Community, Culture, and Conservation: Using the Compass of Coexistence to Think Differently About ‘Development’

Written by Dr Mweda Mbaka and Dr Katherine Baxter

The Forgotten Compass of Development

For generations, the idea of “development” has been sold to us as an upward slope on a graph—GDP climbing, foreign investments flowing, industrial output swelling. The world applauds when the numbers look good, despite what qualitative realities these quantitative abstractions may be masking. Yet in the villages where children once ran barefoot between homesteads, in the bustling streets where traders knew every customer by name, and in the landscapes that once told stories through their rivers and forests, this kind of development often arrives like a well-dressed stranger: polite in appearance, but leaving behind dispossession, diluted heritage, and degraded ecosystems.

We have been taught to measure progress in money, not in trust between neighbors; in tons extracted, not in forests preserved; in towers built, not in stories, songs, and skills carried forward. Yet beneath the noise of the markets and the distorting rhetoric of politicians, another compass exists—one much older than modern economics, rooted in the timeless orientation of living systems towards coexistence.

Its needle points to community, culture, and conservation. These are not nostalgic ideals but the very bearings of survival. A society is only as strong as the ties that bind its people, as rich as the heritage it carries forward, and as secure as the natural systems that keep it alive. Without community, development turns into extraction. Without culture, it collapses into assimilation. Without conservation, it ends in self-destruction. But weave these three together, and you have a fabric strong enough to hold both present and future generations.

This is not romance; it is logic. If the 21st century is to hand down more than debt, displacement, and degraded lands to its children, we must root development where people live, where traditions give life meaning, and where ecosystems still thrive in robust webs of interdependence. Only then will “development” be worthy of the name.

Where We Begin: The Story of a Different Compass

Imagine a small highland village at dawn. Mist clings to the ridges, women gather at a spring with gourds, elders sit beneath an acacia tree telling stories, and children follow paths beaten by generations of bare feet. In this place, wealth is not measured in bank accounts but in reciprocity—how many hands will help you plant your field, who will care for your child when you are ill, how much of the harvest will be shared with a neighbour in need.

Here, community is more than proximity. It is a living web of trust, cooperation, and obligation. Decisions are made together; resources are managed in common; care is a collective act. When these bonds are strong, inequality has little room to grow. Local economies flourish not because outside money floods in, but because value circulates like blood, nourishing every part of the whole.

Modern development often frays these bonds. Young people leave for cities; extractive projects seize land and water; even digital connectivity, while linking people across continents, can weaken the local connections that sustain social life. When the web breaks, vulnerability seeps in, and control over resources and decisions increasingly shifts to distant centers of power. In such moments, the compass of development veers away from community towards systems designed to serve a few, rather than the many.

The Soul Thread: Culture

Culture is the memory of a people. It shapes the language through which they think, the values that guide their choices, and the songs that carry stories of triumphs and losses. It maps the relationships between people and the land, and it is written by the slow evolution of a community over time.

In many African traditions, culture carries an ethic of restraint: take only what you need, return what you can, honor the life around you. These are not abstract moralities but pragmatic survival strategies—rotational grazing that keeps pastures fertile, seed saving that preserves biodiversity, water harvesting that sustains communities through dry seasons.

To strip a community of its culture is to strip it of resilience. When development models impose homogenized norms, they do more than erase dances or dialects; they dismantle entire systems of sustainable living refined over centuries. Without cultural integrity, externally imposed solutions often fail—not from lack of funding, but from lack of roots. Across Africa, from the Sahel to the Cape, the erosion of traditional practices in farming, grazing, and water management has not only undermined livelihoods but also degraded the very ecosystems upon which those livelihoods depend. In such losses, both local communities and external stakeholders find themselves poorer.

The Ground Beneath: Conservation

Too often, conservation is imagined as a fence around a park—a place where people are excluded so that “nature” can remain untouched. But real conservation is not a static boundary on a map; it is an ethic of care for all living systems, including those that feed and shelter us. It is seamless, flowing wherever there is life.

Healthy rivers, fertile soils, and thriving forests are not luxuries; they are the infrastructure of life. They regulate climate, provide food and medicine, and anchor the seasonal rhythms that farmers and herders depend upon.

When conservation is led by local communities—those with a deep and vested interest in the land’s long-term health—it is both more just and more effective. It secures resources equitably in the present and preserves ecological capital for the future. By contrast, exclusionary “fortress conservation” models have too often deepened historical injustices and sparked avoidable conflicts between communities and conservation authorities. Short-term greed or external political pressures can blind policymakers to the long-term instability such approaches create, undermining both ecological and social outcomes.

The Interwoven Fabric

Community, culture, and conservation are inseparable. When community and culture are bound together, they nurture identity and shared responsibility. When community and conservation work in unison, stewardship becomes rooted in the governance systems of the people most dependent on the land. When culture and conservation align, sustainability becomes a moral and spiritual duty, not merely a bureaucratic objective.

At their intersection lies equitable and sustainable development—not as an idealized dream, but as a practical and achievable reality when all three remain in balance.

Why the Weave Is Unravelling

Global market systems reward short-term profit over long-term health. Policies are drafted in isolation—economic strategies in one corner, environmental protection in another, cultural affairs somewhere else—with little conversation between them. Many decision-makers, often shaped by external frameworks, undervalue or misinterpret local customs, imposing solutions that jar against the rhythms of place. Those who know the land best—the marginalized, the indigenous, the poor—are too often the last to be consulted about its future.

Finding Our Way Back

The path to reintegration is not a mystery; it has simply been sidelined. We can realign policies so that cultural and ecological health count as much as economic growth. We can reform education to move away from models that prioritize individual competition over collective well-being, integrating traditional knowledge alongside scientific research. We can create governance systems where communities are not just consulted, but co-manage the resources they depend on. And we can redesign local economies to keep wealth circulating within communities, rewarding regenerative agriculture, eco-tourism, and cultural enterprises that strengthen, rather than weaken, the social fabric.

The Livable Future

The crises of our age—climate change, biodiversity loss, inequality—are not isolated problems but symptoms of a deeper illness: disconnection. In too many places, our systems of education, economics, and governance have reinforced the notion that personal advancement stands apart from community well-being. We have unhooked “development” from the living systems that make life possible.

Reconnecting community, culture, and conservation is not about returning to a romanticized past. It is a deliberate, forward-looking investment in a livable future—a future in which development serves life rather than depletes it. These are not “soft” considerations to be added after the economic plans are drawn; they are the structural beams of the house we all inhabit.

And if we are wise, we will strengthen those beams now. Because once they fail, no one—no matter how rich or powerful, poor or meek—will have a roof left to stand under.