Biocultural Community Protocols: A Toolkit for Community Facilitators

Biocultural Community Protocols: A Toolkit for Community Facilitators is a comprehensive guide published by Natural Justice in 2012. It provides Indigenous peoples and local communities with a framework to document their customary laws, values, and decision-making processes into 'biocultural community protocols'. These instruments are designed to help communities secure their rights and territories, manage interactions with external actors (such as governments, researchers, and companies), and advocate for the stewardship of their collective biocultural heritage.

• Biocultural community protocols are instruments developed by self-defined communities to ensure external actors 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 identifies a conflict between the "legal fragmentation" of government laws, which compartmentalize the environment, and the community view of territories as "integrated systems".
• Protocols can be used proactively to invite external actors to contribute to community plans or defensively to "call on external actors to cease harmful activities".
• The process of creating a protocol is rooted in 'endogenous development', defined as localized change that is "initiated, determined, and controlled from within communities".
• The toolkit emphasizes the importance of including under-represented groups, such as women, youth, and the elderly, to prevent "elite capture", where a small influential group protects their own interests.
• Legal empowerment is a core component of the toolkit, based on the principle that "law should not remain a monopoly of trained professionals".
• Participatory resource mapping is used to redress power imbalances, allowing communities to visualize their territories and "safeguarding locations of cultural and sacred sites".
• The toolkit provides a 'Community Wellbeing Impact Assessment Worksheet' to evaluate how proposed activities affect material, social, cultural, and spiritual wellbeing.
• Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) is described as a continuous process rather than a one-off event, where the community has the right to "say “no”, or withdraw entirely" at any stage.
• The toolkit suggests using 'Legislative Theatre' to translate community-identified issues into legal reports for presentation to parliaments or decision-makers.
• Monitoring and evaluation are used to track progress and assess the impact of the protocol, utilizing both quantitative data and qualitative "Most Significant Change" stories.

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} }