Diagnosing scaling bottlenecks in ten community conservation initiatives in South and East Africa

Scaling area-based conservation, including through initiatives ed or co-managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities, is a flagship goal of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Conservationists often aspire to scale initiatives, but this is rarely achieved in practice. Identifying and addressing “bottlenecks” – factors that limit initiative adoption – could help shape more effective scaling strategies. Therefore, we integrate insights from 84 experts with existing evidence to identify potential risk factors and bottlenecks to scaling ten community area-based initiatives in South and East Africa. The number of reported potential risk factors and bottlenecks varied among initiatives. However, governance and distributional issues – including unfair benefit sharing, unequal decision-making, inflexible rules, and “top-down” leadership – were frequently highlighted as bottlenecks. Furthermore, adopting initiatives often presented costs (e.g., increased local conflict, reduced access to natural resources and cropland) but most experts believed these costs were offset by other benefits and thus did not constitute bottlenecks. While these results do not capture local perspectives, our findings suggest that scaling strategies that strengthen environmental governance may support more socially just and durable approaches to meeting area-based conservation goals.