What is Community Conservation?

The What and Why

What is community conservation?

Community conservation is simply local communities protecting biodiversity and natural resources. This approach recognizes that local people are the best stewards of their own land and that they have a vested interest in its conservation. Community conservation is an effective and powerful process for conserving biodiversity and it also builds communities’ capacity for good governance and sustainable livelihoods.

Why is community conservation critical for the biodiversity crisis?

Community conservation is the engine driving us toward global biodiversity goals, including the ’30×30′ initiative to protect 30% of the planet by 2030. These targets may seem daunting from a distance, but through community conservation, they shift from abstract benchmarks to active, ongoing realities. Here’s how community conservation makes global goals a reality:

Massive Scalability

By partnering with one community at a time, we create a ripple effect. Each success story inspires others, and a model that works in one place can be adapted and adopted by communities around the world. We are not building a top-down organization; we are fostering a global movement of local action.

Cost-Effectiveness

Community-led initiatives are often more efficient and cost-effective than large-scale, centrally managed projects. They rely on local knowledge and labor, reducing the need for expensive external consultants and enforcement.

Resilience and Permanence

When conservation is embedded in a community’s culture and governance, it becomes more resilient to external pressures. These efforts are not easily undone by political shifts or funding changes because they are an integral part of the community’s identity and future.

By investing in community conservation, we are making the smartest possible bet on the future of our planet. We are investing in the inherent human capacity for stewardship, creativity, and resilience.

Why does community conservation work?

Recognizes diverse values and motivations within communities: It works because it builds on values people already have. People want to conserve biodiversity, live in a healthy environment, and protect their natural resources. They appreciate a diversity of benefits from biodiversity, both direct and indirect. Even protected areas like national parks and wildlife reserves are appreciated by communities. We have to stop approaching conservation as if it is a luxury that communities can’t afford and that they are motivated to conserve only if it provides direct economic benefits.

Builds capacity, not dependency: Our role is not to lead, but to support. We provide communities with the resources they need, including technical training and policy guidance. This model avoids creating dependency. Instead, it builds the long-term capacity of local organizations, enabling them to govern their own conservation efforts, monitor biodiversity, and advocate for their own rights.

Supports local agency and ownership: When a community feels ownership, they become biodiversity’s most dedicated guardians. This approach respects their knowledge, cultural practices, and deep understanding of their local ecosystems. The community decides what to protect, how to protect it, and why. This agency leads to durable outcomes that withstand political and economic shifts.

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The How

The Process: The stages of a conservation project

Drawing on 40 years of global experience across more than 30 projects, we’ve mapped out a natural, proven process for community-led conservation.

The process describes a project being catalyzed by a conservationist—whether they are an outsider or a member from within the community itself—but we often find that local communities are already actively protecting their own biodiversity. In either case, as conservationists, our role isn’t to reinvent the wheel—it’s to listen, support, and help communities scale their impact. Our role is to champion and catalyze the conservation power that already exists within communities.

The Activities: Strategies and Interventions

The designing of conservation activities or interventions in conservation can sometimes seem like a mystery. But it shouldn’t be. We use a framework that consists of five categories of conservation activities. The categories are all important pieces of conservation and they reinforce and support each other. The five types of activities (also called strategies or interventions in conservation planning) are: knowledge, awareness and advocacy, capacity-building, policy, and the management and governance that directly conserve biodiversity.

Deeper Dive

Contact us to discuss participating in or organizing one of our workshops or visit our resources page to find CC publications, lectures by our founder, and podcasts and articles by our staff and partners.