Secure Rights Over Lands, Waters, and Resources
LandMark
An online, interactive global platform hosted by World Resources Institute (WRI) and Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) to provide maps and other critical information about lands that are collectively held and used by Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Includes data on formal vs. informal tenure, indicators of legal security of lands, development pressures, and other relevant information.
The Global Property Rights Index (Prindex)
A global indicator of citizens’ perception of the security of property rights, a joint initiative of the Global Land Alliance and Overseas Development Institute. Intended to monitor and encourage good governance of property rights, and in focusing on perception, does not necessarily reflect legal status.
NAMATI Community Land Protection Facilitator’s Guide: Mapping and Registration of Community Lands
Section titled “Harmonizing Boundaries and Documenting Community Lands,” pages 133-176. This chapter describes how to support communities to make participatory sketch maps of their lands; resolve boundary disputes and land conflicts related to their community lands; then document the agreed boundaries with various forms of physical evidence, including signed agreements with neighbors, boundary trees or other markers, and location coordinates.
Strong Leadership, Governance, and Management Capacity
CARE Community Score Card (CSC) and Social Analysis and Action (SAA) Approach
These resources were suggested by multi-sector (health, education, and development) reviewers of the VCA Framework and Results Chain and Evidence Base project as potentially useful for programs to apply a community-driven accountability approach for the assessment and improvement of program delivery (CSC); and a participatory approach for exploring the social factors that negatively impact community members, with an eye toward fostering gender equity in program design and implementation (SAA). Such approaches can foster trust between communities and conservation practitioners by illuminating important considerations for project design and implementation such as: Whose priorities are valued and acted upon? Is there consensus on priorities among the entire stakeholder body? Do the priorities identified resonate with the larger community? Are they inclusive of the diversity of needs and priorities expressed? Do they capture the needs and interests of the most marginalized and underrepresented in the community?
NAMATI Community Land Protection Facilitator’s Guide
This resource contains best practice guidance on many of the potential actions suggested in the capacity-building (Pillar 2) tools and resources section, including how to work with community leaders, engage women and marginalized groups, conduct community visioning, support land use planning, document community lands, resolve conflicts, and pursue registration and formalization of community land claims.
Institutional Self-Assessment: A Tool for Strengthening Non-profit Organizations
In addition to community capacity-building, TNC has a long history of supporting the capacity of in-country civil society organizations and nonprofits whose work directly impacts Indigenous Peoples and local communities. This resource can be used to assess our own capacity as well as that of partner civil society organizations and nonprofits, including evaluation of their strategic vision and planning, leadership, organizational management, human resources, resource development, financial management, constituency building/outreach, and programmatic capacity.
This resource provides three relevant results chains for capacity-building (as well as sustainable livelihoods), and contains additional detail, a menu of potential indicators, and suggested tools and resources for assessing and strengthening trust with and within communities (pages 24-33), as well as the effectiveness of community leaders and institutions (pp. 34-42).
TNC Governance Self-Assessment Tool
This resource provides a tool developed by TNC’s Northern Australia Team for community partners to use in assessing the effectiveness of their own community leaders and institutions.
Effective Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue and Decision Making
The MSP Guide: How to Design and Facilitate Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships
The guide offers a roadmap for designing and facilitating multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs). This is not a recipe book; rather, it provides a broad outline. The power of this guide comes from its underlying framework for understanding and facilitating MSPs. This framework links theory with practice and provides a model and set of principles to guide the design of MSPs, tips on facilitation, and a set of participatory process tools.
The MSP Tool Guide: Sixty Tools to Facilitate Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships
As a companion to the MSP Guide on how to design and facilitate effective multi-stakeholder partnerships, this tool guide offers 60 process tools serving different purposes curated by the authors as the ones they find especially useful to support MSP processes.
Towards New Social Contracts: Using Dialogue Processes to Promote Social Change
This toolkit is designed to stimulate a reflection around the potential and limits of multi-stakeholder processes in promoting socio-political change and provides practical tools and resources to facilitate the use of dialogue processes in new ways. This toolkit is primarily intended for civil society, particularly small organizations operating at the local level, and seeks to add a civil society perspective to multi-stakeholder initiatives. Also available for download in French, Spanish, and Arabic.
Cross-Sector Collaboration to Tackle Tropical Deforestation
At the core of this document is a set of diagnostic questions to help jurisdictional programs design and assess cross-sector collaboration and its backbone support. The questions are divided into six sections: initial conditions, outcomes, collaboration dynamics, structure of the collaboration, backbone support, and accountabilities.
