From Community Engagement to Community-Led Conservation

At Chemonics and the Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association's Communities in Conservation Summit, frontline environmental stewards, policymakers and experts came together to rethink the role communities play in protecting wildlife.
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Preventing Culture from Eating Your Strategy

Cultural norms can thwart the most technically sound development strategies. How can the cultural consensus model, developed by anthropologists, help to ensure that culture strengthens rather than weakens a strategy's effectiveness?
Blog Post

How to Fail to Succeed

How can we improve development efforts in environmental and natural resources and other sectors by more intentionally sharing and learning from our failures? Michael Brown explores the importance of creating a culture of reflecting on failures to address urgent conservation needs.
Blog Post

Measuring Community Norms Around Women’s Empowerment in the West Bank: Opportunities and Challenges of a Novel Approach Using Cultural Consensus

Understanding cultural norms is essential to achieving development results but can sometimes be difficult. The authors of this paper tested a novel method to monitor and evaluate a USAID justice project in the West Bank, Palestine.
Resource - Paper

In Search of Common Ground: Applying Shared Lessons from Countering Violent Extremism and Preventing Gang Violence

This paper discusses the various ways to mitigate the drivers of group violence by the international development community by putting forth five principles to design and implement programs aimed at countering and preventing violent extremism and enabling stable environments for improved development.
Resource - Paper

Community Engagement in Biodiversity Conservation: Lessons from the Field-Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda

This paper examines how conservation practitioners can learn from the effort to question the utility of community engagement, adapt lessons to bridge conservation and development more effectively, and apply the limited funds available to conservation to accomplish more on the ground.
Resource - Paper

Evidence on Biodiversity Conservation Impacts: Assessing Theories, Approaches, and Outcomes from Community Engagement and Tenure

This paper uses systematic synthesis methods to assess the state of the peer-reviewed evidence base on community engagement interventions linked to terrestrial conservation projects. Specifically, it examines the relationships between different engagement approaches and land tenure/governance structures.
Resource - Paper

Beyond a Buzzword: What Thinking and Working Politically Looks Like in Practice

What does TWP look like in program implementation? In this blog post, Sharon Van Pelt, Elizabeth Sanchez, and Santiago Villaveces-Izquierdo delve into the importance of regularly using TWP-PEA to pause and reflect.
Blog Post