In some cases, the creation of protected areas to conserve nature has resulted in the displacement of indigenous peoples away from their original territories in Latin America. In this context, conservation organizations are developing alliances with indigenous peoples in different parts of the continent to find ways to jointly address conservation and livelihood issues with equity to avoid displacement and to empower decision-making at the grassroots level. This article illustrates the establishment of partnerships between conservation organizations and indigenous peoples that have yielded concrete results. While it is hard to generalize from a high diversity of cases, the common thread is the realization that the main solution would be to implement a comprehensive land/resource use reform that would avoid the destruction of wild habitats and promote the recuperation of degraded lands. Additionally, the management of protected areas must include the voices of those most directly affected by the establishment of those areas; one solution is the participation of indigenous peoples and other local stakeholders in protected areas management committees.

Despite a growing and increasingly sophisticated set of international policy guidance and norms governing issues of equity and the rights of indigenous and local people, conservationists continue to face moral and practical dilemmas in the application of these guidelines in the field, especially in cases where conservationists seek to restrict access to natural resources. One source of the dilemma is that successful implementation of international covenants may require a stronger enabling environment (in the form of fairness, legitimacy of political actors, transparency and accountability) than typically exists on the ground. Conservationists also need to be better informed about existing best practice on community participation. However, both policy and practice can be ultimately strengthened by an iterative process in which practitioners provide regular input to policy development in order to improve the normative basis for successful conservation.

An ongoing debate over the impacts of protected areas on rural communities in central Africa has become increasingly polarized in recent years, even as definitions of displacement have shifted from outright expulsion to economic dislocation precipitated by lost access to natural resources. Although forcible removal of communities to make way for the creation of National Parks has certainly occurred in the past in some parts of the world, we contend that not a single individual has been physically removed from any of the protected areas created in central Africa over the past decade, despite claims to the contrary of hundreds of thousands of "conservation refugees." Furthermore, we recognize that a scarcity of data precludes impartial evaluation of the potential impacts of economic displacement of local communities living adjacent to protected areas, and we call for a concerted effort by conservationists and the social scientists who criticize conservation efforts, in order to measure the effects of protected areas on livelihoods, and to work towards a more socially responsible conservation paradigm.

Many rationales for wildlife conservation have been suggested. One rationale not often mentioned is the impact of extinctions on the traditions of local people, and conservationists' subsequent need to strongly consider culturally based reasons for conservation. As a first step in strengthening the case for this rationale, we quantitatively examined the presence and representation of eight potentially extinct mammals in folklore of 48 Native American tribes that live/lived near to 11 national parks in the United States. We aimed to confirm if these extinct animals were traditionally important species for Native Americans. At least one-third of the tribes included the extinct mammals in their folklore (N=45 of 124) and about half of these accounts featured the extinct species with positive and respectful attitudes, especially the carnivores. This research has shown that mammals that might have gone locally extinct have been prevalent and important in Native American traditions. Research is now needed to investigate if there indeed has been or might be any effects on traditions due to these extinctions. Regardless, due to even the possibility that the traditions of local people might be adversely affected by the loss of species, conservationists might need to consider not only all the biological reasons to conserve, but also cultural ones.