Sustainable Livelihood Opportunities
Healthy Country Planning (HCP) is an adaptation of the Open Standards (OS) developed for use in participative and cross-cultural situations—typically with Indigenous communities. To better enable this, the language of the OS has been translated into simpler terms, a color-coding system adopted, and a flow chart of how all the steps fit together added for clarity. It has been developed and tested across Australia, and the most experienced coaches in its use are Australian, but it has been used very successfully in the Americas and Asia. The complete set of PowerPoint files and associated exercises for running an HCP training workshop can be accessed above.
The objective of this study was to identify, evaluate, and synthesize lessons learned from examples of community-focused enterprises and investments that support economic livelihoods, human well-being, and environmental outcomes for Indigenous People and local communities in various parts of the world. Lessons learned from these examples provide guidance on designing and financing community livelihood models and help organizations that are seeking to strengthen existing efforts or start new initiatives related to sustainable livelihoods.
Sustainable Livelihoods Enhancement and Diversification (SLED) Manual
This manual provides a set of guidelines for development and conservation practitioners to support communities in enhancing and diversifying their livelihoods. SLED does this by working with Indigenous Peoples and local communities to identify and develop opportunities for positive change in their livelihoods, based on their strengths and capacities, accounting for factors that help and inhibit livelihood change while reflecting people’s aspirations and hopes for the future. Although the methodology is written with coral reefs and coastal fisheries in mind, it can be applied widely wherever natural resources are facing degradation due to unsustainable human use.
Market Analysis and Development (MA&D) is suitable for enterprises based on natural resource products that need to be protected or conserved, because it links participatory natural resource management and conservation activities to income generating opportunities. Thorough MA&D can provide a wide scope for understanding relevant market systems and thus help avoid business failure. While the methodology is written with forests as the focus, the approach has also been successfully applied to projects related to community-based tourism, agricultural products, livestock initiatives, and coastal fisheries.
Communities, Conservation and Livelihoods
This book reflects the results of over a decade of studies focusing on communities, conservation, and livelihoods, through the Community Conservation Research Network (CCRN), a global initiative that involves a wide range of Indigenous, academic, community and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). As will be seen in this book, the linkages of conservation and livelihoods arise within underlying ‘social-ecological’ systems, they are rooted in the varying meanings of and motivation for conservation, they are affected by issues of power and of governance, and they lead to a wide range of biodiversity and livelihood outcomes.
This report is intended to serve as an internal guidance document for TNC practitioners who are considering, or actively engaging, in Development by Design (DbD) projects or other community-based projects facing proposed or current development. The report consists of four primary sections including (1) an overview of the Conservancy’s positions and commitments regarding human well-being and community engagement, (2) an abridged literature review highlighting the recognized best practices for engaging with communities on extractive projects, (3) representative Conservancy case studies summarizing experiences and lessons learned about engaging with communities during development projects, and (4) overall recommendations for conservation practitioners based on reviews of the leading literature and Conservancy experiences.
Equitable Benefits, Impacts, and Inclusion
International Institute for Environment and Development’s Participatory Learning and Action manual on Biodiversity and culture: Exploring community protocols, rights and consent. See especially section 16, pages 179-183, for an article on “Understanding and facilitating a biocultural community protocol process” by Holly Shrumm and Harry Jonas. In addition to the three phases for gender integration in conservation, conservation staff should be aware of the prevalence of gender-based violence around the world, and informed on how to respond, as well as how to take equitable approaches that will not unintentionally create or exacerbate situations of violence. IUCN and the US Department of State have information on What is Gender-Based Violence?, and RAINN provides information on Tips for Talking with Survivors of Sexual Assault. Both resources are also available in Chinese, French, Indonesian, Mongolian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swahili.
As emphasized throughout this document, taking a culturally responsive approach to gender equity integration is paramount, underscoring the importance of a robust, participatory gender analysis. There are other helpful resources on cultural responsiveness in gender equity integration as well, for example the United Nation’s Briefing Notes on Gender and Indigenous Peoples.
Regarding securing gender equity in lands, waters, and natural resources rights specifically: Rights and Resources Initiative’s Gender Justice website includes legislative best practices for securing women’s rights to community lands, outlines factors that contribute to successful strengthening of Indigenous and rural women’s rights to govern community lands, and explains how to use international law to advance women’s tenure rights in REDD+. World Resources Institute provides a case study report on enabling factors for women’s security and collectively held land regulations, available in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Indonesian, and Nepali.
Strong Connection to Knowledge and Place
Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages
An organization that supports speakers who are saving their languages from extinction through activism, education, and technology. Research teams document endangered languages and cultural practices, publish scientific studies, run digital training workshops to empower language activists, and collaborate with communities to create language resources that will serve as a basis for language revitalization.
