Take a bunch of countries with a history of border disputes. Throw in a few UN agencies and a host of civil society organizations (CSOs) from various nations. Collect them to protect a reclusive animal about which little is known.

That sounds like a recipe for bureaucratic deadlock, but has actually yielded more than a decade of collaboration. The key ingredients proved to be precisely that diversity of participants – some international, some national, some local, each bringing a tool to solve an aspect of the problem – combined with a win-for-all scenario that helped to promote sustainable rural development goals and, to a small extent, 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: preserve mountain scenery. That year, at the initiative of Kyrgyzstan, all 12 countries in the snow leopard range, 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 the United Nations Development Programme. Eleven years later, this conglomerate of national governments, international organizations and civil society organizations is still hanging on (except for Afghanistan, which stopped participating after the Taliban took power) while managing to improve conservation outcomes. GSLEP became a platform through which this diverse 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. More importantly, it became a platform where different types of actors – states, civil society organizations, international organizations, the private sector, universities – could each mobilize for the tasks for which they were best suited, from providing regulatory frameworks to gaining access to the local population or bring new funding. At the same time, GSLEP coordinated the contributions of each actor across different projects, successfully interweaving their strengths into a network that held together even as individual conflicts and efforts waxed and waned over time.

GSLEP relied on international CSOs – such as the Snow Leopard Trust, the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union and Fauna & Flora International – who partners to governments in conservation worksuch as facilitating transboundary environmental management, developing new methods to assess snow leopard populations and raising awareness in local communities. In a region where states often view CSOs with suspicion, GSLEP’s survival is remarkable, but not without hiccups, ranging from a paranoid reaction by Tajikistan authorities towards a snow leopard collar project to Kyrgyzstan’s 2024 law enables potential crackdowns on foreign-funded NGOs. Nonetheless, the GSLEP generated significant levels of cooperation between state and non-state actors, including a high degree of resistance, particularly 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 state environmental protection agencies were chronically underfunded since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and where the country’s civil society was well developed because the authorities were historical welcome (until 2024) for that kind of activism, GSLEP’s work had the potential to significantly impact not only the conservation of snow leopards but also the lives of those who live near them.

This is where the very nature of snow leopards comes into play. As one charismatic species and a national symbol in Kyrgyzstan, they were an attractive candidate for Kyrgyzstan’s first venture into environmental diplomacy. Detached and extremely difficult to find, they prefer prey on wild animals rather than livestock (med exception). These behaviors meant they were not an economic threat to nearby herders, but also made it nearly impossible for conservationists to work directly with snow leopards. Instead, conservationists had to work around them: protecting their prey from excessive hunting, limiting interactions between herders and snow leopards’ wild prey, and adapting mountain herding and environmental protection to the reality of climate change and its effects on herders’ seasonal practices and pastures—conservation activities that, 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 interplay between snow leopard habits and local cultures, economies and infrastructures, along with changes brought about by climate change; in turn, this understanding was only possible thanks to the diversity of stakeholders involved.

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

The political lesson here goes beyond Kyrgyzstan and beyond snow leopards. The relationship between snow leopard eating habits, environmental diplomacy in Inner Asia, and global efforts to preserve mountain ecosystems may not be obvious to the uninitiated, but it is to those who work on these issues and live in these mountains. Local knowledge and collaboration can make or break global efforts. Although this particular set of connections is specific to snow leopard conservation, comparable examples can be found for many global issues. Very different results from seemingly similar carbon credit programs show, for example, the disadvantages of a cut-and-paste approach that is not based on local knowledge (more recently greenwashing issues aside). A domestically managed forestry project selling carbon credits was one success story in California, strengthens an indigenous group’s legal claim to the land and improves fire management, while a similar programs in the Brazilian Amazon resulted in net forest destruction and accusations of green colonialism, partly 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 different stakeholders combine efforts. By providing an environment for such collaboration, GSLEP not only brought expertise to bear in local contexts, it also brought together actors who can draw on complementary types of resources, expertise and authority, ultimately successfully linking snow leopard conservation and sustainable rural development, while are aware of the needs and preferences of the local population. The global challenges facing the world are diverse, and so are the sources of mistrust between the stakeholders who care about the outcome of each of these challenges. We need innovative institutional models which can bring together different stakeholders, but they should not be limited to the global actors alone. When the local stakeholders are included in negotiating, determining and implementing the agenda for international efforts, the result is a collaborative process deeply rooted in local knowledge, a crucial part of the foundation for success.