There is a 10 km gap between Kinabalu Park and Crocker Range Park in Sabah, Malaysia, which is occupied by local communities and used primarily for agriculture. The way this socio-ecological production landscape is managed influences the quality of ecological connectivity between these parks. The Kinabalu Ecolinc Project, conducted during the 2014–2021 period, attempted to ensure the ecological connectivity between the parks through a four-pronged approach of protecting forests of biodiversity value by establishing community-conserved areas, restoring degraded forests, making agriculture environmentally sustainable and economically profitable, and enhancing forest-based community tourism. To understand the current state of the project site and identify needs for future interventions, a rapid assessment was conducted in August 2023 in three communities. Community members expressed their strong wish for self-governance of land and noted that interventions that touch on land titles at various levels need to be addressed carefully. There were both active and rather reserved attitudes toward the promotion of ecotourism. Documentation of traditional knowledge, including ethnobotany, is ongoing or needs to be started. Additional stimuli seemed necessary to maintain the interventions introduced in agriculture. For spatial planning to meaningfully operationalize ecological connectivity in the case study area, proper management of the socio-ecological production landscape is key. The local communities need to be empowered as the guardians of the landscape and participate in a multistakeholder platform that harmonizes the interests and mandates of all those concerned about the area to which they have title. Where such a platform will require a reason and motive to form, we argue for the benefit of developing and implementing a regulatory framework for other effective area-based conservation measures (OECM). We also argue that a simple, integrative “coverage metric” can be used to facilitate interstakeholder dialogue.