Format/Structure

A research-based conversation structured as a comparative dialogue that explores changes in conservation arrangements across Indigenous territories.

Long Abstract

Conservation initiatives and Indigenous land titling frameworks often converge around imaginaries of preserving collective spaces, codifying rights, and romanticizing nature-culture relationships. Yet these shared imaginaries frequently collide with contradictory national agendas, weak institutions, and exclusionary conservation models. Such tensions raise fundamental questions about who has the right to define, govern, and benefit from the territory.

For many Indigenous and local communities, conservation and land tenure policies come with unclear promises about access to benefits and little recognition of their own systems of governance and knowledge. Indigenous leaders and communities have actively developed strategies since the 1980s that challenge displacement and dispossession, reshaping conservation discourse through practices rooted in self-determination, knowledge, and territorial agreements. Drawing on political ecology, this panel examines how conservation and Indigenous rights intersect in both collaborative and conflictive ways.

We seek to explore three interrelated issues:

(1) How do realities on the ground compare to imaginaries about what conservation and Indigenous land titling will achieve?

(2) How do local/regional contexts, legal frameworks, and fraught timelines shape lived realities in the “leftovers” of fragmented landscapes?

(3) What alternative pathways—especially those led by Indigenous women, youth, and grassroots leaders in the Global South—point toward more just, inclusive, and ecologically grounded ways of practicing conservation?

We welcome contributions from across regions that look at how Indigenous communities navigate overlapping conservation and tenure regimes, question the gap between lofty narratives and lived realities, and imagine alternatives to exclusionary models. Our goal is to identify practical pathways for environmental governance that respond to cultural contexts, respect Indigenous self-determination, and take conservation beyond business-as-usual in the face of the climate crisis.

This Roundtable has 8 pending paper proposals.
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