Manuscript for publication in the up-coming special issue in Ecology and Society on Cape Town’s urban ecology. Analyzing shifts towards people-centered conservation practice: a comparative study of urban biodiversity protection at four nature reserves in Cape Town Elin Israelsson [1] and Henrik Ernstson [1,2] [1] Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University; [2] African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town E-mail: henrik.ernstson@stockholmresilience.su.se INTRODUCTION The basis for biodiversity conservation has historically been through creation of protected areas that often exclude people (Adams et al. 2004, Gockel and Gray 2009). Failing to view people as an integral part of nature, this ‘traditional’ approach to natural resources management has repeatedly produced negative social impacts such as loss of rights to residence, use of natural resources that leads to precarious livelihoods, and loss of access to places of cultural value (Adams and Hutton 2007, Agrawal and Redford 2009). In South Africa, on top of extensive dispossession during Apartheid to divide people along racial and ethnic lines, people have also been relocated to make way for biodiversity conservation (Fabricius and de Wet 2002, Kepe et al. 2005). This exclusionary way of conserving natural resources has increasingly been criticized as ineffective and ethically problematic. In response, ‘people-centered’ conservation in protected areas, paralleled with notions like collaborative or community-based natural resource management on both protected areas and other tenure, has emerged within conservation policy worldwide (Brown 2003, Gockel and Gray 2009, Berkes 2004). By adopting the principle that local peoples’ needs should be integrated in protected area planning and management processes at the third World Parks Congress 1982 (Adams et al. 2004), the political landscape changed to promote more inclusive conservation practices that simultaneously tackle development and conservation (Hulme and Murphree 1999, Adams et al. 2004, Adams and Hutton 2007, Chan et al. 2007). The witnessed shift in conservation policies does not necessarily mean, however, that a shift has occurred in actual practices on areas assigned for biodiversity conservation (Hill 2005, Hulme and Murphree 1999). On the contrary, examples show that efforts to merge conservation and development often favour biological objectives (Benjaminsen et al. 2008, Kepe et al. 2005), intertwined with expert-oriented and undemocratic practices (Chan et al. 2007). A major challenge remains on how to embed humans as part of ecosystems processes (Berkes et al. 2003) in practical work on the ground; people-centered practices requires shifts in conservation objectives, embedding nature reserves in local communities, and change ingrained notions of what it means to be a nature conservator. This article focuses on nature reserves in the City of Cape Town (CCT), South Africa. This remarkable city arguably presents an important case study for exploring how policy shifts can induce people-centered practices since the contestation between conservation of biodiversity To be submitted.