Protocolos Comunitarios Bioculturales: Kit de Herramientas para Facilitadores Comunitarios

The 'Protocolos Comunitarios Bioculturales: Kit de Herramientas para Facilitadores Comunitarios' is a comprehensive guide published by Natural Justice in 2012. It provides a framework and a set of participatory tools to help Indigenous Peoples and local communities document their customary laws, values, and governance systems into 'biocultural community protocols'. These protocols are designed to empower communities to manage their territories, protect their collective biocultural heritage, and negotiate on equal terms with external actors such as governments, corporations, and NGOs.

• Biocultural community protocols are participatory instruments developed by self-defined communities to communicate their identity, customary laws, and priorities to external actors, ensuring that traditional ways of life and territorial administration are respected.
• Communities develop these protocols primarily as a response to external threats driven by global demand for natural resources, which often leads to land acquisition, biodiversity loss, and the 'legal fragmentation' of community life by state laws.
• The guide identifies two primary motivations for creating protocols: proactive/aspirational, where communities invite constructive collaboration and benefit-sharing, and defensive, where they seek to stop harmful activities or demand reparations.
• The toolkit emphasizes 'endogenous development,' defined as localized change initiated and controlled from within the community, utilizing local resources and retaining benefits locally to maintain cultural and spiritual wellbeing.
• Legal empowerment is a core component of the process, aiming to break the monopoly of legal professionals and enable communities to use national and international frameworks—such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—to defend their territories.
• The guide provides specific tools for mapping community foundations, including 'Community Institution Maps' to visualize decision-making and 'Community Decision-Making Calendars' to track seasonal governance cycles.
• To address power imbalances, the toolkit suggests 'Multi-Stakeholder Partnership' tools, such as 'Forum Theatre' and 'Image Theatre,' which allow communities to experiment with different social responses to conflict and power dynamics.
• The process of 'Free, Prior and Informed Consent' (FPIC) is presented not as a single event but as a continuous process where communities have the right to seek more information, say no, or withdraw from negotiations at any stage.
• The guide warns of potential limitations, including the risk of 'elite capture' where a small influential group dominates the process, or the danger that documenting sensitive information might attract unwanted external interest in lucrative resources.
• Monitoring and evaluation are framed as a process of 'intrinsic' and 'extrinsic' analysis, using tools like 'Most Significant Change' stories to capture qualitative shifts in community wellbeing and relationships with external actors.

APA

Shrumm, H., & Jonas, H. (2012). Protocolos Comunitarios Bioculturales: Kit de Herramientas para Facilitadores Comunitarios. Natural Justice. https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/BCP-Toolkit-Espanol.pdf

Chicago

Shrumm, Holly, and Harry Jonas. Protocolos Comunitarios Bioculturales: Kit de Herramientas para Facilitadores Comunitarios. Natural Justice, 2012. https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/BCP-Toolkit-Espanol.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Shrumm |first1=Holly |last2=Jonas |first2=Harry |title=Protocolos Comunitarios Bioculturales: Kit de Herramientas para Facilitadores Comunitarios |publisher=Natural Justice |date=2012 |url=https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/BCP-Toolkit-Espanol.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{shrumm2012protocolos, author = {Shrumm, Holly and Jonas, Harry}, title = {{Protocolos Comunitarios Bioculturales: Kit de Herramientas para Facilitadores Comunitarios}}, institution = {Natural Justice}, year = {2012}, url = {https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/BCP-Toolkit-Espanol.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }