Local Voices, Global Collaborations: What We Can Learn from Snow Leopards

Take a bunch of countries with a history of border disputes. Throw in some United Nations agencies and a slew of civil society organizations (CSOs) from different nations. Gather them to protect a reclusive animal about which little is known. 

It sounds like a recipe for bureaucratic stalemate, but in fact has yielded more than a decade of cooperation. The key ingredients turned out to be that very diversity of participants—some international, some national, some local, each of whom brought a tool for solving an aspect of the problem—combined with a win-for-all scenario that helped advance sustainable rural development goals and, in no small part, the characteristics and behavior of an animal species in the wild.

In 2013, Kyrgyzstan took its first step towards becoming a leader in a specific niche of environmental diplomacy: preserving mountain landscapes. That year, at Kyrgyzstan’s initiative, all 12 snow leopard range countries, including China, India, and Pakistan, signed the Bishkek Declaration and agreed to launch the Global Snow Leopard and Ecosystem Protection Program (GSLEP), which included organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund and United Nations Development Programme. Eleven years later, this conglomeration of national governments, international organizations, and CSOs still hangs together (except for Afghanistan, which stopped participating after the Taliban takeover) while managing to improve conservation outcomes. GSLEP became a platform through which this disparate group of countries and organizations successfully leveraged the global popularity of big cats to bring additional resources to the region for both conservation and development. Even more importantly, it became a platform where different types of actors—states, CSOs, international organizations, private sector, universities—could each mobilize for those tasks for which they were best suited, ranging from providing regulatory frameworks to accessing local populations or bringing new funding. Meanwhile, GSLEP coordinated each actor’s contributions across different projects, managing to intertwine their strengths into a network that held together even as individual conflicts and efforts waxed or waned over time.

GSLEP relied on international CSOs—such as the Snow Leopard Trust, Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union, and Fauna & Flora International—as partners to governments in conservation work, such as facilitating cross-border environmental management, developing new methodologies to assess snow leopard populations, and raising awareness in local communities. In a region where states often look with suspicion at CSOs, GSLEP’s survival is remarkable, though not without hiccups, ranging from a paranoid reaction of Tajikistan’s authorities towards a snow leopard collaring project to Kyrgyzstan's 2024 law enabling potential crackdowns on foreign-funded NGOs. Nevertheless, GSLEP generated significant levels of cooperation between state and non-state actors, including a high degree of resilience, especially in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, to state crackdowns on other NGOs.

The work of different stakeholders is probably nowhere more intertwined than in Kyrgyzstan. In a context where governmental environment protection agencies were chronically underfunded since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and where the country’s civil society was well developed because authorities were historically welcoming (until 2024) to that kind of activism, GSLEP’s work had the potential to significantly impact not only snow leopard conservation but also the lives of those who live near them.

This is where the nature of snow leopards themselves comes into the picture. As a charismatic species and a national symbol of Kyrgyzstan, they were an attractive candidate for Kyrgyzstan’s first venture into environmental diplomacy. Reclusive and extremely difficult to find, they prefer preying on wild animals rather than livestock (with exceptions). These behaviors meant that they were not an economic menace for nearby herders, but also made it almost impossible for conservationists to work with snow leopards directly. Instead, conservationists had to work around them: protecting their prey from excessive hunting, limiting the interactions between herders and snow leopards’ wild prey, and adapting mountain herding and environment protection to the realities of climate change and its effects on herders’ seasonal practices and pastures—conservation activities which, when done with input from local voices, often had benefits for people in the region. This win–win scenario depended on a fine-grained understanding of the complex interactions between snow leopard habits and local cultures, economies, and infrastructures, along with shifts brought about by climate change; in turn, this understanding was only possible thanks to the variety of stakeholders involved.

Increased funding for snow leopard conservation combined with its indirect approach meant that a wide variety of environment protection activities in Kyrgyzstan could benefit from being defined as snow leopard conservation in project proposals. Underfunded state environmental agencies had incentives to partner with other stakeholders who could potentially bring project funding for conservation activities. Non-state actors had an interest in cooperating with state agencies who had the authority to approve conservation projects in the country’s mountains. At the same time, international and foreign organizations often needed help from the local civil society both to better access rural mountain communities and to navigate the politics of governmental approvals for projects on the public lands. This complex network of actors transformed Kyrgyzstan’s environmental protection approach into a new kind of system, where most funding came from abroad, most on-the-ground work from CSOs (including local community organizations), and most work on setting the institutional frameworks from the state agencies, while livelihood benefits accrued to nearby rural populations.

The policy lesson here goes beyond Kyrgyzstan and beyond snow leopards. The relationship between the feeding habits of snow leopards, environmental diplomacy in Inner Asia, and the global efforts to preserve mountain ecosystems might not be obvious to the uninitiated, but it is to those working on those matters and living in those mountains. Local knowledge and collaboration can make or break global efforts. While this particular set of connections is specific to snow leopard conservation, comparable examples could be found for many global issues. Widely differing results from seemingly similar carbon credits programs, for instance, show the disadvantages of a cut-and-paste approach that is not grounded in local knowledge (recent greenwashing issues aside). An indigenously-managed forestry project selling carbon credits was a success story in California, reinforcing an indigenous group’s legal claim to the land and improving fire management, while a similar program in the Brazilian Amazon resulted in net forest destruction and accusations of green colonialism, in part due to the differences in local politics and the local economy beyond forestry.

Using fine-grained, local understanding to guide an international response to a global issue—as in the case of snow leopard conservation—is only possible when diverse stakeholders combine efforts. By providing a setting for such collaboration, GSLEP not only brought forward expertise in local contexts, it also brought together actors who can leverage complementary types of resources, expertise, and authority, ultimately successfully connecting snow leopard conservation and sustainable rural development, while being mindful of the needs and preferences of local populations. The global challenges that the world faces are diverse, and so are the sources of mistrust between the stakeholders caring for the outcomes of each of those challenges. We need innovative institutional models that can bring different stakeholders together, but they should not be limited only to the global players. When the local stakeholders are included in negotiating, setting, and implementing the agenda for international efforts, the result is a collaborative process deeply grounded in local knowledge, a crucial part of the foundation for success.