Community Stewardship for Transformative Biodiversity Conservation in Northeast India

Biodiversity finance and conservation strategies, in the face of escalating climate action and corporate priorities, must undergo transformative change. To be  impactful, they need to move beyond top-down, externally designed solutions and embrace community-led approaches rooted in place-based, time-tested stewardship practices, particularly in ecosystems of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs).

Northeast India, a critical part of the Indo-Myanmar biodiversity hotspot, is home to diverse ethnic communities with constitutional protections for local governance. Despite a tradition of shifting cultivation, the region maintains around 70% forest cover, fostering rich biodiversity. However, to ensure the sustainability and resilience of biodiversity conservation in these landscapes, there is an urgent need for a shift away from externally templated forest management models, usually promoted by the state, Development Finance Institutions (DFIs), and increasingly, the Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) market.

Recent work by some like-minded organizations highlights the compelling potential of community-led stewardship model. This approach demonstrates the critical role IPLCs play in sustaining socio-cological resilience of their bio-cultural landscapes. Community stewardship framework integrates care, knowledge, and agency, generating evidence of the profound, culturally rooted, multi-dimensional connections communities have with their landscapes and their significance for sustainability and resilience.

By assisting local communities and their organisations, in deploying participatory tools like GIS-based resource mapping, care economy tracking, and biodiversity assessments, Landstack empowers local communities to manage their landscapes. These stewardship actions, grounded in traditional knowledge and ethical care, present a holistic, locally-driven approach to biodiversity conservation that balances global conservation goals with local needs.

This model challenges the limitations of state-driven, canopy-density focused forest management and the commodification of biodiversity in PES markets. It positions stewardship as a long-term, locally led, non-market strategy that addresses both climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation, through giving-back and soft touch forestry by the communities.

Through community-based Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV), Landstack enables transparent tracking of stewardship practices by local indicators, ensuring better integration into policy and financing. This work shifts IPLCs from passive beneficiaries or project manager, to active agents of change, offering a transformative, just, and sustainable model for biodiversity conservation.