Biodiversity secures long term flows of benefits from nature by providing resilience to
disturbance and environmental change. Nevertheless, climate change, fragmentation and
habitat destruction among other anthropogenic drivers, are inadvertently, causing
continued decline of global biodiversity, at a rate that is 100-1000 times more than what
can be considered as natural, sending it virtually to the brink. Protected Areas (PAs)
remain the core strategy for biodiversity conservation, but they have been challenged for
“denying” local communities, the flow of their bona fide benefits and contributing to
rural poverty, and compromising conservation as a result. Community Based Natural
Resources Governance (CBNRG) responds to the challenge, but the challenge is
exacerbated by the fact that a broad array of desired outcomes as well as a large range of
unlinked and uncoordinated nodes of governance (actors) across multiple scales are
involved in governance within the same social-ecological system. These result in failure
to achieve desired conservation and development related outcomes.