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.