Conservation by Design Was Never Just About the Forest or the species.

I remember the exact meeting where I stopped believing in perfect plans.

We were sitting in a community hall somewhere in the Amazon basin maybe something like 20 years ago; plastic chairs, a fan that wasn't doing much against the heat, a stack of maps we had spent weeks preparing. Beautiful maps, honestly. Deforestation models, priority zones, protected area gaps, all color-coded and defensible. We had the science. We had the funding logic. What we did not have, it turned out, was the room.

An older man in the back,  I won't use his name, but I still hear his voice, waited until I finished my presentation and then asked, quietly … And where in this plan is my son's future?

I didn't have a slide for that.

That question rearranged something in me that has never gone fully back into place. Twenty-five years + into this work, I still think about it more than I think about most of the technical papers I've read or co-authored.

The Methodology I Actually Believe In

On paper, Conservation by Design sounds tidy: a structured, participatory, adaptive approach. You start with questions instead of pre-baked solutions, what is the problem, who is affected, what are the underlying drivers, what does success actually look like to the people who have to live inside it long after we leave. It blends ecological science with social reality and governance. It's a good framework. I've used it, taught it, defended it in front of people who wanted a five-year guarantee that nature doesn't actually offer.

But here's what nobody tells you in the training materials: the framework only works if you've done the harder, less fundable work first, the work of actually sitting with people long enough to be trusted. You cannot co-create a strategy with a community you haven't first co-existed with, even briefly, even imperfectly. I learned that in that community hall, and I have re-learned it, in smaller and larger ways, in several countries in Latin America, where I have been lucky enough to work. Every single time I thought I understood the local reality well enough to skip that part, I was wrong.

Why This Isn't Only About Ecosystems

Here is the part I didn't expect when I was younger and thought I was in the business of saving birds, forests, endangered ecosystems or species: this same discipline is exactly what it takes to lead a team.

I have worked with people across countries, languages, institutional cultures, and,  more than once, real grief, real family emergencies, real burnout that nobody wrote into the workplan. And I noticed, somewhere along the way, that the teams I led well were the ones where I applied the same questions I used in the field. Not … what deliverable do I need from you, but … what is actually going on here, who is affected by this decision, what does a good outcome look like to you. Leadership, like conservation, fails when it starts from a pre-defined solution instead of a real question.

I built training programs. I introduced shared values across offices that had never spoken to each other. I brought accountability into places where accountability had quietly been optional for years. And every one of those efforts worked, when it worked, for the same reason the community-hall lesson worked: because someone was actually listening before deciding.

The Part That Still Costs Something

I won't pretend this is only an inspiring story. Participatory, adaptive, slow-and-honest work is exhausting in a sector built around quarterly reports and donor cycles that want certainty on a timeline. There were years I felt like I was translating constantly,  between funders who wanted a straight line and realities that were never straight, between headquarters and field or country teams, between what a grant proposal promised and what a community actually needed. There were nights I went home unsure whether I had done right by the people I was accountable to, or just done what was fundable.

I think that tension never fully goes away, and I've stopped expecting it to. What changed is how I hold it. I stopped treating the discomfort as a sign I was failing, and started treating it as a sign I was still asking the right questions,  the ones without tidy answers.

What I'd Say to Someone Starting Out

If you're early in this field and you feel that gap,  between the science you were trained in and the human complexity nobody warned you about, I want you to know that gap is not a flaw in you. It's the actual work. The maps and the models are necessary, but they are not the plan. The plan is what happens when you're brave enough to sit in a room, hear a question you don't have a slide for, and let it change what you build next.

Twenty-five years + in, that's still the only methodology I fully trust.