Meet Filipa and her work in Mozambique

For this project, Filipa’s journey has brought her back to the Netherlands, where she first studied anthropology before moving to Mozambique. There, her MSc thesis explored large-scale land investments and how local communities navigated the changes they brought. Captivated by the region, she stayed on, living and working on conservation and community-based initiatives for several years. While her work with local communities has felt personally meaningful, it also unsettled some of her assumptions. Too often, community engagement in conservation becomes a “ticking-the-box” exercise rather than an opportunity to build just partnerships.

That is why Filipa is thrilled to join the ABC Futures program. She looks forward to the time and space to think more deeply about the experiences and dilemmas she has encountered. Her research looks at how conservation organizations work with local communities, and how local ideas, priorities, knowledge, and leadership can play a greater role in shaping conservation initiatives.

She explores these questions around Gorongosa National Park, a landscape shaped by a complex history. During the colonial era, residents were violently displaced, and a brutal civil war further shattered the region’s social fabric, infrastructure, and wildlife. Filipa is also aware that, as a white European researcher, she navigates this context from a particular position. Familiarity with Mozambique is not the same as being from the place; it requires being mindful of the limits of her perspective and careful about how she tells other people’s stories.

Focusing primarily on anthropological research, Filipa will spend a lot of her time with local communities around Gorongosa, listening to their stories and learning how conservation is experienced and negotiated in everyday life. As a mother, she hopes to bring her toddler during fieldwork. This is partly a practical parenting decision, but it may also allow motherhood to become a shared part of her everyday life with other women in the communities.

Perhaps these everyday human connections are precisely what is missing in conservation practice and research. Global policies recognize Indigenous Peoples and local communities as central to conservation, but that recognition rarely translates into meaningful relationships or real influence. Filipa hopes to support that shift by encouraging conservation partners to engage through different values and practices. After all, meaningful change starts from within: with how we see, listen, make decisions, and relate to others.

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