Biocultural Community Protocols: A Toolkit for Community Facilitators

The "Biocultural Community Protocols: A Toolkit for Community Facilitators" is a guide published by Natural Justice to help Indigenous peoples and local communities document their customary laws, values, and decision-making processes. These protocols serve as instruments to manage interactions with external actors—such as governments, researchers, and companies—ensuring that community rights and stewardship of their territories are respected. The toolkit provides a comprehensive framework for facilitators to lead communities through the process of endogenous development, legal empowerment, and strategic advocacy.

• Biocultural community protocols are instruments developed by self-defined communities to communicate their identity, customary laws, and procedures for engagement to external actors. They are intended to promote recognition of community-specific stewardship of territories and are based on customary, national, and international laws.
• 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 ways of life.
• Protocols can be used both proactively to invite constructive collaboration and benefit-sharing, and defensively to demand that external actors cease harmful activities or seek redress for past injustices.
• The toolkit emphasizes an 'endogenous development' approach, where change is initiated and controlled from within the community, utilizing local resources and assets to improve material, social, cultural, and spiritual wellbeing.
• Legal empowerment is a core component of the process, aiming to break the monopoly of trained professionals over the law and using tools like 'Legislative Theatre' to influence national or regional policy changes.
• The toolkit provides specific participatory tools for documentation and analysis, including community biodiversity registers, historical timelines, trend line analysis, and participatory resource mapping using GPS and GIS technology.
• To ensure legitimacy and prevent 'elite capture,' the protocol process must be inclusive, specifically accommodating the unique constraints of under-represented groups such as women, youth, elders, and people with disabilities.
• The toolkit warns that protocols are not a panacea and may have limitations, such as the risk of entrenching existing power asymmetries, causing internal conflict if rushed, or exposing sensitive information to external exploitation.

APA

Natural Justice (n.d.). Biocultural Community Protocols: A Toolkit for Community Facilitators. https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/BCP-Toolkit-Part-I.pdf

Chicago

Natural Justice. Biocultural Community Protocols: A Toolkit for Community Facilitators. n.d. https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/BCP-Toolkit-Part-I.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Natural Justice |title=Biocultural Community Protocols: A Toolkit for Community Facilitators |url=https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/BCP-Toolkit-Part-I.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{naturaljusticendbiocultural, author = {{Natural Justice}}, title = {{Biocultural Community Protocols: A Toolkit for Community Facilitators}}, institution = {Natural Justice}, url = {https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/BCP-Toolkit-Part-I.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }