Reflection and Reconstruction of the Whole-Chain Path of “Popular Science Education-Training Empowerment-Industrial Transformation” in Communities Surrounding Nature Reserves with Community Participation

Communities surrounding nature reserves are the core intersection of ecological protection and livelihood development. However, the long-standing binary opposition between “protection and development” remains unresolved, rooted in the structural fragmentation of the collaborative chain of “ popular science education-training empowerment-industrial transformation ”. Taking the communities around Yunnan Wumeng Mountain National Nature Reserve as an empirical case, we focuses on the collaborative dilemma between nature protection and community development, and conducts reflection and reconstruction on the full-chain path of “popular science education-training empowerment-industrial transformation ”. Through methods including in-depth interviews, participatory observation and pilot verification, the study systematically analyzes and reflects on three core problems in the current path: the absence of subject roles, the disconnection between content supply and demand, and inefficient value transformation. The essence lies in the failure to achieve in-depth integration between ecological protection goals and community development demands, and thus a systematic reconstruction framework is proposed, which takes “ community participation as the core, demand-driven as the logic, and closed-loop collaboration as the mechanism”. The reconstructed path is fundamentally guided by the real needs of communities. By establishing a multi-subject collaborative network of “government + nature reserve + community + enterprise + NGO (Non-Governmental Organization)” and designing a hierarchical and classified content system of “ localized education-customized training-market-oriented transformation ”, it realizes a virtuous closed loop of “knowledge transfer-capacity improvement-profit feedback”. Pilot verification from 2023 to 2025 shows remarkable effectiveness of this path: residents' awareness of ecological protection has increased by 50%, the mastery rate of livelihood skills has reached 85%, community industries have driven the economic growth of surrounding communities by more than 6 million yuan, the forest coverage rate has risen from 82% in 2018 to 89%, and the number of key protected species has increased to 113. These fully verify the practical effectiveness of the full-chain collaborative model in solving the problem of “ opposition between protection and development”. This study not only provides an innovative practical paradigm of “full-chain integration and multisubject collaboration” for the co-management of nature reserve communities, but also offers a reference guide with both theoretical value and practical operability for promoting the symbiotic and win-win development of ecological protection and community development in similar ecologically fragile areas.