An overview of international legal and institutional frameworks for promoting community action in conservation

In much of the conservation discourse, the interests of humans and biodiversity are still presented as conflicting, in a relationship where satisfying the needs of one would come to the detriment of the other. This trade-off ideology has been at the basis of the, for instance, fences and fines approaches to conservation, and in the most extreme cases has led to the creation of protected areas by evicting indigenous peoples and local communities, irrespectively of their actual impacts on the local environment. Emerging approaches informed by the notions of community-based conservation and biocultural diversity have advanced alternative (yet age-old) ways of understanding the relationship bet…