Territorial approaches invite us to consider multiple actors, multiple land use and feedbacks among actors and between societies and their environment. In terms of development, they emphasize on the importance of local scale governance systems as opposed to centralized top-down governance. Studying, managing and developing territories involves dealing with my heterogeneous actors, multiple land use and power imbalances. How can we encourage local actors to go beyond “business as usual” and transcend historical conflicts, collaborate and collectively re-think local governance of spaces and natural resources they share? Coexistence between agriculture and conservation is a major issue in the global South. There is more to coexistence issues than human-wildlife conflicts. By taking conservation beyond the boundaries of protected areas, Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) have created heterogeneous mosaics of land uses including National parks, Protected Forests, private conservancies, CBNRM areas and farming communal areas. The stakes are high and tensions between actors rooted in the history of these places. If they are to achieve their objectives of meeting conservation and rural development goals, TFCAs need to develop practices and methods that bring these different land users to meet, share and negotiate at the local, national and regional scales. In this paper, we come back on over 10 years of collaboration between researchers and local actors in Zimbabwe. Focused on a recent participatory modelling project, we show how a strong and long-term partnership between researchers and local actors creates mutual trust and allows the development of tools and arenas through which dialogue can take place, new local social dynamics can emerge, and innovative local governance practices can be designed.