Community-driven EBM: step-by-step
Visioning
Steps 1-3
This phase builds the foundation for the management. It identifies and engages local actors, delineates the management area, identifies key concerns and issues, and develops the over-arching goal.
Planning
Steps 4-7
This phase lays out a detailed EBM plan. It analyses the socio-ecological system in detail, establishes SMART objectives and concrete actions to achieve them. A large part of the work is done by experts, a dedicated planning group that collects and assesses the necessary data and conducts the planning work.
Implementation
Steps 8-10
This phase puts the management plan into practice. It activates real-world interventions to achieve the objectives, starts consistent monitoring to track outcomes, and ensures that results are communicated transparently to partners and the wider community.
Who can use this blueprint?
This blueprint is intended for all who seek to start or strengthen ecosystem‑based management (EBM) locally. It is meant to support e.g. local and regional authorities, community facilitators, NGOs, and practitioners. The step by-step guide is focused on coastal and marine areas, but it can be equally valid for more land-based environments.
Why community-driven?
- Promote integrated management to foster long-term ecosystem health
- Lower the threshold to get started with EBM
- Build local capacity, ownership and legitimacy for EBM
- Promote collaboration between diverse local interests
- Involving scientific, local and traditional knowledge in decision making
Local realities are complex, dynamic and context-specific and therefore EBM works best when it is driven by local actors: the people who live in/with and depend on the ecosystem. Directly involving them into shaping priorities, actions and rules is necessary for a fair and trustworthy process.
Such a process will increase shared ownership and thereby the likelihood that agreements will be respected and followed, reducing conflict and improving long-term outcomes. It also ensures that management reflects local needs, values, and cultural connections to the ecosystem.
Experience-based knowledge about local conditions, such as local challenges, seasonal changes, species behaviour, and resource use patterns, is essential for designing management approaches that are relevant, realistic, and responsive to change.
By grounding decisions in what local communities experience and observe, management becomes better adapted to the actual dynamics of the environment. By combining local and traditional and indigenous knowledge with scientific input, a management system that is both credible and effective can develop.
In this way, EBM becomes not just a set of rules, but a collective process rooted in the local community’s knowledge, responsibility, and stewardship.
Why this blueprint?
Coastal ecosystems are subject to increasing pressure from the growth in the blue economy, including aquaculture, tourism, renewable energy production, extraction of minerals, transportation and urbanisation. To address these challenges, ecosystem-based management (EBM) offers an integrated approach aimed at safeguarding the ecosystem while promoting the sustainable and equitable use of ecosystem services.
EBM is fundamentally a matter of societal choice and should be implemented through a participatory process that is decentralized to the lowest appropriate level. However, in practice, EBM is often developed through top-down processes led by governments. To ensure that coastal EBM is more equitable, legitimate and inclusive, there is a need to adopt bottom-up approaches that build capacity and empower local communities to actively participate in decision-making and management.