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We facilitated the development of a co-designed and locally led community biodiversity inventory (CBI) in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, using nine design principles for participatory action research that promoted inclusivity. A questionnaire survey toward the end of the process found significant differences between people who were engaged and disengaged in the CBI. Engaged people valued biodiversity and ecosystem services, envisioned employment through ecotourism, and held a community-led view of governance. Disengaged people valued human-made and abiotic resources, overlooked threats to ecosystems, envisioned development through agriculture, and held a government-led view of governance. We postulate that CBIs attract actors interested in cultural biodiversity conservation. The process reinforces their beliefs and may affect others, forming the nucleus for local ecosystem stewardship. Community biodiversity inventories are, however, no panacea for local empowerment. Processes beyond local people's and facilitators' control and unrealized expectations may negate the impacts of well-intended efforts and good practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Complex systems are shaped by cross-scale interactions, nonlinear feedbacks, and uncertainty, among other factors. Transdisciplinary approaches that combine participatory and conventional methods and democratize knowledge to enable diverse inputs, including those from local, informal experts, are essential tools in understanding such systems. The metaphor of a ‘bridge’ to overcome the divide between different disciplines and knowledge systems is often used to advocate for more inclusive approaches. However, there is a shortage of information and consensus on the process, methodologies, and techniques that are appropriate to achieve this. This paper compares two case studies from Peru and South Africa in which community-level assessments were conducted as part of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and explores the different conceptual models used to deal with scale and complexity, the methods adopted to deal with epistemology, and the different means of dealing with uncertainty in each assessment. The paper highlights the conceptual and practical challenges encountered by each assessment and discusses some of the conceptual and practical trade-offs involved in the selection of particular approaches. We argue that a boat navigating between unknown shores may be a more appropriate metaphor than a bridge, whose starting and end points are fixed and known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]