EcoStrategist

If a development project arrives with the best of intentions but the wrong assumptions, it can still cause harm. That risk is especially high when “gender solutions” are copied from Western contexts and dropped into Indigenous or other local communities without real partnership. This post lays out why culture and lived realities matter, what international law already requires, what the evidence shows when we ignore that, and how to design projects that are both gender-responsive and community-led. Why culture and lived realities matter for “gender work” “Gender” isn’t a single, universal experience; it’s shaped by race, class, language, age, disability, land ties, and more. Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) named this the problem of intersectionality: people sit at the intersection of multiple power structures, so one-size-fits-all gender fixes often fail, or even reproduce inequality. UN Women (2022) operationalizes this by urging intersectional gender analysis across the full pr...

We hear “resilience” everywhere, calls to build resilient cities, resilient supply chains, resilient people. Yet for many local communities the word can feel like a polite way of saying “brace for impact.” If resilience is reduced to bouncing back to the way things were, it risks becoming a mandate to absorb shocks without changing the conditions that made people vulnerable in the first place. In practice, resilience worth having is less about elasticity and more about agency: the power of communities to decide what to protect, what to let go of, and when to transform rather than “return to normal.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change frames climate-resilient development as an integration of adaptation and mitigation with equity and justice, while recognizing Indigenous and local knowledge as essential to doing it well (IPCC, 2022). That is a profound shift from technocratic “fixes” toward democratic problem-solving. A second shift is overdue: from projectizing resilience t...

 Viajar a Costa Rica con mis hijos fue mucho más que unas vacaciones; fue una lección viviente sobre lo que significa convivir en armonía con la naturaleza, sobre cómo un país entero puede construir su identidad a partir del respeto profundo por la vida. Desde que aterrizamos, sentí que estábamos entrando en otro ritmo, uno más pausado, más atento. La primera vez que escuchamos un “pura vida” en la calle sonreímos, sin saber que esa expresión se volvería el hilo conductor de toda nuestra experiencia. Lo decía el chofer del bus, lo decía la señora del puesto de frutas, lo decía el guía en medio del bosque, y lo decíamos nosotros, cada vez con más intención. “Pura vida” no era un cliché. Era una forma de mirar el mundo. Costa Rica se siente como un país que decidió hace tiempo tomarse en serio el futuro. Más de veinte años atrás, mientras otros seguían apostando por la explotación de sus recursos sin medida, aquí se gestaba un movimiento social silencioso pero decidido: proteger los ...

Surviving Together in a Time of Crisis We are living through the sixth mass extinction. Species are vanishing 100 to 1,000 times faster than natural rates. But throughout history, humanity has thrived not by acting alone, but by cooperating. From hunting in groups to building cities, our survival has always depended on collective effort. Today, the environmental crisis demands that same instinct. Countless NGOs work tirelessly to protect ecosystems, but isolated efforts, no matter how passionate, can’t match the scale or urgency of what we face. Saving biodiversity requires not just more action, but smarter, collective action. Collaboration among NGOs goes far beyond joint statements or shared events. True networked work means: Building common goals across organizations. Coordinating strategies across regions and sectors. Sharing resources, knowledge, and influence. Speaking to policymakers and funders with a unified voice. This approach transforms conservation work. Instead of duplica...

After fifteen + years working in conservation, from village meetings in rural Ecuador to boardrooms in Cambridge, I've learned something that no university course ever taught me: the most powerful weapon against biodiversity loss isn't a spreadsheet. It's a story. Let me start with a confession. When I first joined Rare, fresh-faced and armed with a degree in environmental science and an MsC, I thought conservation was about presenting irrefutable facts. Show people the data on deforestation rates, explain the carbon cycle, present the economic case for ecosystem services—surely that would be enough to change hearts and minds? I was spectacularly wrong. My first real lesson came during a community meeting with coffee farmers in the Peruvian Andes. I'd prepared what I thought was a compelling presentation about watershed protection, complete with graphs showing erosion rates and water quality metrics. Fifteen minutes in, I could see eyes glazing over. An elderly farm...

  Working at Rare taught me a humbling lesson that fundamentally changed how I think about environmental conservation: knowledge doesn't equal behavior change. It's a lesson that every environmentalist, policymaker, and concerned citizen needs to understand if we're serious about addressing biodiversity loss and climate change. The Knowledge Trap For years, I believed in what I now recognize as the "information deficit model" – the assumption that if people just knew the facts about environmental destruction, they would naturally change their behavior. Climate change is real, biodiversity is collapsing, plastic is choking our oceans – surely these facts would motivate action? Yet time and again, I witnessed the opposite. People who could eloquently describe the impacts of deforestation continued to buy products that drove it. Individuals deeply concerned about marine life still used single-use plastics. Even those working in conservation sometimes struggled ...