Guidelines for Considering Traditional Knowledges in Climate Change Initiatives
These guidelines are intended to examine the significance of Traditional Knowledges (TKs) in relation to climate change and the potential risks to Indigenous Peoples in the United States as an example for sharing TKs in federal and other non-Indigenous climate change initiatives. These guidelines should be used to inform the development of specific protocols in direct and close consultation with Indigenous Peoples.
Institute for Integrative Science and Health—Two-Eyed Seeing
This website includes articles, presentations, videos, and examples in understanding and applying Elder Dr. Albert Marshall’s “Two-Eyed Seeing” framework. Two-eyed seeing refers to learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of Western knowledges and ways of knowing…and learning to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all.
Durable Outcomes for People and Nature
Conservation Financing for Conservation Programs with Indigenous People and Local Communities
The overall aim of this study is to explore options for generating sufficient levels of finance over sustained periods of time so that Indigenous Peoples and local communities have the financial capacity to continue to effectively steward their natural resources. The objective is to identify sustainable financing models and examples employed in conservation projects associated with Indigenous and local communities around the world and assess these examples to facilitate replication and adaptation. The study is also intended to share knowledge on successful sustainable financing models among Indigenous Peoples and local communities and provide guidance on the sources of both public and private investment in developing these models.
Additional Key Financing Resources
This folder offers a collection of additional resources to support Indigenous Peoples and local communities conservation financing. This includes training resources as well as libraries of information on financing solutions across a diversity of instrument types, geographies, ecosystems, and sectors. A summary document therein provides an overview of the offered resources.
This resource provides a library of functions for R (a free programming software) users to conduct social network analysis as a means of identifying key network nodes among existing community leaders and critical injection points to promote the persistence and diffusion of conservation programs.
Freshwater Community-Based Conservation
Freshwater Practitioner’s Guide to the VCA Framework
Conserving the biodiversity of the world’s freshwater systems is critically important for people and communities worldwide. Yet the very nature of freshwater resources poses unique challenges to their sustainable management, especially under conditions of stress. The sheer scale, variability, and unpredictability of the resources and those interacting with them is daunting. Adding to this fundamental complexity are such factors as competing resource claims, over-allocation of available resources, political and power dynamics, social and cultural disparities, and economic constraints. This guide aims to advance the understanding of how communities can sustainably manage freshwater resources by applying the VCA Framework. Note, this guide was incorporated in the writing of VCA 2.0 to ensure adequate coverage and inclusion of freshwater contexts and perspectives, and the main concepts are reflected within. Also available in French, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Community-Based Conservation of Freshwater Resourcesn
This systematic review examines peer-reviewed literature to assess the effectiveness of community-based approaches within freshwater-related ecosystems. The review indicates that studies of freshwater community-based conservation are limited in number and representativeness. While positive outcomes for both biodiversity and human well-being are commonly reported, limitations due to study design constrain the ability to infer the significance or causality of these effects. Overall, the analysis indicates that there are several gaps in the available research: across geographic regions, freshwater ecosystem types, intervention types, and environmental and human well-being outcome types. Given the importance of freshwater resources to Indigenous Peoples and local communities, this review highlights the critical need to generate evidence across more diverse contexts to achieve greater clarity on whether and how community-based projects can be most effective.
Power Sector Planning Framework
One of the most significant impacts to freshwater ecosystems and the people who rely on their ecosystem services is the construction of dams. We evaluated opportunities for communities to have a voice in energy sector planning and describe a framework for community participation.
Engaging with Communities on Freshwater Protected area Establishment and Management
This report was developed to review best practices in working with Indigenous Peoples and local communities in establishing and co-managing freshwater protected areas. It includes best practices in identifying and engaging stakeholders; establishing rules, monitoring, enforcement, and conflict resolution; developing leadership structures; and considering elements of water tenure security.
Community-Based Conservation in Water Scarce Areaso
Half of the world’s populations live in places at risk of water shortage. One-third of all rivers, lakes, and aquifers are being heavily exploited, with at least 75 percent of water extracted for human use. Colonization and dispossession of land and water access have disproportionately affected Indigenous Peoples and local communities. In this internal report we explore some of the unique attributes of water scarcity, and dive into five case studies from India, the United States, Peru, and Australia to identify best practices for elevating community voices in water scarcity decision-making and scaling equitable wins for people and nature. We conclude with an analysis of the lessons learned across these cases and key considerations for conservation practitioners.
n. A manuscript was submitted for publication as of January 2022. For latest draft, please reach out to Nathan Karres (nkarres@tnc.org).
o. For access to the full internal report, please reach out to Caitlin Doughty (caitlin.doughty@tnc.org).
