Environmental Consulting and Community Planning Services

Our environmental consulting and community planning services are designed to help people work together in a collaborative, positive, engaged manner to achieve measurable, long-term benefits that consider the welfare of people and the earth. We draw on interdisciplinary strategies, clever whole-system design solutions, collaborative community planning, and consensus-based dispute resolution techniques to facilitate participatory ways of working together to create socioeconomic and environmental benefits for everyone.

As advocates for healthy communities, we help people from all backgrounds balance their diverse interests to reach resolutions and solutions that better reflect the interests of the whole community, including those who are traditionally excluded. By forming appropriate community stakeholder groups, we help community leaders and other decision-makers do what they do best—express their unique expertise in a collaborative forum for the benefit of the people they serve. We serve many different groups of people, including local and indigenous communities, governmental agencies, and private and nonprofit organizations. As always, we offer a sliding scale of fees for those who may not have adequate funding and we will gladly trade goods or services with our community members in lieu of money. Additionally, we provide many hours each year of pro bono work for service-based projects that provide environmental, economic, and social benefits to communities.

LEARNING FROM PAST MISTAKES: MOVING TOWARDS A MORE COLLABORATIVE APPROACH TO CREATING HEALTHY COMMUNITIES

Conventional environmental conservation and development organizations such as The United Nations, The Nature Conservancy, The World Wildlife Fund, and other NGOs have been around for decades, and have created hundreds of thousands of conservation and development programs.   Yet, despite the abundance of these well-intentioned programs, they have failed to meet their conservation and development goals and environmental destruction continues at unprecedented rates.

Similarly, more than 100 countries have established environmental conservation or protectionist measures such as national forests and parks, protected reserves, and other designated wilderness areas. It is undeniable that these protections provide the last of our earth’s remaining wild places with some level of protection from the hands of major industries exploiting them for mining, farming, and logging.  However, throughout the world people in charge of managing these protected areas face similar problems such as lack of enforcement measures, lack of necessary funding, and continued resource exploitation practices by corporations, governments, and forest-dependent people living in or near these protected areas.

In the past decade, there has been an abundance of research attempting to explain why these well-intentioned environmental organizations and governmental protection measures fail to meet their goals.  This research has created opportunities for these organizations and governments alike to examine their programs and make the necessary changes, as well as ensure that new projects incorporate this insight into their planning stages.  

Some of the most important lessons this body of research has revealed[2]:

• Conventional environmental and rural development projects have consistently failed because their sponsors have at best only been offering supplemental benefits and have not provided substantial benefits sufficient to win the local people’s cooperation and to outbid or out-compete an array of destructive nature exploitation activities.[3]
• Conservation strategies rarely consider the scale or extent of local participation and the distribution of associated costs and benefits.[4]
• Organizations that operate exclusively on the assumption that human behavior and motivations are utilitarian and self-maximizing in nature fail to recognize that although economic factors play a critical motivating factor, moral and social factors also motivate communities.
• Local people view forests and wildlife as important for a variety of reasons such as utilitarian, ecosystem services, and intrinsic worth.
• Although forest-dependent communities recognize the importance of protecting the environment, when lack of employment or economic factors affect them, people indicate that it is necessary for their survival to cut down trees and continue other environmentally destructive practices.
• Forest-dependent communities abandon environmentally destructive practices when they have access to sufficient economically viable alternatives.
• Income generation alone is not sufficient to encourage conservation; law, tourism, and environmental awareness also contribute to decreases in hunting and deforestation in forest-dependent communities.
• People most often cite the following negative impacts that conventional ecotourist, conservation, and rural development projects have on their communities:  increased solid waste generation, cultural loss, community and familial disintegration, and increased access to alcohol and drugs.
• People do not think that these types of projects are doing enough to work with community members to provide education and awareness about conservation perspectives and information on forests and wildlife. People want exchange of ideas and more training and feel that this has a great positive influence on their perspectives about conservation.
• It is critical to engage in periodic monitoring of local, ecological conditions by the government, organizations, scientific researchers, and community members. Monitoring programs should include collaborative analyses and feedback into the system to ensure adjustments, positive growth, and project success.

CONSENSUS BUILDING: RESOLUTION, COLLABORATION, AND PLANS FOR ACTION

Consensus Building is a process guided by a neutral third party to help people who agree to work together to resolve common problems and develop and implement their own strategies for group solutions in a relatively informal, cooperative manner.   It is especially useful in bringing representatives from different stakeholder groups together early in a decision-making process so as to produce plans that better reflect all of the parties who will be affected by them. Depending on the needs of each group, these forums or meetings can result in a range of tangible outcomes such as governmental rule proposals, community project plans, and legally-backed contracts. 

