Connecting landscapes, communities and knowledge: lessons from organizing the INSAKA symposium on participatory conservation

Participatory conservation is widely endorsed as policy, yet the deliberative platforms through which it is enacted are seldom examined as research objects. This article studies a three-phase international symposium convened in Namibia in November 2025 by the University of Namibia under the INSAKA Consortium. It asks what such a platform reveals about the conditions under which participation in conservation becomes substantive rather than procedural. The study uses a single embedded case design in which the symposium functioned as both an authentic practice and a research site. Data comprised thematic presentations delivered across the three phases, rapporteur records of plenary and panel discussions and a moderated community panel at the ≠Gaingu Conservancy. Participant observation at all three locations and a closing reflective session completed the corpus, which was analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis. Five themes were constructed. Knowledge moved through iterative dialogue rather than one-directional transfer. Community participants articulated place-based ecological knowledge that reframed the questions posed to them. Adaptation practices reported by conservancy members operated across land-use boundaries, supporting planning at the landscape rather than unit scale. Existing compensation instruments marked the limits of procedural participation. Informal relational settings generated the event's most concrete institutional commitments. Cutting across these themes, the itinerant design made visible an asymmetry between Namibia's mature terrestrial participation architecture and its comparatively closed marine governance arena. The article contributes empirical evidence on how convening design shapes participatory outcomes. It argues that transferring the conservancy model to the coast is first a legislative question and only then a participatory one.