Sand County Foundation’s Community Based Conservation Network (CBCN) is a learning network for landholders.  Through this program, Sand County Foundation established a network of community leaders and innovators now operating in five countries extending from Kwa-Zulu Natal Province in South Africa to north-western Tanzania.  Landholders in the network are supported by conservation and development practitioners who cover a large swath of Africa and have strong links to similar local initiatives in North America.

CBCN encompasses a rich diversity of people, landscapes, and resources.  Pastoralists earning money from wildlife; farmers managing forests and restoring a depleted national park; and commercial ranchers who have pooled their land and wildlife to create a large privately owned conservation area.  Be they Maasai pastoralists, Zulu farmers, or white ranchers, these examples of community based conservation demonstrate two crucial points: local people finding ways to improve their livelihood based on land and natural resources and improved stewardship of resources through monitoring and adaptive management.

CBCN fosters civil society.  One of the biggest challenges faced by landholders is the development of new policies for natural resource management that enable them to assume greater authority over their land and take responsibility for their endeavours.  Much of the policy development work, which is led by civil society, runs against the grain of an entrenched command and control central government that would prefer a “one-size fits all” policy that is readily administered but stifles local initiative and often leads to conservation failure. 

CBCN supports landholder initiatives.  We use small grants to test and develop promising new ideas; technical expertise for enterprise development, monitoring and adaptive management; negotiation and facilitation services; and creation of landholder forums for debate and discussion with government or other agencies.  The CBCN approach is supported by some of the latest techniques emerging from resilience thinking and sustainability science. 

CBCN provides landholder exchanges.  The experiences and lessons learned by landholders are transmitted between sites within the network in Africa and North America and between sites supported by other agencies.  These are accomplished through peer-to-peer visits and conferences.  The primary aim is to enable landholders to tell their stories and learn from each other.