Transforming conservation: towards community-led nature governance
IIED works to shift conservation paradigms, policy and practice so Indigenous Peoples and local communities can lead. By scaling practical tools, tackling legal and institutional barriers and convening dialogues from country to global levels, we aim to strengthen equitable governance, change narratives and influence decisions at major policy moments through 2027.
In Guatemala, Indigenous women grow and manage the production of ingredients for organic shampoo, including aloe, cacao, avocado and honey (Photo: UN Women, via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Despite recent global commitments, top-down and exclusionary conservation still marginalises Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPs and LCs) and overlooks their contributions to biodiversity, their knowledge and relationships to nature.
Progress in recognising and shifting conservation leadership to IPs and LCs is hampered by a number of barriers, including:
- Narrow conservation paradigms that separate people from nature
- Insufficient recognition of rights in national laws
- Underlying injustices such as discrimination, power imbalances and historical violations of rights, and
- Capacity issues in protected areas and conservation institutions on how to address governance issues.
What is IIED doing?
Our overarching goal is to make Indigenous – and community-led conservation the norm – shifting paradigms, policy and practice, removing barriers to IPs and LCs leadership, and securing a change in conservation discourse and decisions over the next few years.
To fulfil this vision, we aim to:
- Roll out practical tools that help communities, managers and authorities develop better governance, share decision-making more equitably, and integrate a diversity of values into conservation
- Increase the understanding of legal, institutional and narrative barriers to more equitable governance
- Identify and strengthen innovative, rights-based pathways for the recognition of diverse forms of governance and relationships with nature, and
- Support the voices of IPs and LCs in global conservation policy by creating spaces for dialogue and advocacy.
Current activities
We are working on a wide range of projects to advance these objectives:
Understanding barriers to IPs and LCs-led conservation and to equitable governance, and how to overcome them
Through research with our partners, and dialogues with conservation actors, we are exploring the underlying barriers to shifting power towards IPs and LCs.
What are the enabling conditions for more equity in conservation? Which systemic challenges (in policies, institutions, narratives and attitudes) are slowing progress towards change? What kind of collective action are IPs, LCs and their allies already taking and how can their customary governance systems be better recognised?
This research is helping us inform global policy debates at the Convention on Biological Diversity, and at IUCN through the task force on advancing Indigenous and community-led governance of protected and conserved areas.
Additional resources: Advancing rights and equity in area-based conservation | Nanyuki road map for advancing rights and equity in conservation | Tackling barriers to social justice in conservation | Advancing equitable governance in area-based conservation (PDF) | Advancing Indigenous and community leadership of conservation requires confronting barriers to change
Assessing governance and equity in protected and conserved areas
Site-level Assessment of Governance and Equity (SAGE) is a site-level tool that helps stakeholders and rightsholders themselves assess governance quality and equity in their protected and conserved areas (PCAs) and agree and implement priority actions for improvement.
Under the Scaling-up Equitable Governance in Area-based conservation (SEGA) project, we aim to drive transformative change by deploying SAGE in the PCA systems of specific countries and supporting institutions to embed the results in both policy and practice. Complementing these efforts, SAGE-GT (for ‘governance type’) focuses on power balance assessment, with a view to enhance the power, authority and influence of IPs and LCs.
Inclusive nature action principles
IIED and partner organisations have set out a guiding framework for governments, donors, NGOs and other stakeholders to deliver more inclusive, locally-grounded nature action.
These eight principles aim to guide policies, programmes and finance to work with community contexts and strengthen collaboration, accountability and respect for rights and knowledge, so biodiversity efforts are more effective and more socially just.
In parallel, we are exploring how ‘inclusive conservation’ has been interpreted by different conservation agencies and what this means for practice on the ground.
Additional resources: Transformative change for global biodiversity: the role of gender equality and social inclusion. Background notes for the Wilton Park Conference, September 2024
Scaling out self-governed biocultural heritage territories
The Potato Park Biocultural Heritage Territory in Peru is a self-governance model where five Quechua communities conserve rich agrobiodiversity, wildlife and ecosystems based on Andean cosmovision, traditional knowledge and customary laws.
IIED is working with IPs and LCs and Indigenous NGOs (Asociacion ANDES and Society for Alternative Learning and Transformation) to scale out and adapt this successful biocultural territory model to different contexts in the Peruvian Andes and coastal Kenya.
We also work with the International Network of Mountain Indigenous Peoples to support efforts to scale out biocultural territories in 14 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Additional resources: Biocultural territories (on IIED's biocultural heritage website)
Understanding rights-based pathways
With our partners, we are developing case studies to understand innovative legal approaches that can support governance and self-determination of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in the conservation context.
These will include examples of how interactions between customary and statutory systems shape biodiversity governance in practice from Uganda, Ghana and Madagascar; and practical examples of Indigenous Peoples engaging with rights of nature approaches in Colombia and Uganda.
We will also convene a series of online dialogues to explore how diverse rights-based approaches can bridge the nature-people divide in law and policy, with a focus on how to ensure Indigenous Peoples’ and local community voices can shape the agenda.
Values of nature tool
This initiative focuses on co-designing a practical, user-friendly tool to support conservation organisations to identify and integrate different values of nature into their work.
The tool aims to support NGOs in acknowledging diverse local perspectives through participatory methods, mapping values across stakeholder groups and planning conservation actions.
This is especially useful in contexts where conservation may conflict with local livelihoods or cultural traditions, helping to surface overlooked values and foster mutual understanding.
First Line of Defence (FLoD)
FLoD uses an iterative learning approach to examine the design logic of programmes that engage communities in tackling illegal wildlife trade. It provides a structured process that brings together local communities, project designers and implementers to understand the context-specific motivations and assumptions that underpin the activities (legal and illegal) of local communities.
By aligning interventions with local contexts and enabling adaptation as conditions change, FLoD helps ensure responses are grounded, practical and more likely to deliver lasting results.
Additional resources: Local communities: the overlooked first line of defence for wildlife
Revitalising shared governance of protected and conserved areas
More equitable governance of PCAs is essential for meeting global biodiversity goals and upholding the rights of IPs and LCs.
Shared governance models, where authority and responsibility are co-managed by key actors at site-level, have delivered conservation that is both more equitable and effective. Yet in much of Africa it remains vastly underused.
Led by the IUCN WCPA Specialist Group on Governance, Equity and Rights and convened by IIED, this initiative aims to re-establish shared governance as a credible, scalable approach by clarifying concepts and roles, centring IPs and LCs leadership, and strengthening design, implementation and recognition so power-sharing becomes a practical route to more equitable and effective conservation.
Human rights and human-wildlife conflict
Together with partners, we are exploring what it means to apply a human rights-based approach to human-wildlife conflict, and aim to provide the international conservation community with practical ways to do so.
We are collectively producing guidance for potential duty-bearers, including governments, conservation organisations and private businesses, to better identify their responsibilities towards IPs and LCs whose rights may be impacted by their land use and conservation decisions.
We are also designing and testing – in India and Indonesia – an adaptable local-level multi-stakeholder tool that centres IPs and LCs voices and aims to improve trust and accountability between key local stakeholders.
Additional resources: Principles for inclusive nature action
Contact
Barbara Lassen ([email protected]), senior researcher (conservation, communities and equity)
