Transforming social conflict to create lasting solutions for people and wildlife
What is Conservation Conflict Transformation (CCT)?
“CCT is the truest path to collective problem solving that break patterns of behavior feeding reoccurring, long-term, and legacy discord AND sets the foundation for avoiding them in the future…Long-lasting solutions evolve from experiencing your rivals as fellow humans, understanding and respecting the struggles they bring to the table, and acknowledging how your own actions shape and contribute to the conflict. It will forever change how you view and engage in conflict.”
Destructive, deep-rooted social conflicts can erode wildlife conservation efforts as well as a community’s way of life. Conservation conflict transformation (CCT) provides a way of thinking about, understanding, and addressing such conflicts. To develop CCT, CPeace drew on a variety of disciplines, including peacebuilding, neurology, social psychology, behavioral economics, and systems theory. CCT is a positive process by which complex, multilayered conflicts are transformed into opportunities to both address the presenting problem and meet deeper needs.
As the global leader in conservation conflict transformation (CCT), the Center for Conservation Peacebuilding leads, integrates, and empowers CCT efforts in a variety of locations and at different scales of conflict. The organization formed in 2006 based on recommendations from conservation, community engagement, and peacebuilding professionals seeking a better way to address intractable conflicts around wildlife conservation. Since then, CPeace has supported thousands of stakeholders, leaders, and practitioners in their efforts to prevent and reconcile complex conflict.
CPeace Leadership
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Executive Director
For nearly 30 years, Francine Madden has a proven track record of effectively, impartially and devotedly intervening in complex, controversial fish, wildlife and other natural resource conflicts. Francine uses these lightning rod issues as entry points to reconcile the deep-rooted, systemic conflicts that impede stability and progress for communities and conservation, citizens and governments. By engaging as a third party neutral and transforming the relationships and dialogue processes, Francine provides critical, comprehensive and unique support toward lasting shared wins for people, their way of life and conservation. Francine’s work has been featured in The Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek and Wall Street Journal.
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Deputy Director
Kim has led community engagement programs addressing highly controversial wildlife conflicts across Australia for two decades, where communities have experienced trauma and tragic loss of life. Whether it is working with people and communities impacted by bats and emergency animal diseases, or following shark incidents on Australian beaches, Kim’s dedication to authentically connecting with and among people with different views and values has contributed to reducing harm to people, communities and wildlife.
As a result of her work, Kim was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship to investigate conflict transformation strategies across five continents. The Fellowship deepened Kim’s practical understanding of the complexities, challenges and opportunities to reconcile destructive conflicts related to wildlife, through investigations of five real-world cases.
Explore our Services
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CPeace designs and leads conflict interventions that move parties from intractable conflict to durable, collaborative solutions.
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CPeace builds the capacity of individuals and organizations to transform entrenched conflict among NGOs, governments, community groups, agencies, and other stakeholders. Capacity-building workshops are offered around the world at both ‘fundamentals’ and ‘advanced’ levels, in-person and virtually.
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CPeace offers interactive small-team virtual support in the form of webinars, short workshops, and strategy sessions to help address pressing conflicts.
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CPeace helps clients analyze and transform the root causes of systemic social conflict that undermine conservation, communities, and shared problem solving.
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CPeace offers networking and support to CCT practitioners through our Community of Practice, including virtual meet-ups and resource-sharing.
Testimonials
The support that CPeace’s Francine Madden provided for our work in the Galapagos created the single biggest and most critical turning point in our organization’s ability to have full support of community and government to do critical ecological restoration on an inhabited island whose community was previously divided regarding proposed conservation actions – and because of CPeace’s efforts they are 100% behind the now-shared conservation and sustainable development efforts. We would never have come this far without Francine. It was the best investment we made in 15 years of work in the Galapagos. We have since engaged CPeace in additional web-based services for both internal and other external strategic guidance and every single time, the results have been incredibly transformative! We can’t recommend Francine and CPeace strongly enough!
— Karl C.
Our virtual capacity building and strategic guidance workshop with Francine was incredibly helpful, leading to critical insights for our team and concrete progress in our community. Francine asked thoughtful questions. She really took the time to listen to us and understand the community we are a part of and she did so with empathy and understanding for all sides in our conflict. In a short period of time, Francine was able to clearly articulate some of the hidden dynamics going on in our conflicts and guide our discussion toward a roadmap for success. As a result, we left our session well supported, empowered and capable of using the tools she shared to diffuse difficult situations and better engage with our community. Since then, we’ve made substantial progress on one of the most challenging and controversial conservation conflicts of our careers!
It was wonderfully productive, highly engaging and an incredibly worthwhile investment of our time and resources. We can’t recommend these sessions highly enough and we can’t wait for our next online session with Francine!