From Rights and Restoration to Community Stewardship
Across the world's forests, grasslands, and wetlands, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) are the silent architects of biodiversity conservation. This is now well documented and acknowledged. 32% of the world's land and inland waters are stewarded by IPLC and 36% of key biodiversity areas lie with IPLC territories. As global frameworks, from the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to national forest and conservation policies, attempt to arrest the accelerating loss of ecosystems, the role of community stewardship has moved from the margins of conservation discourse to its centre.
Yet beneath this growing recognition lies a deep and persistent contradiction. The very communities whose generational stewardship has sustained these landscapes remain structurally invisible in the governance and financing systems designed to protect them. Less than 3% of global climate and conservation finance reaches IPLCs directly. National conservation strategies continue to be designed around state-led and technocratic approaches, treating communities as beneficiaries of conservation rather than as its primary practitioners. Where formal recognition has come, through instruments like the Forest Rights Act in India, Ancestral Domain titles in Southeast Asia, or community land rights frameworks in sub-Saharan Africa, it has opened critical space for communities to assert agency over their territories, resist extractive interventions, and participate in planning processes. Rights recognition matters deeply. But rights alone have not been sufficient to shift the underlying logic of how conservation value is understood, measured, and rewarded.
Stewardship as a Lens
At the heart of this track is a question that goes beyond rights: how do we recognise and enable the actual practice of community stewardship? Communities manage their natural landscapes not through periodic interventions but through continuous, daily acts of care rooted in deeply embedded ecological knowledge, representing a sophisticated system of ecosystem management that formal conservation science is only beginning to appreciate. This knowledge is experiential, intergenerational, and place-based. It is also largely undocumented and unvalued in the policy and financial architectures that govern forests and biodiversity.
The challenge of recognition operates on two levels. Intervention designers such as governments, conservation organisations and project developers, view communities as beneficiaries to be helped or labourers to be deployed, rather than as knowledgeable stewards whose practices actively sustain the ecosystems, these outsiders seek to conserve. But recognition is equally a challenge within communities themselves. Decades of exposure to technocratic knowledge systems and top-down development have led many community members to internalise a hierarchy that positions formal scientific knowledge above their own. Until both forms of misrecognition are addressed, the external tendency to overlook communities as active managers, and the internalised devaluation of their own knowledge systems, the promise of community stewardship will remain unrealised
The track invites sessions that cover:
How the recognition of community rights — to land, forests, and natural resources — has translated (or failed to translate) into genuine stewardship authority, and what conditions make the difference
What community-led approaches to forest and ecosystem management look like across different geographies and tenure contexts, and what they reveal about conservation models that centre communities rather than treat them as peripheral
How indigenous and local ecological knowledge can be repositioned — within policy, within institutions, and within communities themselves — from an afterthought to a foundation of conservation practice
The financing gap facing IPLC communities, and what more equitable models of conservation and climate finance — in design, governance, and delivery — could look like
How community stewardship connects to broader questions of climate resilience, biodiversity commitments, and sustainable land use, and what it would take for global frameworks to meaningfully reflect community contribute?