Transforming the Fenceline: frontline justice work in the conservation landscape

Participants from the 2024 'Transforming the Fenceline' course sharing their change projects at the Community Engagement Practitioner conference, October 2024.

In the conservation sector, as with many other social and environmental sectors, the people who do the most navigating and hold the greatest knowledge tend to be the least recognised. Community Engagement Practitioners (CEPs) work at the physical fenceline between protected areas and the communities that live alongside them. They are the ones called when wildlife crosses into village land, when grievances build, when misinformation spreads, when a community feels the park is taking from them and giving nothing back. They hold the relationships. They absorb the tension. And historically, the conservation sector has called them "Liaison Officers" and paid them accordingly.

We think this is the wrong way round. The fenceline is not a peripheral concern of conservation, it is the work. Community Engagement Practitioners are frontline justice workers, doing the relational, contested, often dangerous labour of repairing and holding the relationships between people, place and institutions. It can be slow. It can also be fast, intense, reactive and dangerous. Through Transforming the Fenceline, our transformative learning course developed with WWF- South Africa and partners across the Greater Kruger landscape including the Southern African Wildlife College, Wits Rural Facility, Kruger to Canyon biosphere region, Nsasani Trust and Hlokomela between 2023 and 2024, we worked with twenty-seven CEPs.

The course was built on a simple proposition: that transformation in conservation would come from supporting CEPs to innovate where they already stood, not from importing solutions from elsewhere. That meant treating them as the experts in their landscape that they are, and together exploring possible frameworks, building peer relationships and recognising how their work can make shifts in the landscapes, communities and the organisations and structures they work within.

One participant's change project from the course makes this concrete. A CEP working near Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park identified a recurring source of conflict: communities believed that diseases killing their livestock were transmitted from park buffalo through broken fences. The demand was that the park buy them vaccines. The CEP didn't approach this as a fencing problem or a communications problem. Using tools from the course such as stakeholder mapping, problem trees, and following the five transformative questions, she traced how the misunderstanding had come to be, what it meant for both park and community, and how it might be transformed. Her change project addressed both the science of disease transmission and the practical work of preventing fence vandalism. One intervention; two communities of knowledge held together; a relationship beginning to repair.

This is what justice work in the conservation landscape looks like in practice. Community work like this is a highly complex practice which requires learning that can only be earned through experience. The knowledge and skills it draws on should be formally recognised. They are as demanding as any academic or industry knowledge system, and those who practise the work well are operating at the highest level of judgement and skill.

It is not glamorous. It does not generate the press releases that anti-poaching operations do. But it is the work that determines whether conservation is something done to communities or something done with them.

Enabling that work required more than training individuals. CEPs returned to organisations that hadn't freed up time for their assignments. Women dropped out because the unpaid work of home life didn't pause for a five-day workshop. Some change projects became uncomfortable for the organisations that hosted them, showing a need for more space for understanding different partners' needs and potentially for negotiation.

Transformative learning at the fenceline surfaced what needed transforming on both sides of it, including in the conservation institutions that employed CEPs in the first place.

As one of the learning partners put it: "Working with a group of people like this gives you enormous hope for conservation”

This work’s next phase was curtailed in the international aid cuts of 2025 - a relaunch is now happening in 2026 in partnership with Southern African Wildlife College.

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