Presentation short abstract

In this paper we tell stories from Maasai communities in Tanzania and propose a research agenda that transforms conservation metrics, beyond counting towards assessing and maintaining healthy relations—between people, land, and our more-than-human kin. And the stories we need to tell to get there.

Presentation long abstract

Conservation Science has historically relied on standard metrics of counting diversity, abundance, rarity, and scarcity from genetic to ecosystem levels. It has simultaneously relied on stories depicting the urgency of saving nature from and for humans, for future generations to see a glimpse of our past. These metrics and stories reflect a particular worldview that sees humans as outside of, destructive of, and in control of nature; capable of measuring objectively from afar and protecting for future generations. There are other ways of assessing the health of our world that do not rely on objective measurements, stories of detachment, or linear conceptions of time. These methods persist in many Indigenous communities around the world, despite actively being rejected by mainstream conservation. It is time to center such approaches now to address the call for transformative change to ensure that by 2050, “the shared vision of living in harmony with nature is fulfilled” (CBD, 2021).

Transformation requires more than adding historically marginalized voices into the current conversation. It requires changing the structure of the conversation, to think, act, communicate, measure, and govern differently. In this paper we tell stories from Maasai communities in Tanzania where conservation is achieved by strengthening relations between people, land, livestock, and wildlife. We propose a research agenda that asks what it would mean to transform conservation metrics and indicators to move beyond counting towards assessing and maintaining healthy relations—between people, land, and our more-than-human kin. And what sort of stories we need to get there.

Presentation short abstract

External actors increasingly seek to support biocultural conservation at scale to achieve global biodiversity goals. Through the case of a pastoralist-led biocultural initiative in Kenya, I argue that global funding systems must adapt to enable conservation to move beyond its colonial foundations.

Presentation long abstract

Biocultural conservation is re-emerging as a pathway that rejects exclusionary, (neo)colonial conservation methods and centres people’s relationships with nature (Gavin et al., 2015). Biocultural diversity has long been created and conserved in situ by on-the-ground actors, often Indigenous Peoples (IPs) and local communities (LCs) (Nemogá, 2016). Following decades of activism by Indigenous and local actors, external actors are now increasingly seeking to support biocultural conservation at scale to achieve global biodiversity goals. For example, the Global Environment Facility’s Inclusive Conservation Initiative (ICI) is providing USD $25 million in direct financing to IPs and LCs across nine geographical regions.

Biocultural geographies emphasise that attention to scale is vital to understanding biocultural conservation (Correia et al., 2025). Drawing on biocultural geographies, here I pose the question: To what extent are efforts to scale biocultural conservation moving beyond the colonial foundations of mainstream conservation? I explore this question through the case study of an ICI-funded project in northern Kenya which is re-centring the practices and diverse knowledges of four long-marginalised pastoralist ethnic groups. My analysis draws on research conducted alongside the Indigenous Movement for Peace Advancement and Conflict Transformation (IMPACT), complemented by five key informant interviews with global-level ICI actors.

Here I argue that attempts to scale biocultural conservation through existing global funding frameworks are limiting the potential to fully transform conservation practice. Drawing on the experiences of ICI, this paper offers insights into how funding systems could be better adapted to build toward a conservation practice that departs from its colonial foundations.

Presentation short abstract

The Champions Network supports locally rooted conservationists in mediating and initiating participatory conservation action.

Presentation long abstract

Conservation in the Indian trans-Himalayas involves complex, locally specific challenges shaped by variations in economy, polity, culture, animal behaviour, and ecology. These diverse conditions give rise to multiple pressures including changing land-use patterns, human–wildlife conflict, large-scale development, and accelerating climate change, that resist any ‘universal solutions’ approach. Climate change itself is increasingly understood as a ‘wicked problem’, a moment where competing values, and futures collide. In these ecosystems, such wickedness is intensified as local challenges entwine with global concerns, sitting at the cusp of unprecedented change. Addressing them requires plural perspectives. It needs scientific ecological knowledge in dialogue with indigenous local ecological knowledge, laying the foundation for a more convivial form of conservation.

Considering this, a network of “champions” from local communities across these fragile landscapes has been operationalised. Embedded in everyday life, these champions mediate, mobilise, and initiate participatory conservation action. The network seeks to reconcile divergent approaches by facilitating exchanges of knowledge, resources, and support across scales. Through mentorship of champions in Spiti and Kinnaur, including capacity-building workshops, documentation, and facilitating peer learning to support pilots of context-specific interventions on human–wildlife conflict and other local environmental priorities. They have also led nature education camps and activities with children. Notably, the work of one champion addressing human–bear conflict in Lahaul has improved local knowledge-sharing networks and was recently recognised through the Green Hub Conservation Grant.

