Gaining assent to the existence of intimate relationships among biodiversity maintenance, ecosystem services, legal frameworks, political practices, rural livelihoods, customary claims and environmental knowledges is relatively easy. Negotiating agreement on how the relative importance of these factors can be assessed theoretically, and on how the valued goals implicit in the everyday realization of each of these factors in conservation programmes can be balanced practically for the greatest long-term benefit, is extraordinarily difficult. The aim of the Singapore workshop was specifically to bring together natural scientists, conservation practitioners, NGO activists, social scientists, lawyers and representatives of indigenous communities to confront precisely these issues in the regional context of the Malay Archipelago. Constituted by two hotspots, Sundaland and Wallacea, the environmental problems of this region of mega-biodiversity are acute. Yet, it is also a region with some of the greatest cultural diversity and socioeconomic disparities in the world, sustained by some of the highest indexes of corruption and conspicuous lack of congruence between administrative sectors. On the one hand, Brunei and Singapore are among the wealthiest nations of the world on a per-capita basis and possess notable systems of social service provision, although supported by authoritarian developmentalism. On the other hand, Indonesia's profile is not so enviable, with 52.4% of Indonesians living on less than US$2/day (www.earthtrends.org; www.transparency.org), thus falling well below the standard set for the ‘millennium development goals’ declared by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (Fukuda-Parr 2004).