Diagnosing scaling bottlenecks in 10 community conservation initiatives in southern and eastern Africa
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Scaling area-based conservation, including initiatives led or comanaged by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, is a flagship goal of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Conservationists often aspire to scale initiatives, but this is rarely achieved in practice. Identifying and addressing factors that limit initiative adoption (i.e., bottlenecks) could improve scaling strategies. We used insightsfrom 84 expert surveys to identify potential risk factors and bottlenecks to scaling 10 community, area-based initiatives in southern and eastern Africa. The number of reported potential risk factors and bottlenecks varied among initiatives. However, unfair benefit sharing, unequal decision-making, inflexible rules, and top-down leadership were frequently identified as bottlenecks. Although adopting initiatives had costs (e.g., increased local conflicts, reduced local access to natural resources and cropland), most experts believed these costs were offset by other benefits and thus did not constitute bottlenecks. Our results did not capture local perspectives, but they suggest scaling strategies that strengthen environmental governance may support more socially just and durable approaches to meeting area-based conservation goals.
Date Issued
2026-04-01
Date Acceptance
2025-07-10
Citation
Conservation Biology, 2026, 40 (2)
ISSN
0888-8892
Publisher
Wiley
Journal / Book Title
Conservation Biology
Volume
40
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
© 2025 The Author(s). Conservation Biology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for Conservation Biology. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Identifier
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/40937832
Subjects
30 by 30
30 para el 30
OECMs
adopción
adoption
and scaling deep
community‐based conservation
community‐based natural resource management
conservación comunitaria
engagement
escala vertical
escalada de cuellos de botella
gestión comunitaria de los recursos naturales
horizontal y profunda
other effective area‐based conservation measures
otras medidas efectivas de conservación basada en el área
participación
scaling bottlenecks
scaling out
scaling up
Publication Status
Published
Coverage Spatial
United States
Article Number
e70149
Date Publish Online
2025-09-12