relationship between conservationists and those who live in a landscape. Indigenous Peoples, local residents, and others who manage, own or use natural resources often have the greatest personal stake in an ecosystem’s governance. As well holding many types of formal and informal rights, local people also have direct insight into their own social-ecological world – its complex dynamics, historic-cultural forces and political entanglements. It is no surprise then that collaborative long-term partnerships with local communities can hugely advance both social justice and impact of conservation efforts. Equally unsurprising, decisions that involve stakeholders are usually better informed, with greater legitimacy and support. However, all too often relationships fail to meet such potential and it can be hard to establish a foundation of open dialogue, trust and mutual understanding.
Barriers such as time, funding, language, cultural divides, conflicting needs and priorities can all come into play. Perhaps more important are the underlying power-dynamics which fundamentally shape who is involved in conservation partnerships and the nature of their participation. Rural populations of many countries are socio-economically and politically disadvantaged, while “top-down” modes of state governance are the global norm. Power imbalances can be especially acute in settings where local communities are living below the poverty line, coinciding with many of the “biodiversity hotspots” that are the focus of international conservation efforts. Add to this the fact that conservation has its own colonial roots, and that much of global conservation funding still comes from a sub-set of high-income nations, and it is clear that default settings are unlikely to deliver equitable, bottom-up processes.
Fortunately, a huge range of tools have been developed that can help forge collaborative partnerships in the face of such power imbalances. Participatory approaches encompass sets of principles, methodologies and ways of thinking that seek to promote wider engagement in discussions and decision-making. From their popularisation in the ’70’s participatory approaches have proliferated as tools to support international development, policy-making, community organising, democratic governance, public planning and health, scientific research and increasingly, conservation and environmental management. While approaches may vary in terms of underlying ideologies or degrees of participation, a shared feature is the aim to address power-relations, often seeking to replace “top-down” decision-making processes with a more “bottom-up” way of doing things. The emphasis is in building trust-based relations, and in creating robust, locally-grounded solutions to societal challenges. From a conservation practitioner’s point of view, such approaches are potentially very useful whether contexts involve land-use planning, navigating human-wildlife conflict, negotiating payment-based mechanisms, or promoting behaviour-change.
Participatory Approaches for Engaging Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples in Conservation: an Open-Access Toolkit
Given their potential, it is striking that many conservation practitioners remain relatively unfamiliar with participatory approaches, or the plethora of resources that can support their use. To address this gap, a new toolkit has been developed by RSPB which aims to facilitate wider adoption of participatory approaches. Drawing on a desk-study and workshops with practitioners from around the world, the toolkit brings together over 100 web resources including training curriculums, guidance documents, searchable databases and web-sites, that encompass a broad range of insights and ideas for engaging people more effectively and equitably. Chapters look at underlying principles and foundational techniques, and how these relate to themes of land and resource management, monitoring and evaluation and research. There is a Resource Map and Quick-Start Guide to highlight the most relevant resources for different applications, and a Methods section show-casing three techniques with more detail, namely Participatory Mapping, Visioning and Participatory Research. The toolkit is intended for a wide range of global users who might be involved in planning or delivering conservation programmes in partnerships with local communities, and is especially oriented towards conservation settings involving international partners.
While this toolkit aims to make conservationists more aware of participatory approaches, effective engagement goes far beyond applying any given technique or method, and the “best” approach will look vastly different across settings. Ill-conceived attempts to leverage participation can ultimately damage relations by raising false expectations or wasting people’s time. On the other hand, positive benefits emerge when engagement is understood as an ongoing process, tailored to match a given context and purpose, and grounded in participatory principles. Specific techniques only come into play to facilitate a wider process, or else they risk becoming box-ticking exercises. While many global conservation practitioners are well-versed in participatory ways of working the field as a whole remains woefully under-skilled, a fact which hampers our progress toward social and environmental sustainability. Happily, this is a situation that can be fixed and, judging from the wealth of learning that the new toolkit has collated, much progress is already being made.
Click this link to download the toolkit: https://www.rspb.org.uk/RSPB-Participatory-Toolkit-for-Conservation