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Enabling Pathways for Rights-based Community-led Conservation

Author: Rights and Resources Initiative, Forest Peoples Programme, and the ICCA Consortium

Date: September 17, 2025

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The Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) recognizes that durable conservation outcomes cannot be achieved without the rights, leadership, and knowledge of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, and local communities. This report assesses the legal frameworks and biodiversity strategies of 30 high-biodiversity countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America to evaluate progress toward rights-based, community-led conservation. The findings show both notable opportunities and persistent gaps that will either need to be seized or addressed if countries are to deliver on the GBF’s promise.

In many places, communities that have stewarded lands, forests, and rivers for generations still lack the legal recognition and protections they deserve.

We identify six opportunities that should be seized if countries are to deliver on the Global Biodiversity Framework’s 30×30 goals:

  1. Recognize communities’ lands and territories: States must secure communities’ tenure rights and respect their self-determined conservation priorities while ensuring that national laws and conservation policies do not dilute, contradict, or override these protections.
  2. Recognize Indigenous and Traditional Territories (ITTs) as a distinct conservation pathway: States should establish the necessary mechanisms to include and report ITTs within nationally recognized conservation areas under Target 3 of the GBF.
  3. Recognize FPIC: Countries must guarantee clear and enforceable rights to FPIC and meaningful participation in both law and practice.
  4. Guarantee women’s equal rights: Countries should reform all applicable laws + policies to explicitly guarantee women’s equal rights to participation in all conservation decisions, including women’s rights to membership, voting, and leadership within communities.
  5. Ensure National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) follow a rights-based approach: NBSAPs should be developed and implemented in full partnership with communities to ensure their rights are respected across all national targets; this includes measurable targets for community-led conservation to realize Target 3 goals.
  6. Bridge the policy/implementation gap: Rights-based legislative and policy reforms must be supported by concrete actions to bridge the gap between law and practice.

These actions matter. Without secure tenure rights and strong legal protections that support and recognize community-led conservation, states risk repeating the mistakes of the past and displacing communities in the name of protecting nature.

Nearly every country studied has potential legal pathways for community-led conservation. What’s needed now is political will, investment, and partnership.

          https://doi.org/10.53892/JVXN6355
          • Key Findings
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          Key Findings

          1. Traditional protected areas remain countries’ main approach to conservation, but are rarely governed by communities.
          2. Even though 26 of 30 countries have legal pathways to recognize community-led conservation in protected areas, many protected areas do not fully protect communities’ territorial rights.
          3. 29 of 30 countries have community-based tenure regimes that could be recognized under Other Effective area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs) and Indigenous and Traditional Territories (ITTs), but many lack the mechanisms to include these in nationally recognized conservation areas.
          4. Fewer than half of the countries legally define and protect communities’ right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC).
          5. Women’s rights to membership, voting, and leadership remain particularly weak.

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