Protocolos Comunitarios Bioculturales: Kit de Herramientas para Facilitadores Comunitarios

The document introduces 'biocultural community protocols' as tools for Indigenous and local communities to articulate their customary laws, values, and decision-making processes to external actors. It provides a structured four-part framework for facilitators to guide communities through the process of documentation, implementation, and reflection. The toolkit emphasizes endogenous development, legal empowerment, and participatory methods—such as community mapping, participatory video, and 'Legislative Theatre'—to reduce power asymmetries and safeguard collective biocultural heritage against external threats like land grabbing and industrial resource extraction.

• Biocultural community protocols are tools developed by self-defined communities to communicate their identity, values, and customary laws to external actors, such as government agencies and companies, to ensure respect for their traditional ways of life and territorial administration.
• Communities develop these protocols primarily as a response to external threats driven by global demand for scarce natural resources, which often leads to land acquisition for external benefit and the destruction of ecosystems through industrial production.
• The toolkit identifies several specific external threats to community territories, including clear-cutting, monocultures like soy and palm oil, large-scale aquaculture, mining, and the creation of strictly protected areas such as national parks.
• The process of creating a protocol is based on 'endogenous development,' which is defined as localized change initiated and controlled from within the community, utilizing local resources and retaining benefits locally.
• Legal empowerment is a central strategy to help communities overcome power asymmetries, asserting that formal legal training is not required to interact effectively with the law and that alternative dispute resolution, such as dialogue, is often more aligned with local realities.
• Participatory mapping is used to redefine power dynamics by allowing communities to visualize their territories, cultural heritage, and resource management systems, countering historical trends where maps were used to dispossess them of land.
• The toolkit promotes 'Legislative Theatre' as a method to transform social issues into legal reports that can be presented to parliaments or government officials to drive actual legislative change.
• The guide warns that biocultural protocols are not a panacea and may have limitations, such as potentially reinforcing existing internal power asymmetries (e.g., excluding women and youth) or attracting external interest to lucrative resources if sensitive information is documented.
• The toolkit provides a specific framework for measuring community wellbeing through indicators of basic needs (food, health, housing, energy), security (tenure), belonging (gender equality), and self-esteem (autonomy).

APA

Natural Justice (n.d.). Protocolos Comunitarios Bioculturales: Kit de Herramientas para Facilitadores Comunitarios. https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/BCP-Toolkit-Espanol-Parte-I.pdf

Chicago

Natural Justice. Protocolos Comunitarios Bioculturales: Kit de Herramientas para Facilitadores Comunitarios. n.d. https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/BCP-Toolkit-Espanol-Parte-I.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Natural Justice |title=Protocolos Comunitarios Bioculturales: Kit de Herramientas para Facilitadores Comunitarios |url=https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/BCP-Toolkit-Espanol-Parte-I.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{naturaljusticendprotocolos, author = {{Natural Justice}}, title = {{Protocolos Comunitarios Bioculturales: Kit de Herramientas para Facilitadores Comunitarios}}, institution = {Natural Justice}, url = {https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/BCP-Toolkit-Espanol-Parte-I.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }