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Recognizing the urgent need for sustainability, we argue that to move beyond the rhetoric and to actually realize sustainable development, it must be considered as a decision-making strategy. We demonstrate that sustainability assessment and sustainability indicators can be powerful decision-supporting tools that foster sustainable development by addressing three sustainability decision-making challenges: interpretation, information-structuring, and influence. Particularly, since the 1990s many substantial and often promising sustainability assessment and sustainability indicators efforts are made. However, better practices and a broader shared understanding are still required. We aim to contribute to that objective by adopting a theoretical perspective that frames SA and SI in the context of sustainable development as a decision-making strategy and that introduces both fields along several essential aspects in a structured and comparable manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation conflicts in protected areas are varied and context-specific, but the resulting effects are often similar, leading to important losses for both humans and wildlife. Several methods and approaches have been used to mitigate conservation conflicts, with an increasing emphasis on understanding the human–human dimension of the conflict. In this article, we present a revision of several conservation conflict cases in the management of protected areas, transdisciplinary and participatory approaches to address conservation conflicts, and finalize by illustrating the application of the nominal group technique (NGT) with the case of the human–giant tortoise interactions in Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos. In this article, we demonstrate the use of novel and systematic participatory and deliberative methodology that is able to engage stakeholders in a constructive dialogue to jointly identify and explore options for shared strategies and solutions to conservation conflicts. The results are comparable with other conservation conflicts cases around the world and illustrate the importance of generating legitimatized information that will further help policy and decision-making actions to address conservation conflicts in the management of protected areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]