Identifying and developing effective post‐2020 conservation bridging leaders

Effective bridging leaders interact within and outside their group to facilitate collaboration required in multistakeholder contexts. This is particularly crucial to community‐based conservation interventions that strive to achieve both ecological and social objectives by actively engaging or devolving decision‐making and management authority to local communities. Although a viable approach in many contexts, achieving “unprecedented collaboration” called for by the Post‐2020 Global Biodiversity Framework in community‐based conservation is problematic given the multiple and diverse actors affecting and affected by these interventions. Therefore, effective leadership becomes crucial to implementing necessary strategies to engage actors and resolve conflict inclusively. Yet, weak leadership commonly constrains these interventions. I reviewed relevant literature and devised a framework of effective bridging leadership characteristics. I then used this framework to appraise bridging leadership in two African coastal‐marine community‐based conservation cases. I employed social network analysis and semistructured and group interviews in the two cases. Several local leaders emerged as key (potential) bridging leaders. Furthermore, I found that effective bridging leaders require not only legal recognition but also perceived legitimacy resulting from building trust with other actors. Additionally, the inclusive collaboration required multiple sources of emotionally intelligent bridging leaders with the integrity, humility, empathy, and cultural awareness necessary to mitigate elite capture, effectively communicate, and empower and provide support to others. Because emotional intelligence in conservation leadership remains a knowledge gap, particularly in community‐based conservation research, insights from this study should be useful to diverse conservation actors.