What a “Whole-of-Society” Approach to Conservation Actually Requires
At COP16 in Cali, Colombia, “whole-of-society” was everywhere. Panel after panel, declaration after declaration, the message rang out: conservation cannot succeed without the participation of all of society — governments, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, NGOs, industry, and the public. And the message was right. We agree completely.
But something important was missing from the conversation. Amid the enthusiasm, very few people were talking about how to actually do it.
The phrase “whole-of-society approach” has become one of the most repeated — and least operationalized — concepts in conservation today. It earns applause at conferences, makes its way into strategic frameworks, and looks excellent in funding proposals. But when you press the people using it to describe what it looks like in practice, the answers get vague fast.
That’s the gap we want to address in this post, because at Global Conservation Solutions, translating this concept from aspiration into action is exactly what we do every day.
It’s Not a Philosophy — It’s a Process
A whole-of-society approach to conservation is not a philosophy to champion. It’s a structured, resource-intensive, and often uncomfortable process that most organizations have never attempted and most funders have never invested in.
It doesn’t begin with a consultant drafting a plan and circulating it for comments. It begins with getting the right people into the room.
Conservation is context-specific. Whether the goal is recovering an endangered species, protecting a seascape, or managing a country’s forests sustainably, the starting point is the same: mapping out who needs to be at the table. Stakeholders. Indigenous rights holders. Local communities. Government agencies at every level. NGOs. In some cases, industry.
And these groups don’t just need a seat — they need to be genuine participants in a systematic planning process from the beginning, co-developing the plan itself rather than reviewing someone else’s draft.
This is where things get hard, and where most well-intentioned efforts fall apart.
Why You Can’t Facilitate This Yourself
When the organization leading a conservation initiative also tries to facilitate the planning process, it rarely works — no matter how good the intentions.
When one organization holds both the agenda and the pen, power dynamics take over. Certain voices dominate. Others disengage. Mistrust builds. And whatever plan emerges, the people responsible for implementing it don’t feel ownership over it. They see it as someone else’s plan, handed to them. That is the fastest way for any plan to die on arrival.
A neutral, third-party facilitator changes the entire dynamic. Their role isn’t to drive the outcome. It’s to foster genuine dialogue, ensure every participant has an equal voice, and guide the group through a structured, step-by-step adaptive management planning process — rather than trying to build the plane while flying it.
This isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the linchpin that determines whether a plan transitions from paper into meaningful outcomes for nature. When people see their values, their knowledge, and their priorities embedded in the final product, they implement it. When they don’t, they walk away.
This is a lesson we’ve learned through years of facilitating exactly these kinds of processes — and it’s at the heart of everything we do at GCS.
What This Looks Like When It Works
A Conservation Plan for the Inner Bay of Fundy
The Inner Bay of Fundy is a nationally significant seascape, and developing a conservation plan for it meant bringing together a broad and diverse coalition. Over 200 people from more than 40 organizations have participated in this planning process, which GCS facilitated using a structured adaptive management framework.
Together, the group collectively developed a shared understanding of the current reality, defined clear outcomes for what success looks like for the biodiversity and biocultural values within the geography, built a prioritized roadmap of strategies and actions to achieve those outcomes, and designed a monitoring plan to test whether each strategy is actually working.
This wasn’t a weekend workshop. It was a foundational, multi-year planning process designed to generate collective ownership and evidence-based decision-making.
A National Adaptive Management Plan for Canada’s Forestry Sector
At a larger scale, GCS recently facilitated an adaptive management planning process for Canada’s entire forestry sector. Canada is the second most forested country on Earth, and this plan may be the largest adaptive management plan, by geographic scope, ever conducted.
The process brought together multiple federal government departments, provincial governments, Indigenous organizations, nonprofit organizations, and forest industry representatives. When it began, significant mistrust already existed between many of these groups — much of it justified. Environmental non-profits and industry. Indigenous organizations and government. The history was complicated, the tensions were real, and candidly, very few people believed the process would reach the finish line.
But it did.
Because the process was facilitated by a neutral third party using a structured methodology, every participant had an equal seat at the table. Over time, despite deep disagreements on many issues, people began to trust the process — and each other. They found shared values. They aligned on clearly stated measures of success. And they completed a national-scale adaptive management plan that is now heading to public review.
That outcome wasn’t inevitable. It was the result of a deliberate process designed to make it possible.
The Three Ingredients That Make It Work
These kinds of outcomes don’t happen by accident. They happen when the process itself is designed with the same rigor we expect from the science. A genuine whole-of-society approach requires three things:
1. A structured, adaptive management planning methodology. One that defines success in measurable terms, designs strategies to achieve it, and monitors whether those strategies are working so they can be adapted over time. Not a static document that becomes obsolete within months. This is the foundation of GCS’s conservation coaching practice.
2. Neutral, third-party facilitation. Facilitation that ensures equitable participation, manages power dynamics, fosters trust, and keeps the process on track. Without this, plans reflect whoever has the loudest voice — not the best path forward.
3. Funding designed to support the process itself. Funders need to recognize that facilitation, participatory planning, and adaptive management are not overhead costs. They are the foundation upon which every successful conservation outcome is built. Until funders invest in the process — not just the project — the conservation sector will keep producing plans that nobody implements, or worse, plans that are implemented poorly, wasting precious time and resources.
Moving From Aspiration to Discipline
If you champion a whole-of-society approach to conservation but aren’t investing in the structured, facilitated, adaptive planning processes that make it real, then it remains rhetoric.
The conservation sector doesn’t need more buzzwords. It needs more completed plans built by the people responsible for implementing them, monitored against clear outcomes, and adapted when the evidence says they’re not working.
That’s what a whole-of-society approach actually looks like. And it’s achievable — but only if we stop treating it as an aspiration and start treating it as a discipline.
Global Conservation Solutions helps teams design and implement collaborative conservation and strategic plans through neutral facilitation, conservation coaching, and adaptive management. If your organization is ready to move beyond aspiration, get in touch to learn how we can help.