EcoStrategist

 In conservation, success isn’t just about what you protect, it’s about how you go about it. Over the past few years, the term Conservation Design has gained traction among ecologists, landscape planners, NGOs, and community leaders alike. But what exactly does it mean? Why does it matter? And how do you actually do it? This post unpacks the when, why, how, and what of Conservation Design, and more importantly, it dives into why understanding the problem, co-designing with stakeholders, and building local capacity are not just good ideas, they're essential.   What Is Conservation Design? Conservation Design is a structured, participatory, and adaptive approach to developing conservation strategies. It blends ecological science with social realities and governance structures to create interventions that are not only effective but also legitimate and sustainable. Rather than starting with pre-defined solutions, it begins with asking questions: What is the problem? W...

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...