Transformative Pathways

Research Overview

Indigenous peoples and local communities conserve a significant amount of the Earth’s biodiversity through their customary practices, especially where their rights over their traditional lands, waters, resources, and knowledge are recognised and respected. Their lands cover at least a quarter of the globe and overlap significantly with biodiversity-rich areas.

However, currently their contributions to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity are not sufficiently recognised or supported, despite being crucial to the fulfilment of global biodiversity and climate goals.

There is enormous potential to scale up support for their contributions and to embed them into the post-2020 global biodiversity framework. This project aims to help fulfil this potential by co-developing community-owned biodiversity monitoring frameworks so that involved communities can collect, use, and present evidence, and demonstrate the outcomes of their actions.

This project is led by indigenous organisations in Kenya, Malaysia, Peru, the Philippines and Thailand and coordinated by Forest Peoples Programme, with ICCS as the academic partner. Other global collaborators are The Asia Indigenous Peoples’ Pact (AIPP), United Nations Environment Programme – World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) and LifeMosaic.

Find out more at the Transformative Pathways project website.

Project outline

The overall goal is that long-term biodiversity conservation and sustainable use by indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) is better recognised, supported, scaled up and embedded in all aspects of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. It will strengthen local level actions of IPLCs in six countries for self-determined sustainable land and resource governance and biodiversity conservation, ensuring the development and piloting of local approaches. It builds on local experience to engage national level actors to create an enabling environment for scaling up support to local contributions to biodiversity as part of achieving global and national Aichi targets. It combines this with effective partnerships and mechanisms for full participation of IPLCs in National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAP) processes at national level and global Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) processes, including monitoring and reporting. It draws lessons from local and national experiences to disseminate at regional and global levels.

Objectives

The overall goal of this project will be achieved through work in six partner countries and at regional and global levels:

(i) IPLCs undertake local initiatives for self-determined land and resource governance for biodiversity conservation, sustainable use and benefit-sharing

(ii) Development of new national partnerships and enabling measures to support the above

(iii) Development of effective partnerships and accessible mechanisms for full and equitable participation of IPLCs in NBSAP processes and in global CBD processes

(iv) Documentation, exchange, analysis and wider dissemination of lessons learned at local, national and global levels

ICCS’s role in the project

ICCS is approaching this project from both sides of the spectrum- by working with project partners to increase the capacity of indigenous peoples and local communities, and working to increase skills and awareness amongst conservation professionals. We are:

We have developed, piloted and tailored a set of innovative tools and approaches to monitor biodiversity, with input from partners and communities. For more details, see our four guidance documents for community-based organisations.
In collaboration with Forest Peoples Programme, we have provided training and are accompanying in-country partner organisations in participatory biodiversity monitoring using CoMapeo (https://comapeo.app/. We have been working mainly with the Ogiek of Mount Elgon in Kenya, who have designed data collection protocols informed by their traditional knowledge and using scientific methodologies including line transects, vegetation quadrats and camera traps. We are also working with communities in northern Thailand through Inter Mountain Peoples’ Education and Culture in Thailand Association (IMPECT) as well as with the Autonomous Territorial Government of the Wampis Nation in Amazonian Peru.
Based on the data collected during monitoring, we have supported our indigenous partners to demonstrate their contributions to biodiversity conservation to external audiences, including national governments.
We have also developed guidance for conservation professionals on the relationship between conservation and human rights.
We are opening spaces for indigenous peoples to share their perspectives to a conservation audience through strategic publications and presentations.

Project outputs

Guidance documents for communities

All our guidance documents can be found here: Transformative Pathways Guidance Documents – ICCS.

Peer-reviewed publications

Please see below.

‘Participatory’ conservation research involving indigenous peoples and local communities: Fourteen principles for good practice – ScienceDirect

Conservation policy is shifting to a greater focus on rights and equity, and supporting this shift is a rational next step for conservation science.

Key themes include procedural, methodological and ethical aspects of participation. We present 14 principles for good practice to participation in research. Together, they provide a novel framework for equity into conservation research.

Newing, H., Fisher, M., Brittain, S., Kenrick, J., & Milner-Gulland, E. (2023). How can we advance equitable, rights-based conservation? Oryx, 57(3), 273-274.

This paper was part of a special issue on human rights and conservation. Another paper in this issue, ‘We are our land – Ogiek of Mount Elgon, Kenya: securing community tenure as the key enabling condition for sustaining community lands‘ focuses on one of the sites we are working at through the Transformative Pathways project.