Thus, the network functions as both; a mode of implementation and a form of inquiry, enabling innovative approaches to emerge from the ground up.

Presentation short abstract

This paper discusses the Sela Parv, a tree-planting festival celebrated by Van Gujjar pastoralists in India. It is a tradition that carries cultural and ecological significance while also challenging colonial conservation models that have actively dispossessed them, serving as forms of resistance.

Presentation long abstract

Every year at the end of July, in the forests of Uttarakhand, Van Gujjar pastoralists gather to celebrate Sela Parv, their traditional tree planting festival. Men, women, children, and youth participate in planting native trees, singing ‘Bainths’, sharing food, and engaging in dialogue with allies, researchers, and state officials, including the forest department and the local judiciary. Rooted in their cultural practice of “Needhi Pratha,” which supports tree diversity along their migratory routes and ensures fodder for their buffaloes, the once-forgotten ten-day festival was revived by the Van Gujjar Tribal Yuva Sangathan, a youth-led collective of and for the community. The Sela Parv serves as an opportunity for the community to ensure the revival and continuity of traditional management practices, and to legitimise their presence and role in the forest to a conservation apparatus that has marginalized and criminalized them for decades. A caring yet assertive articulation of resistance to exclusionary, colonial models of conservation, the Sela Parv approaches conservation through a symbiotic lens, viewing the community as active participants rather than destructive interlopers. It speaks of a story of revival and resilience, of inclusion and celebration. Drawing on Indigenous political ecology and scholarship that speaks to anti-colonial ways of knowing and caring for the land, this paper argues that the Sela Parv is an embodiment of ‘radical resurgence’, and provides insight into what doing conservation otherwise could look like.

Presentation short abstract

Blackfoot-led buffalo reintroduction in Glacier & Waterton Lakes National Parks shows how Indigenous-park relations are improving, as parks are supporting Indigenous ecologies and sovereignty. We also show how parks are important to Indigenous Peoples through education and ecological protection.

Presentation long abstract

The Blackfoot-led Iinnii Initiative is reintroducing free-roaming buffalo – iinnii in Blackfoot – onto traditional Blackfoot Lands, including into Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks across the U.S.-Canada border. This provides a concrete path for helping heal the fractured relationship between the Blackfoot and the parks. Reflecting a long history of dispossession by parks, Glacier and Waterton played key roles in taking over Blackfoot lands and instituting a new knowledge system based on Western wildlife management. Iinnii’s return advances debate on Indigenous-national park relations in two ways. First, it shows that we need a richer and more nuanced understanding of Indigenous-park relations that captures how this is changing. Today, Tribes and other Indigenous Peoples are rebuilding not only their presence in parks but also bringing back Indigenous and in particular relational ecologies, and this is supported by park administrations. This, however, is just the beginning of much-needed changes that may translate, for instance, into more intensive co-management that embraces Indigenous ecologies and even land back. Second, despite their harms, parks can remain important to Indigenous Peoples. They can harness their public education mission to reinforce Indigenous ecologies, belonging, and self-determination. Parks also largely refused industrial development within their borders to protect the land and its resident creatures. While not by design – and even done at the expense of Indigenous Peoples – this has often protected Tribal homelands, providing opportunities for reconnection, the return of culturally significant species, and the potential rewriting of wildlife management based on reciprocity and abundance.

Presentation short abstract

Drawing upon more than twenty years of research in Southern Africa, I interrogate moments of transformation that suggest the possibility of alignment between indigenous and global conservation agendas.

Presentation long abstract

The expansion of global conservation agendas around the world has coincided with European colonialism, indigenous population displacement, community-based initiatives, Western tourism, and global conservation agendas. Geographic scholarship and other impactful work within the social sciences have effectively demonstrated the deeply rooted colonial and mainstream conservation agendas that have worked to prioritize biodiversity often at the expense of vulnerable human communities. This scholarship has effectively shown how global conservation demarcates geographic territory, identifies what is understood as an illicit livelihood practice, elides indigenous knowledge and livelihoods, all while articulating how these features are embedded within broader political and economic systems. But are our collective futures so clearly defined? Are we beholden to these historical dynamics at the expense of identifying new possibilities for indigenous livelihoods and biodiversity conservation? Drawing upon more than twenty years of research in Southern Africa, I interrogate moments of transformation that suggest the possibility of alignment between global and local conservation agendas. In so doing, I interrogate the implications for long standing work in political ecology, ecological anthropology, conservation science, and social-ecological systems to envision alignments between the global and the local, that offer possibilities for how both human and the more-than-human can flourish in our collective future worlds.

