Transforming Forest Landscape Governance in the Lower OgoouÃ© - Lower Nyanga Landscape Corridor To conserve forest landscapes and contribute to improved IPLC livelihoods in Gabon through enhanced governance, environmental monitoring, and private sector engagement Note: Disbursement data provided is cumulative and covers disbursement made by the project Agency. The project aims to deliver direct socioeconomic development benefits to a total of 30,000 beneficiaries, of which at least one-third are women (together with their households) and indirect benefits to an estimated 336,219 beneficiaries nearly evenly split between women and men. These benefits range from capacity development (trainings) and support toward employment under the GEF7 project, particularly household and community small businesses, bringing various forms of direct and indirect livelihoods support. The project specifically aims to raise household well-being (for selected households). The project moreover aims to involve a share of at least 25% of forest dwelling and forest dependent people (IPLCs) in project recruitment, consultations, and activities, and to proactively engage and empower IP representatives through capacity development for the future.  The project strategy is based on the assumption that joint management of the landscape and its natural resources, in partnership between local communities and formal conservation authorities, will contribute to the reduction of social conflict and insecurity, to the sustainable recovery and use of natural resources, as well as to biodiversity conservation. Furthermore, enhanced partnership and reduced social conflict will provide enabling conditions for rational sustainable land use practices promoted by the project and for resource conservation.   Through support for different forms of community biomonitoring (both in partnershp with protected area authorities and by local communities independently) and through a documentation and preservation of local and traditional knowledge, including ecological knowledge, the project also builds on local skills and interests, cf. assets-based development; this additionally builds local community members’ capacities in environmental monitoring (including use of technology) and increases collaborations with protected area management staff, potentially leading to alternative/diversified job opportunities in the future.  Overall, the additional contribution of community involvement in conservation (beyond prior ‘standard’ emphasis on national parks and nature reserves) is expected to lead to a considerably increase in biodiversity protection – both with additional manpower as well as knowledge and skills, on one hand, and with the empowerment and recognition/support of endogenous community conservation initiatives, on the other hand. Taken together, moving beyond the “PA model” and toward a more inclusive “protected and conserved area” model of conservation emphasising governance as well as management issues, conservation outcomes are expected to be maximized alongside a much greater sense of wellbeing of indigenous peoples and local communities, IPLCs. This project is built on such an emerging conservation paradigm, with numerous examples regionally and globally informing project design.