A commonly held belief is that if people can benefit financially from enterprises that depend on nearby forests, reefs, and other natural habitats, then they will take action to conserve and sustainably use them. The Biodiversity Conservation Network brought together conservation and development organizations and local communities to systematically test this hypothesis across 39 conservation project sites in Asia and the Pacific. Each project implemented one or more community‐based enterprises such as setting up an ecotourism lodge, distilling essential oils from wild plant roots, producing jams and jellies from forest fruits, harvesting timber, or collecting marine samples to test for pharmaceutical compounds. Each project team collected the biological, enterprise, and social data necessary to test the network's hypothesis. We present the results of this test. We found that a community‐based enterprise strategy can lead to conservation, but only under limited conditions and never on its own. We summarize the specific conditions under which an enterprise strategy will and will not work in a decision chart that can be used by project managers to determine whether this strategy might make sense at their site. We also found that an enterprise strategy can be subsidized and still create a net gain that pays for conservation. Based on our experiences, we recommend developing “learning portfolios” that combine action and research to test other conservation strategies.

THE ENVIRONMENT IN MOST COUNTRIES IS BEING DEGRADED, POVERTY WORLDWIDE ISincreasing, and the gaps between rich and poor individuals and nations are widening. One half of the world's human population still survives on less than $2 per day. These people face the prospect of environmental degradation of their ecosystems that is likely to be exacerbated by climate change. Yet these local ecosystems contain much of our planet's biodiversity and are also the sources of livelihoods and ecosystem services for the rural poor and indirectly for the global community. A key to halt, and then reverse, these environmental and economic trends may lie in new and imaginatively conceived institutions of knowledge in developing countries.Increased knowledge has always provided the basis for human advance. In recent times, wealth has been generated mainly by technical innovation and entrepreneurship, whereas gains on social and environmental fronts have been driven by a broader intellectual tradition. In developed countries, these traditions have been organized into knowledge institutions such as universities. In developing countries, modern universities have, unfortunately, lacked the historical, social, economic, and political contexts that shaped those in the developed world. As a result, these institutions have largely failed to address contemporary economic and environmental problems.Moreover, knowledge institutions in the developing world face unique challenges. Current problems associated with hunger, inequities, and environmental degradation are complex and require considerable human resources and new knowledge. And institutions that can translate knowledge into action, such as nongovernmental organizations, extension arms of universities, and community user groups, are very few and have a weak capacity to meet contemporary needs. Universities in the developing world, generating knowledge for knowledge's sake or, more often, duplicating knowledge, are not moving fast enough to develop programs to meet new challenges.Innovative knowledge institutions and partnerships are needed, and they must be guided by certain principles. Highly varied local situations and the uncertainty of complex social and ecological systems call for flexible, experimental, and adaptive learning-based approaches. The new institutions must also be problem-driven. The alleviation of poverty and environmental sustainability should be explicit goals for which knowledge must be generated. Institutions must transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries to generate new ideas and technologies and link science with policy and governance to frame questions and foster social change. Two examples of such new institutions in the developing world meet only some of these criteria: the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) in India and the EARTH University in Costa Rica. Considering the magnitude of the problems, many more are required.Our experience with ATREE suggests that new knowledge institutions function best by having partnerships wi...

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