What skipping FPIC costs your organisation

No conservation organisation sets out to damage the communities it works alongside. The harm documented in this research almost always follows from good intentions executed too quickly: a partner government assures consultation has been handled, a funding deadline forces a project to launch before engagement is complete, or the organisation simply does not have a rights-based framework in place to notice a gap in a process it did not design. Free, Prior, and Informed Consent exists precisely because good intentions are not a safeguard on their own. The five papers below trace what happens once that gap opens, to the community first, and then to the organisation that left it open.

Trust is often treated as something a conservation organisation can build through better communication or a friendlier local liaison. This paper argues that treating trust as a communications problem misses what is happening underneath it. The authors show that trust and perceptions of justice are tightly linked: a community's willingness to trust an organisation depends on whether its past dealings with that organisation, or with conservation more broadly, were experienced as fair. Where consent has been skipped or treated as a formality, trust-building efforts layered on top function as what the authors call a technical fix, and can end up re-embedding the very inequities they were meant to resolve, since the underlying power imbalance was never addressed.

Citation: Saif, O., Keane, A. and Staddon, S. (2022) 'Making a case for the consideration of trust, justice, and power in conservation relationships', Conservation Biology, 36(4), e13903. doi: 10.1111/cobi.13903.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13903

Some of the reputational cost conservation organisations carry does not trace back to a single missed consultation. It is structural, built up across decades of practice that treated certain communities as obstacles instead of partners. This Nature Perspective argues that conservation's expansion of protected areas and its prioritisation of individual animal welfare over human well-being have intensified exclusion of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour communities, particularly across the Global South. The paper's proposed framework, built around recognising human rights and ensuring community agency, is offered specifically because the authors see this pattern as reputational and existential for the field, not just an ethical footnote, especially as shifting global politics make continued public and donor support for conservation less automatic than it once was.

Citation: Mbizah, M.M., Allen, T., Allred, S., Bright Ross, J.G., Dávalos, A., Dickman, A., Dunaway, M., Ghosh, R., Gomera, M., Hammond, N.L., Hare, D., Kepe, T., Nkomo, M.N., Oommen, M.A., Paudel, K., Perram, A., Roe, D., Rudd, L.F., Shanker, K., Thekaekara, T. and Biggs, D. (2026) 'A framework for addressing racial and related inequities in conservation', Nature, 649, pp. 301 to 309. doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-09892-1.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09892-1

Carbon finance has made the reputational stakes of skipping consent concrete and public. This Personal View asks whether carbon markets amount to a new form of colonialism, pointing to the continued exclusion of Indigenous Peoples from decision making despite their role as key stewards of the landscapes carbon projects depend on. The authors set this against the scale of the market itself, projected to grow from two billion dollars in 2020 to roughly 250 billion dollars by 2050, and argue that organisations operating in this space without a credible consent process are exposing themselves to scrutiny that will only intensify as the market grows and more communities find platforms to raise their experiences publicly.

Citation: Redvers, N., Chan, J., Odochao, S., Pratt, V., Sim, J., Gougsa, S., Kobei, D.M. and Willetts, L. (2025) 'Carbon markets: a new form of colonialism for Indigenous Peoples?', Lancet Planetary Health. doi: 10.1016/S2542-5196(25)00086-5.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(25)00086-5

Some consequences are not reputational in the abstract. They are operational and immediate. This review of 94 sources on forest carbon initiatives across the Global South documents a case where a certification body, Verra, temporarily suspended a project after concerns emerged about whether it had properly secured community consent. That suspension halted the flow of revenue the project depended on and became a matter of public record, visible to every investor, partner, and community evaluating whether to work with the organisations involved in the future. The review's broader finding, that legal action has been taken against multiple governments and developers for profiting from carbon credits without FPIC, shows the same pattern resurfacing again and again across the sector.

Citation: Cubas-Báez, A., Sunderlin, W., Larson, A.M. and Frechette, A. (2025) 'From promises to practice: Persistent challenges in safeguarding local rights in forest carbon market initiatives', CABI Reviews, 20(1), 0025. doi: 10.1079/cabireviews.2025.0025.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1079/cabireviews.2025.0025

The cost of skipping consent also shows up in a slower, harder to trace way: initiatives that simply stop growing. This study surveyed 84 experts across ten community conservation initiatives in southern and eastern Africa to identify why so many struggle to scale beyond their pilot stage. Unfair benefit sharing and unequal decision-making were named as the most common bottlenecks, ahead of any ecological or financial constraint. An organisation that has not built consent and shared decision-making into how an initiative runs from the outset is, in effect, building a ceiling into its own programme, one that shows up as stalled growth years after the launch instead of as an obvious early failure.

Citation: Pienkowski, T., Clark, M., Jagadish, A., Albert, A., Brar, M., Breedveld, T., Chinangwa, L., Gohil, D., Irumba, D., Kanaan, R., Kicheleri, R.P., Kihumuro, P., Kiwango, W.A., Mabele, M.B., Matiku, P., Mbeyale, G., Mbuvi, M.T.E., Mugisha, A., Mwango, S., Mwanyoka, I., Nyirenda, R., Oula, G., Pétursson, J.G., Rusoke, T., Turyahabwe, N., Kazungu, M., Mandoloma, L., Meshack, C., Moombe, K.B., Moyo, F., Muposhi, V.K., Ochieng, A., Sabuhoro, E., Spenceley, A., Sulle, E., Tumusiime, D.M., Wilfred, P., Brehony, P., Assef, E.D. and Mills, M. (2026) 'Diagnosing scaling bottlenecks in 10 community conservation initiatives in southern and eastern Africa', Conservation Biology, 40, e70149. doi: 10.1111/cobi.70149.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70149