Consensus building allows for collaborative negotiation of a range of issues including: community public policy disputes, regulatory or standard-setting determinations, and community planning projects. It encourages increased intergovernmental and interagency cooperation, and develops partnerships in both the public and private sector.  It serves as an alternative to costly and time-consuming litigation, has popularity and legal legitimacy throughout the world (e.g., in the litigation-loving United States, more than 20 states have established laws that provide assistance and funding for these forums as alternatives to having to go to court), and has become increasingly important in negotiating across the international sphere, such as transboundary environmental disputes involving everything from drafting treaties to resolving disputes that concern social rejection of development projects that affect the environment.[5]

CONSENSUS BUILDING FOR ENVIRONMENTAL CONSULTING AND COMMUNITY PLANNING SERVICES

Please contact us if you would like to use a consensus-building forum for your environmental or community planning needs including:

Community Planning Projects:  For any given project, we form a working group that is tailored to the service or solution required, including appropriate stakeholders from the local community and advisors and specialists from the field.   We then guide this working group in a participatory process to determine goals and strategies, set up realistic economic and social benefits, and devise integrated plans to achieve these goals.

Consensus building for community planning projects ensures that the people who will be directly affected by the project and the environments they live in are represented along with those will be responsible for design and implementation. This ensures that a wider variety of opinions are incorporated into the planning stages rather than waiting for conflicts to arise after considerable time, money, and energy has been invested in a project. This also encourages smoother, more successful project implementation because parties will be less likely to impede plans or policies if they believe that their input has truly been included in the outcome. 

Environmental Assessments, Site Analysis, and Land Plans:  Site analysis and land plans are design services help communities collaboratively develop innovative, practical, whole-system designs and integrated solutions to meet the needs of each set of unique project requirements. Through collaborative decision-making, we help individuals and communities analyze and design integrated plans for anything from turning public spaces into community gardens, building or repairing dilapidated infrastructures, and cleaning up waste sites and other places that may have lapsed in terms of meeting pristine environmental requirements before it is too late.

All projects we take on are coordinated with workshops we host, so that we further our commitment to creating opportunities for people who wish to learn from specialists in the fields of permaculture, natural building, renewable energy and waste systems, and wellness and spiritual wellbeing, but who do not traditionally have access to such opportunities. In this way, we can find more ways to help individuals and communities become more of a part of the discovery process to determine the methods and practices that work the best for their unique situations and requirements, while also providing training for those interested in gaining information for microenterprises they are working on starting up.

By coordinating with our workshops we are able to provide environmental assessments, site analysis and land plans, advice on best practices, technological support, and installation of projects that benefit the community.

A collaborative design process provides many creative opportunities to help visualize designs.

Local and National Environmental Policies:  Unsustainable development and misguided environmental policies are just two of the threats that have contributed to rapid social, political, economic, and environmental changes that bring new issues to the table and the need for improved methods for society and authorities to communicate with one another.  Consensus building provides the perfect forum for those working to replace outdated or unsuccessful local and national policies that damage or threaten the environment and those living in it, with those that protect and rejuvenate it.

Like many other developing countries, Belize faces an incredible opportunity and responsibility to take the necessary steps to dramatically improve the quality of life for its poorest communities, benefit its national economy, and protect and strengthen its beautiful natural environment. Unlike countries like Costa Rica which have been exploding with unsustainable commercial development and now must deal with the resulting aftermath, Belize is much less developed and thus poised to make decisions that protect and nurture the beautiful natural resources it houses and the people who live here.

Country-wide transformations are possible when the community itself is a part of the solution. With a population dominated by young people, Belize is ripe with intelligent, passionate community members who want to be more involved in taking action for land conservation and regeneration opportunities.  The older population of Belize holds the wealth of the country’s knowledge, and is our closest link to Belize’s rich cultural history. To create stronger conservation incentives and long-term community benefits, it is critical to include and work with interested, invested community representatives to help determine what socioeconomic and environmental benefits they think would most benefit their community, and in turn collaboratively design solutions that address these needs realistically. 

Belize has the chance to become the first Latin American country to demonstrate the potential for broad change by committing to environmentally responsible growth, where any and all regional development takes into account economic, environmental, and social considerations from the outset, and planning is done in a collaborative manner together with interested local community members, nonprofits and other civil society groups, and local government groups.  Belize has the chance to create an international persona that truly shines in its commitment to creating bold, clever, whole-system solutions to some of the countries most difficult problems in a way that creates prosperity for the wildlife, wild places, and the people who serve as stewards of them.

Mediation and Conflict Resolutions:  We are happy to serve our communities as mediators or impartial consensus building facilitators for disputes ranging from local village disagreements to more complicated multiparty problems.    When there are highly-polarized debates surrounding issues that affect parties with diverse perspectives, such as between local and indigenous peoples and government officials, we can serve as neutral mediators to provide a unique forum to help reach resolutions and consensus in a way where all parties benefit and solutions reach a wider group of recipients. 

Environmental Conflict Resolution:  Traditionally, environmental conflicts have been between the environmental common well-being and individual interests. However, on closer examination social and environmental conflicts can take innumerable shapes and represent a plethora of environmental disagreements such as individual beliefs versus collective ones, local or state values versus national values, and construction project requirements versus the customs and rituals of the affected groups. When numerous parties are involved, each bringing different stakes to the table as is often the case with environmental disputes, consensus building guides parties in sharing the decision-making power to seek mutually beneficial resolutions, under the common goal of protecting the environment.