LAUSR

The COVID-19 global pandemic highlights the need for integrated far-sighted solutions to biodiversity loss, planetary health, rural poverty, and restoring the integrity of social-ecological systems. Cross-scale community-based conservation (CBC) offers opportunities in producing positive outcomes across multiple sectors (Otto et al., 2013). Therefore, CBC represents a potential solution to mitigate the negative effects of COVID-19. Besides the clear impacts on human health, Oldekop et al. (2020) also highlighted the effects of the pandemic on global supply chain collapse and growing debt across multiple scales. These negative impacts are compounded in poor communities, and it is clear the marginalized will bear the brunt of these costs (Bennett, 2016). Holistic community-based conservation has the potential to both lessen the current impacts of COVID-19 while also creating community resiliency to social, economic, and public health shocks. Finally, fully participatory CBC potentially offers a preventative solution, as it is ultimately position to create healthy sustainable relationships between society and nature conservation. However, CBC is often controversial among many conservationists due to the conflict of attempting to produce both development and conservation outcomes, two areas that are often in opposition with one another (Berkes, 2004). Indeed, there are important lessons to be taken from early Integrated Planning (IRD) and Integrated Conservation Development Programs (ICDPs). These approaches ambitiously attempted to produce many outcomes across multiple sectors, placed a heavy dependence on outside expertise that undercut local involvement and knowledge, and paid little attention to local governance structures to create ownership for sustained change (Brown, 2002; Lewis & Carter, 1993). These early initiatives often ended up accomplishing nothing. CBC in itself is a reaction to decades of exclusionary conservation where humans and the environment were thought to exist separately and management was based upon linear cause-effect thinking (Berkes, 2004; Ghimire & Pimbert, 1997). The problem was most acute where national policies led to management systems that displaced communities or deprived local resource users of their rights to their own lands. The complexity of socialecological systems further underlines the importance of decentralized place-based management (Kates et al., 2001) of natural resources as top-down ‘expert-based’ models are ill-suited and create mismatches in scale (Folke et al., 2002). CBC, in its beginnings, was often delivered via two major approaches in response centerdriven conservation (Otto et al., 2013). First, it was an attempt to reverse top-down conservation by shifting the focus to those who bear the ’costs’ of conservation. This was particularly associated with the ‘protected area movement’ where early CBC attempts (e.g. ICDPs) attempted to provide development benefits or incentives for communities with limited or no access to a now ‘protected’ ecosystem. Second, CBC was associated with complete devolution of rights over a resource to a local community. While there were successes and failures across both methodologies, the discussion was unnecessarily dragged into a ‘bottom-up’ vs ‘top-down’ debate. During this period, valuable time was lost to improve and advance conservation efforts. I argue that the focus of the discussion should had been placed upon identifying what conditions, strategies, and underlying factors created positive outcomes to improve future iterations of CBC models. Future advancements should recognize CBC as a way to influence policies and work in tandem, not against, top-down approaches. In recent years those who still hold true to CBC have moved beyond simplistic cause-effect or ‘win-win’