Presentation short abstract

Meta-ethnographic analysis of 612 quotations across 68 case studies examines how Indigenous Peoples and local communities experience locally-led conservation. Findings reveal resistance and alternative-building as unified practice, with consciousness-building constituting conservation work itself.

Presentation long abstract

This research examines how Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IP & LC) experience and describe the implementation of locally-led conservation. While conservation scholarship increasingly recognizes IP & LC as central to biodiversity stewardship, most research examines conservation through ecological outcomes or governance structures rather than how communities experience implementation. Questions remain about how IP & LC articulate structural constraints on their agency and conceptualize relationships between confronting external impositions and building territorial alternatives. This study employs meta-ethnographic analysis to systematically examine 612 verbatim quotations from IP & LC and other conservation actors across 68 case studies, enabling pattern identification while maintaining contextual richness often lost in quantitative syntheses. The analysis reveals four major themes: IP & LC confronting external actors who dismiss traditional knowledge, undermine governance systems, and break partnership promises; navigating conservation policies that create constraint spectrums ranging from absolute dispossession through coerced compliance and bureaucratic impossibility to tokenistic consultation (structural violence perpetuated despite official acknowledgment of dysfunction); resisting appropriation that extracts Indigenous practices while severing relational meanings (epistemic violence); and building alternatives through dismantling internalized oppression, constructing knowledge-based conservation practices, and policy advocacy. This study makes four theoretical interventions: resistance and alternative-building operate as unified practice; the constraint spectrum represents structural violence by design; internal consciousness-building constitutes conservation work itself; and appropriation operates as epistemological foundation enabling structural constraints. These findings reframe IP & LC agency not as reactive opposition but as generative practice refusing complicity with structural violence while building territorial futures on their own terms.

Presentation short abstract

Participatory more-than-human ethnographic work on understanding relationality between people and wild Asian elephants in rural India provide multidimensional provocations to rethink conservation interventions, beyond the dominant techno-managerial paradigms.

Presentation long abstract

Asian elephant conservation is a major challenge in Indian conservation sector, and it is primarily done through managing human-elephant interactions with techno-managerial interventions. Different kinds of technical barriers that separate human and elephant spaces, outreach and awareness sessions targeted towards people who live alongside elephants, developing livelihood strategies to reduce costs of losing property to elephants dot the strategic landscape where ‘turning conflict into coexistence’ becomes the motto of the conservation sector. While conflict and coexistence become buzzword in the elite conservation space, our participatory more-than-human ethnographic work in rural Assam, India showed that such tech-centricity either neither acknowledge historical trajectories through which current human-elephant encounters have emerged, nor addresses relational, politico-affective ecologies that people develop with elephants due to long term co-occurrence and habitation. Through a more-than-human political ecology framework, we developed an understanding of the relational ecology which merged ecological history of the place, class-gender-ethnicity differences, elephants’ mobility in the landscape, and afterlives of conservation artefacts, such as solar electric fences. Such long-term, in-depth, participatory understanding provide provocations towards thinking conservation interventions differently, such as catering to peacebuilding, reducing ethnic differences, addressing gendered emotional and material needs, understanding history better in order to reach root causes of negative human-elephant interactions, and finally developing more-than-human justice-based actions that takes care of elephants’ needs as well.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how relational ecology shapes mainstream conservation in Canada. It argues that for relational ecology to go mainstream, systematic changes are needed in conservation structures (policy, processes), narratives (discourse, education), and practices (operations, metrics).

Presentation long abstract

As the momentum for Indigenous-led conservation in Canada has grown so too has the interest in a conservation practice more aligned with Indigenous approaches to land and water stewardship. The Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership has worked to support the establishment of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas and transform existing protected areas to be more aligned with Indigenous knowledge systems, legal orders, and worldviews. By examining several instances in which mainstream conservation is being transformed, this paper identifies the opportunities, challenges, and tensions that arise in building a new conservation practice rooted in relational ecology. While by no means 'mainstream', we are seeing a shift in how conservation is understood. Conservation actors are instigating policy changes to support the shift and demanding tools that better acknowledge the contributions of relational ecology. This paper argues that in order for relational ecology to go mainstream, systematic changes are required in the structures (processes that shape conservation including governance), views about conservation and relationships to nature (discourse, narratives, and education), and practices (what people do with the intention of advancing conservation).