TOOLS
Over the last decade, we have worked together with our local collaborators to create and refine a series of capacity-building modules that guide stakeholders as they develop and implement quality of life plans. We hope that these materials will be useful to a broad range of organizations working with communities to improve quality of life and conserve the environment.
This guide has been developed for technicians and/or facilitators of organizations that work with native and rural communities and for members of native or rural communities where quality of life plans are developed.
This document establishes guidelines for using planning instuments such as Regional Development Plans, Master Plans for Protected Areas and Life Plans for Native Communities together.
This tool aims to promote in a participatory and reflective way the good management of enterprises derived from the use of natural resources and ancestral knowledge with emphasis on social and environmental responsibility.
Publications
“A new approach to conservation: using community empowerment for sustainable well-being,” published in Ecology and Society, takes stock of The Field Museum’s long-standing work with indigenous and campesino communities in the Peruvian Amazon to unpack how emphasizing communities’ assets, rather than their deficits, has strengthened conservation.
In Environment and Society, the authors unpack the so-called “biocultural” approaches in an article entitled “Culturally Grounded Indicators of Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems.” Effective, culturally grounded measurement systems are key to supporting adaptive management and resilience in the face of environmental, social, and economic change. The paper reviews seven case studies and one framework regarding the development of culturally grounded indicator sets, and propose new indicators to take stock of how well these approaches are performing relative to conventional conservation initiatives.
More than 30 co-authors—scientists, policy-makers and on-the-ground practitioners—published "Biocultural approaches to well-being and sustainability indicators across scales" in Nature/Ecology and Evolution which suggests alternative and complementary approaches that use indicators grounded in the values of a particular community.