In the carbon world, conversations tend to revolve around methodologies, MRV systems, financial models, leakage, permanence. Yet the majority of project failures have little to do with technical design. They collapse much earlier, and much more quietly, when a project loses its social footing. Social acceptability doesn’t appear in a spreadsheet. It shows up in daily behaviours: a farmer who no longer waters seedlings, a chief who stops attending meetings, a nursery that remains locked for days, young trees cut with the vague explanation that “the goats passed through.”
If we want to understand what really makes a project durable, we need to look at what actually happens in the villages where NBS initiatives land.

Social acceptability is always about territory, memory, and invisible rules

In many rural areas, land is never just land. In Benin, a well-funded agroforestry project failed because the “available” public plots identified by government officials were, in reality, dry-season corridors used for generations by Fulani pastoralists. The project team had consulted the provincial administration, received all the signatures it needed, and assumed the area was unoccupied.
But the pastoralists—living on the fringes, not attending village meetings, and not considered “members” of the village—were never involved.
Predictably, the young cashew seedlings were grazed every year. Not out of hostility, but because the land had never truly been “public.” The project died without a confrontation; it died from a misunderstanding of land memory.

By contrast, in northern Ghana, a restoration project succeeded precisely because it treated land memory as a starting point. Before planting anything, the team spent weeks mapping customary use, sacred groves, community forests, water points, and pastoral mobility. The mapping exercise was less technical than diplomatic: it created space to uncover layers of meaning. One of those layers was an old clan cemetery, never mentioned during initial consultations because it was not considered something “one talks about with outsiders.”
The project shifted its planting zone to avoid it. This small adjustment generated a disproportionate amount of trust—and the project benefited from it for years.

The common mistakes exist — and they always have names and faces

The most common error is the illusion of agreement.
In Nigeria, a mangrove restoration initiative secured what seemed to be a strong endorsement from the local traditional chief. On paper, everything was aligned. But the chief had been appointed during a political dispute and was not recognised by half the fishing community. When the project organised its first public meeting, most fishermen didn’t attend—not out of disinterest but because they did not acknowledge the chief who convened it.
Months later, young mangrove propagules started disappearing.
There was no protest, no sabotage—only a quiet refusal to support a process that had ignored legitimate authority.

In Mozambique, it was not leadership but language that doomed a project. During an early meeting, a field technician casually mentioned that “carbon can generate a lot of income.” It was vague, but it was enough to create expectations of quick financial returns. When the first two years produced no carbon revenue—which is perfectly normal—the community interpreted the silence as a broken promise. Trust evaporated. A single sentence, spoken too early, had dismantled two years of work.

Kenya provides the opposite story. An agroforestry project there took a radically different approach: in three separate meetings—elders, women, and youth—the team explained that carbon revenues take time, that markets fluctuate, and that nothing was guaranteed. This transparency created credibility. When revenues didn’t materialise quickly, no one accused the project of deception. Trust had been built on clarity, not on anticipation.

What successful projects do differently — whether they shout about it or not

In projects that endure, one pattern always appears: an almost stubborn physical presence on the ground. In Madagascar, a dry-forest restoration NGO made an unusual choice: placing two community mediators in each village. They were locals, trained by the central team, but rooted in the daily life of the community.
Their mission was not “sensitisation.” It was listening. They picked up the weak signals—rumours, frustrations, shifts in family alliances, tensions about labour allocation.
When young men complained that nursery jobs went mostly to older villagers, the mediators reported it. The team adjusted the work schedule, redistributed tasks, explained the logic.
It is this constant micro-adjustment that creates long-term stability.

In Senegal, a project based on assisted natural regeneration put governance at the centre—not as a concept, but as a daily practice. Each village formed a committee where women held half the seats, not because of a gender quota, but because they were the ones managing hedgerows, leaf harvest, and food plots. They saw problems before anyone else.
This committee chose which areas to protect, decided on seasonal closures, and agreed on sanctions. The power was real. And because the power was real, the project lasted.

Social acceptability is not a component of a project — it is the project

All these cases point to the same truth: social acceptability is never something you fix later. By the time it becomes a problem, it is already too late. Communities rarely return once trust has broken.
This is why NBS projects succeed when their social architecture is designed from day one. When they see land not as polygons but as memories. When they understand authority not as hierarchy but as networks. When they explain uncertainty rather than hide it. When they listen longer than they speak.

A carbon project never collapses because of biomass modelling.
It collapses when the people who live on the land stop believing in it.

And conversely, a project with strong social acceptability can survive a drought, a delay in funding, or a methodological revision. It can even survive a change of government. Its resilience comes from its human foundation, not from its spreadsheets.