Indigenous-Led Conservation Editing and Proofreading Services

A partnership agreement between a Nation and a conservation organisation describes "co-management" of a protected area, and both parties sign it believing they have agreed on how decisions will actually be made. Eighteen months in, the organisation proposes a research programme the Nation was not consulted on before the funding application went in, and both sides discover they had different understandings of what co-management meant in practice: the organisation understood consultation as the mechanism, the Nation understood joint sign-off as the mechanism, and the word "co-management" was doing the work of papering over a disagreement neither side realised they had.

We edit what conservation organisations and Indigenous governments produce to define how a partnership actually makes decisions — co-management and partnership agreement decision-making structures, funding and research proposal approval processes, benefit-sharing and resource access documentation, and the correspondence clarifying how a specific decision was actually made under a partnership agreement. Our editors work on the word "co-management" and what decision-making authority it is actually meant to describe.

The specific decision-making mechanism is what a partnership agreement actually needs to state, and its failure is a term like co-management or partnership left to mean whatever each side separately assumes until an actual decision forces the disagreement into view. Co-management describes a relationship; it does not specify whether a given category of decision requires joint sign-off, requires consultation with a right to object, or simply requires notification after the fact, and these are three very different distributions of actual authority sitting under one reassuring word. We work through these so decision categories are defined specifically, with the actual mechanism stated for each — this category requires joint written approval, this category requires consultation with a stated response period, this category requires notification only — since a partnership agreement that names one mechanism for every kind of decision either overstates authority the Nation does not actually hold or understates authority it does; so funding applications, research proposals, and public communications about the partnership are named as specific decision categories with their own stated process, given that these are exactly the kinds of decisions that most often proceed on an assumed understanding that turns out to differ between the parties; so a disagreement or an unresolved decision has a stated resolution process, because a partnership agreement with no path forward when the parties disagree defaults, in practice, to whichever party had the resources to act first; so any decision made under the agreement is documented with which mechanism was actually used, given that a pattern of decisions made by notification when the agreement specifies consultation is a breach that needs to be visible to be addressed; and so benefit-sharing and resource access terms are stated with specific figures, allocations, or conditions rather than a general commitment to fair or equitable sharing, since these words carry no agreed meaning until a specific allocation is actually attached to them. Agreements written this way mean both parties are agreeing to the same authority structure, not to the same reassuring word.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including partnership terms, governance structures and correspondence. We are editors rather than Indigenous governance specialists, conservation lawyers or Nation representatives, and we offer no view on decision-making authority, governance structures or partnership terms — these are for the parties themselves, and particularly the Nation, to determine. What we can do is make sure the agreement states the mechanism both parties actually agreed to.