What enables conservation on Indigenous and community lands? Mapping the evidence to support rights-based approaches.

Stephanie Brittain

Helen Newing

7th July 2025

4 minutes read

Forests matter, for biodiversity, for climate, and for people. They cover nearly a third of the Earth’s land surface and support over three-quarters of terrestrial life. For an estimated 1.6 billion people, many of whom are Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IP&LCs), forests are vital to health, well-being, livelihoods, and cultural identity. They provide food, water, fuel, medicine, and spiritual connection. And increasingly, there is evidence that forests stewarded by IP&LC are under less ecological pressure than other lands.

In recent years, global environmental policies have caught up with this evidence. From the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework to climate agreements and UN declarations, the role of IP&LC in conservation is now widely acknowledged. But implementation still lags. Conservation finance continues to flow predominantly to government and private actors, and expansion of government-controlled protected areas remains a dominant strategy, often at the expense of Indigenous rights and community land claims.

So why this disconnect between policy and practice? One major reason may be a lack of coherent evidence on how best to support IP&LC-led conservation. In our recent Conservation Biology paper, we sought to understand what really enables conservation to succeed on Indigenous and community lands. We wanted to understand what enabling conditions – things like secure tenure, supportive governance, and respect for Indigenous knowledge- are discussed as key for effective conservation in the literature, and how they relate to ecological outcomes.

We constructed a systematic map of 182 peer-reviewed studies that looked at conservation outcomes on forested IP&LC lands. We focused specifically on ecological outcomes – like forest cover, species richness, and soil or water quality – because these are often the indicators used to measure conservation success in policy and practice.

We found that the most frequently studied outcomes were forest cover and forest quality, which makes sense given the rapid expansion of satellite data. But far fewer studies looked at species-level outcomes, like threatened species or invasive species, and even fewer explored ecological indicators like water or soil quality, or carbon sequestration. This points to a gap in how we understand the full ecological value of IP&LC stewardship.

We identified 20 enabling conditions, grouped into three categories: contextual factors beyond the community’s control (such as law, policy, and external land use pressures), conservation interventions by outsiders (such as funding or empowerment schemes), and internal community-level factors (like governance, traditional knowledge, or dependence on forest resources).

Legal land rights and supportive policy environments were the most frequently discussed contextual enablers. At the community level, strong governance, particularly communities’ ability to enforce local rules and exercise stewardship, was the condition most often associated with positive ecological outcomes. These findings reinforce what many have argued for years: that when communities have the rights, tools, and autonomy to manage their lands, conservation tends to follow.

Our review also revealed some biases. For example, many studies focus on how communities use land and resources, but far fewer examine external pressures such as  extractive industries or infrastructure projects that can degrade ecosystems from the outside in. This reflects a bias in the literature that often places the burden of conservation success or failure on the community itself, rather than on wider socio-political forces. Yet we know that at least 25% of IP&LC lands are under threat from development, including so-called green agendas.

This work contributes to the aims of the Transformative Pathways project, which supports Indigenous and community-led conservation and governance systems across the globe. By strengthening the evidence base on what enables IP&LC-led conservation to succeed, we hope to better inform policy, practice, and funding decisions that align with locally defined visions of stewardship and sustainability.

So, what does this all mean?

We need more nuanced, intersectional research that considers both ecological and social outcomes, and that recognises the complexity of conservation on IP&LC lands. We need studies that go beyond forest cover to include species, soil, water, and carbon, and that do so in ways that reflect community priorities, not just policy metrics. We need to shift the focus away from community characteristics and look more critically at the enabling (or disabling) roles played by external actors and policies.

The post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework is full of language about rights-based conservation. But if we don’t understand what rights-based conservation requires on the ground legally, socially, ecologically, we risk falling into the same traps of the past. Our hope is that this work is the first step in clarifying where we are, where the gaps lie, and what research and action are needed next.

Read the full paper here