Despite high global investment in projects designed to combine conservation with local development, successful examples were still difficult to find at the time this paper was written. In a wide-ranging review, the author identified the factors responsible for the disappointing progress: unfounded optimistic assumptions, inadequate evaluation and failure to involve local people fully. He recommended that our overall approach to conservation and development projects should be more cohesive, a large-scale and long-term process of adaptive learning, in which individual projects were deliberately focused on testing methods of systematic change rather than solving site-specific problems. Necessary features of these projects included true devolution of decision-making and thorough collaboration among NGOs, governments and professional researchers.