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Local communities within Parque Internacional La Amistad (PILA)’s buffer zone will play the decisive role in determining PILA’s future as they mediate entry to and are the main users of the park. The original project will provide the tools and baseline data for the management of PILA. Post Project will use those tools to empower local communities so that the biodiversity and livelihood value of PILA’s forests continues to be well conserved and sustainably used. We will do this by increasing the capacity and ability of local communities to use PILA in a sustainable manner whilst ensuring that the central role played by local communities in PILA’s continued survival is recognised by national and binational authorities and enshrined in the Management Plan. This is based on a a small grass-roots pilot project, ‘Red Quercus’ (http://www.inbio.ac.cr/pila/comunidades_organizaciones_quercus.htm) a collaboration between local communities, Nature Conservancy and INBio that was successful in generating added livelihood values. We will use the biodiversity data and tools developed as part of the original project to apply this model to other local communities within PILA’s buffer-zone.