Ensuring participation with local communities

Enabling local group participation

Description

Ensuring participation with local communities involves actively engaging community members in decision-making, planning, and implementation of initiatives that affect them. This strategy addresses issues of exclusion, lack of local ownership, and ineffective solutions by fostering collaboration, transparency, and mutual trust. Practical actions include facilitating inclusive forums, supporting local leadership, and integrating community knowledge, thereby enhancing relevance, sustainability, and acceptance of interventions while remedying top-down approaches that often overlook local needs and priorities.

Implementation

This strategy features in the framework of Agenda 21 as formulated at UNCED (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), now coordinated by the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and implemented through national and local authorities.

Agenda 21 recommends that, subject to national legislation, action should be taken to: respect, record, protect and promote wider application of the knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities which embody traditional lifestyles for the conservation of biological diversity and the sustainable use of biological resources, with a view to the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising; promote mechanisms to involve those communities, including women, in the conservation and management of ecosystems.