About this Research Topic

Background

People’s participation and support for natural resource conservation have increasingly emerged as essential ingredients all over the world. These processes have evolved towards wider concepts encompassing collaborative design, planning and production, co-management and co-governance, active campaigning and citizen-science. People's engagement is emphasized in relation to local and traditional knowledge integration, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of interventions, conflict resolution, equity in distribution of benefits, long term sustainability, communities empowerment, as well as contribution in decision-making processes, public opinion and political support.

However, participation itself does not guarantee success in preventing biodiversity loss and habitat fragmentation nor in balancing nature conservation with human well-being. Many factors have proven to affect the level of people’s participation and support, and therefore their effectiveness. For example, involvement of relevant stakeholders; inclusiveness of institutional and legal frameworks; cultural and historical components; social-environmental awareness; involvement in management mechanisms for benefits sharing and governance; efficiency of conflict-resolution strategies; and proper communication and dissemination. Credibility and legitimacy of conservation outcomes from participatory approaches is sometimes debated while uptake by decision-makers remains low.

In this Research topic we aim to take stock from and critically analyze the wealth of knowledge on people's engagement in nature conservation, and to investigate the role that local as well as international communities have played at various extent for the success or failure of conservation endeavors. This includes identifying gaps and challenges, setting targets and designing interventions, actively supporting and campaigning, implementing best practices, measuring outcomes and effectiveness, and sharing management and governance techniques. Some of the questions we would like to address are for example:
What value has been added by collaborative design, planning, management or governance in natural resources conservation?
How many community-driven recommendations that could support decision-making are actually taken up by relevant decision-makers?
Which impacts have been generated by people’s participation and support, and what barriers and opportunities were found?
How people’s perceptions and public opinion have shaped conservation advocates' visions and agenda, from local to global scale?
What are strengths and weaknesses of community managed conservation areas and how can this model can be scaled up?
How can local knowledge be integrated into expert-driven modeling of conservation priorities?

In this Research Topic we encourage submissions from all over the world of studies targeting:
1) Critical reflection on people’s participation (wide concept) and support in conservation, strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and challenges. Submitted articles can include reviews as well as lesson-learned from specific case studies.
2) Impacts assessment of participatory processes in conservation. Submitted articles can include case studies on participatory approaches and tools , e.g. scenario planning, management effectiveness and governance assessment, ecosystem services evaluation, citizen-science based data collection. We encourage to focus on actual impacts on decisions and/or interventions outcomes, and taken up by policy and practice.
3) Analysis of how people’s participation and support has shaped visions and agenda of the natural resources conservation policy frameworks, from global to sub-national level.
4) Comparative analyses of participatory approaches versus desktop-based or model-driven approaches for planning and forecasting in conservation, including, for example, mixed-approaches and counterfactual analyses.

Keywords: co-management, community perception, sustainability, Participation Impacts, Knowledge co-production, collaborative governance

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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