A new study traces how decisions were made across four conservation and development projects near Masoala National Park and what their successes and setbacks reveal about getting conservation right. 

A vegetable garden planted near a riverbed in northeastern Madagascar seemed like a reasonable idea. A local resident had proposed it, the project team had selected it, and technical support was in place. Then a cyclone passed through and the garden was gone. The project was abandoned, and the person who had tended it was left frustrated. The loss, the study suggests, might have been avoided had anyone weighed the area's flood risk and cyclone frequency before the first seeds went in. 

This garden account is one example in a paper published in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation on 19 May 2026, which examines how decisions get made in conservation and development work. Drawing on 74 interviews conducted between May 2023 and December 2024, the researchers reconstructed the histories of four such projects in the Maroantsetra district, near Masoala National Park, asking three questions of each: who took part in decisions, whose knowledge was drawn on, and which kinds of knowledge were used. 

Across the four cases, local participation and the inclusion of local knowledge generally grew over time. But a recurring gap stood out. People were frequently consulted without being given real influence over what followed. Involving communities, in other words, is not the same as letting them decide, and inclusion that stops at consultation risks drawing out local knowledge while the actual choices are made elsewhere. 

A second pattern proved even more revealing. The team distinguished among three kinds of knowledge: understanding how a system works, agreeing on what a project is for, and working out how to get there. An explanation for why projects stumbled was the absence of one of these at a decisive moment. The riverside garden is a case in point. The know-how to plant was there; the knowledge about flood risk was not. 

These findings matter beyond Madagascar. Conservation often unfolds in places where people depend directly on the land, and projects that aim to protect nature while supporting livelihoods are common across the tropics. The study does not argue against them. It argues that how they are governed deserves as much attention as what they aim to achieve, and that bringing local communities, practitioners, and researchers together to produce knowledge jointly—early, and repeatedly, rather than at a single stage—is more reliable than assuming participation alone will lead to better decisions. 

The paper also has a direct connection to the Wyss Academy’s work. One of the four projects studied, the Full Circle Initiative, became part of the Wyss Academy’s work in the Mahalevona Valley in 2022. The paper is candid about its early setbacks, the lost garden among them, and traces how it later changed course: co-developing a shared valley-wide vision with communities and district actors, and drawing more deliberately on local, scientific, and practitioner knowledge together. The study was funded by the Wyss Academy for Nature at the University of Bern and led by Clara Léonie Diebold, with co-authors Peter Messerli, Sarah-Lan Mathez-Stiefel, and Julie Zähringer of the Wyss Academy and Paul Clément Harimalala, a Maroantsetra-based local coordinator. 

The intricate question the study leaves open is less about having the right answers, but rather about who gets to ask the questions and whether the different kinds of knowledge a place holds are brought together early enough to count. 

Text: Predrag Tripkovic