a Q&A with Ileana:

Have you identified effective ways to engage and include the hardest-to-reach and/or marginalized groups, so they can participate in mapping?

What has helped us most is being intentional from the beginning. Not only about who gets invited, but also about how the space is facilitated. In practice, this means working closely with local partners who already have trust in the territory, using smaller groups, and sometimes creating separate spaces first for women, youth, or others whose voices might otherwise get lost. We have learned that inclusion is not just about being present in the room — it is also about feeling comfortable enough to speak.

How do you manage expectations in the community, especially if their project ideas and results will not be supported by major government actors and funders?

This is always important. We try to be very honest from the start: a mapping or diagnostic process does not automatically mean immediate funding or government support. What it can do is help communities organize their ideas, make risks and priorities visible, and build a stronger basis for dialogue and future action. In PARES, this has been valuable because the process helped us design NbS pilots that respond to what communities themselves identified, even when broader support from institutions is still developing.

Can you speak a bit more about how to integrate the communities' results and understanding with scientific methods and data? (What do you do if they seem contradictory?) Similarly, we'd be curious to hear about the best ways to share the data. The GIS systems are so cool, but does that make it harder for communities to engage with and understand all the results?

For us, these two things should speak to each other, not compete. Community knowledge often helps us understand what technical data is not fully showing, or why a map looks one way but the lived experience feels different on the ground. When there seems to be a contradiction, we usually see that as something worth exploring more carefully, not something that has to be “fixed” quickly.

On sharing the results, we try to work in layers. The workshops themselves stay very simple and accessible, and then later we translate that information into GIS products or dashboards. But it is really important to bring it back again in a way that communities can still use and understand — for example through printed maps, visual summaries, or follow-up conversations.

Do you have a favorite outcome or story specifically from a community mapping workshop you'd like to share? We are especially interested in examples about how results from participatory mapping exercises were used to change/shape an implemented project or policy.

One of the most useful things for us in PARES has been seeing where threats, livelihoods, and conflict pressures overlap in the same places. That gave local partners a much clearer basis for deciding where to focus pilot actions and why. So the maps were not just descriptive — they actually helped shape the design of NbS pilots by showing where an intervention could reduce climate risk while also supporting cooperation, social cohesion, and peace-positive outcomes.

Are there any situations or contexts where you would say community mapping isn't a good fit? Do you always suggest this kind of approach during a project?

I would not say it works everywhere in the same way. If tensions are too severe, or if there is very little trust among the people involved, mapping may not be the right first step. In those situations, I think it is often necessary to do some earlier work to build the conditions that make mapping possible — for example, trust-building, dialogue spaces, or smaller preparatory conversations with different groups. In our experience, participatory mapping works much better once there is at least a minimum shared basis for people to engage.

A broader lesson for us is that these participatory diagnostics are not an end in themselves. They can become a bridge — helping people name risks, understand each other a bit better, and turn difficult realities into opportunities for resilience, social cohesion, and peace-positive action.