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.

This paper was the result of Chemonics’ collaboration with the Conservation Solutions Lab (CSL) at Arizona State University to ask a very basic and important question: Do we have any evidence to show that this approach is achieving the results we seek? At the request of Chemonics and CSL, the authors traveled to three East African countries — Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda — to meet with practitioners from each sector of the ICDP process. This represented an effort on 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.