Biocultural Community Protocols: A Toolkit for Community Facilitators

The document is a practical guide for creating biocultural community protocols—instruments that document a community's customary laws, values, and decision-making processes to manage interactions with external actors. It emphasizes an endogenous development approach, where change is initiated and controlled from within the community. The toolkit provides a wide array of participatory tools for mapping resources, analyzing power dynamics, and engaging in legal advocacy. It outlines a four-part process: understanding the community and facilitator's role, documenting the community's foundations, implementing the protocol through engagement and negotiation, and continuously reflecting on and revising the instrument.

• Biocultural community protocols are used by Indigenous peoples and local communities to ensure that external actors, such as government agencies and companies, respect their "customary laws, values, and decision-making processes," particularly regarding the stewardship of their territories.
• Communities develop these protocols primarily as a response to external threats driven by global demand for scarce natural resources, which often leads to "land and resource acquisition for external gains."
• The toolkit advocates for 'endogenous development,' defined as localized change that is "initiated, determined, and controlled from within communities," utilizing local assets and retaining benefits locally.
• A core component of the protocol process is legal empowerment, which aims to break the tradition of communities being "‘spoken at’ or ‘spoken for’" by helping them use legal tools to address power asymmetries.
• The document identifies several specific tools for resource mapping, ranging from simple "sketch maps" to more technical "Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)" to define customary territories and boundaries.
• To address power imbalances in multi-stakeholder partnerships, the toolkit suggests participatory theatre tools, such as "Forum Theatre" and "Image Theatre," to explore interpersonal dynamics and social change.
• The toolkit emphasizes the importance of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), stating that it is a process where the community has the right to "seek more information, say “no”, or withdraw entirely" at any stage of negotiation.
• The document warns that biocultural community protocols are not a "panacea" and may have limitations, such as the risk that the process could be "overly influenced by certain parties" or further entrench existing power asymmetries, such as the exclusion of women and youth.
• The toolkit provides a framework for monitoring and evaluation, distinguishing between 'monitoring' as a "continuous process of self-assessment" and 'evaluation' as a periodic assessment of outcomes and impacts.
• The document highlights the use of "Most Significant Change" stories as a qualitative tool to understand community wellbeing and perceptions of development that quantitative indicators cannot capture.

APA

Shrumm, H., & Jonas, H. (2012). Biocultural Community Protocols: A Toolkit for Community Facilitators. Natural Justice. https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Biocultural-Community-Protocols-Toolkit.pdf

Chicago

Shrumm, Holly, and Harry Jonas. Biocultural Community Protocols: A Toolkit for Community Facilitators. Natural Justice, 2012. https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Biocultural-Community-Protocols-Toolkit.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Shrumm |first1=Holly |last2=Jonas |first2=Harry |title=Biocultural Community Protocols: A Toolkit for Community Facilitators |publisher=Natural Justice |date=2012 |url=https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Biocultural-Community-Protocols-Toolkit.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{shrumm2012biocultural, author = {Shrumm, Holly and Jonas, Harry}, title = {{Biocultural Community Protocols: A Toolkit for Community Facilitators}}, institution = {Natural Justice}, year = {2012}, url = {https://naturaljustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Biocultural-Community-Protocols-Toolkit.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }