Bringing in multiple perspectives, especially those that usually remain invisible, is a universal challenge to policy processes today. India undertook an ambitious participatory process to prepare a National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) under the requirements of the Convention on Biological Diversity – with the extra challenge of integrating opinions over a vast national scale.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) commit the international community to an expanded vision of poverty reduction and pro-poor growth, one that vigorously places human development at the centre of social and economic progress in all countries.

Biodiversity is managed and valued locally but also provides value globally, attracting many interest groups. Formal biodiversity assessments have tended to emphasise global values. But this focus is being replaced by awareness that pluralist, adaptive management of biological resources needs biodiversity assessments able to express and communicate multiple values of biodiversity. This review looks at some of the assessment tools on offer, and some examples of actual practice, to identify how biodiversity assessments do - and how they could - integrate the different values that people attach to biological variety and variability.

This book attempts to explore different natural resource sectors and to identify possibilities for mainstreaming the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity into these sectors but without compromising livelihoods in the process. ~It advocates leveraging incremental change within the existing natural resource sectors through research, policy change, development and demonstration of alternative approaches. There are six chapters that discuss these issues in the forestry, agricultural, livestock and fisheries sectors and within rangelands. A discussion on insect diversity and livelihoods also constitutes a separate chapter. The whole book is framed by an introduction and macro-economic perspective on how to start to resolve the conflicts between conservation and development.

The process to develop the Philippines' regulation on access to genetic resources - Executive Order No. 247 - involves consulations with a range of stakeholders in the capital region. This report traces the steps in the process, examines its strengths and weaknesses drawing on the views of different actors involved, and identifies conclusions and recommendations for securing participation in the development of access and benefit-sharing policy. It also highlights priorities for strengthening the implementation of E.O. No. 247.

This publication is an attempt to extract and synthesize some of the key issues surrounding ICDPs, their design and implementation, from existing literature. First introduced in the mid-1980s by the World Wide Fund for Nature, Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) are most often defined as biodiversity conservation projects with rural development components. Initially viewed as a ‘radical divergence’ from strict preservationist approaches to wildlife and protected areas management, ICDPs have tried to become more in tune with sustainable rural development needs. Nowadays, many ICDPs are mainly distinguishable by their location - usually near a protected area or sensitive or threatened ecosystem. Over the years, however, the ICDP concept has faced many difficult challenges.

In the first phase IIED’s Evaluating Eden initiative, desk-based reviews of the status of CWM were commissioned in eight regions: West Africa, Central Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, South Asia, South East Asia, Central America and South America. In addition two country reviews were carried out in Australia and Canada, providing an additional and valuable perspective to the project. The regional teams then went on to explore some of the issues raised in these reviews in a series of case studies based on original fieldwork. Some of the case studies are included in the various regional reports that have been published in this series. Others have been published as discussion papers by IIED or research partners. More remain unpublished and available only as “grey” literature. The purpose of this volume is to provide the reader with detailed summaries of all the Evaluating Eden case studies and to point them in the direction of further information.