Drawing on diverse experiences in participatory forestry and landscape management, the session examines how governance transitions, rural outmigration, reduced forest dependency, and shifting markets are reshaping community-forest relations. We will discuss legal innovations, digital tools, recognition mechanisms, and territorial approaches that offer new pathways forward.
We invite papers that analyze:
Governance transitions and representation of IPLCs in forest and biodiversity governance.
Social and demographic change and its effects on collective forest action.
Recognizing and scaling IPLC stewardship through OECMs and other legal-policy tools.
Reconnecting fragmented forests and communities via adaptive governance and co-management.
Rethinking community forestry models for long-term sustainability.
In Nagaland, northeast India, Community Conserved Areas (CCAs) represent one of South Asia’s most extensive Indigenous-led conservation systems, with over 400 documented CCAs governed by village institutions that protect forests and wildlife under customary law. These CCAs play a vital role in conserving forests and biodiversity, making them strong candidates for recognition as Other Effective area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs). Such community governance systems are central to transformative approaches where Indigenous institutions lead both conservation and livelihood decisions.
The Forest and Biodiversity Management Project (FBMP), initiated in 2021, builds on these long-standing traditions by strengthening the institutional, ecological, and planning foundations of 64 CCAs covering over 40,000 hectares across seven landscapes. FBMP’s multi-layered planning and implementation framework includes: (i) village-level plans and People’s Biodiversity Registers (PBRs) that guide site-level conservation and livelihoods; (ii) cluster-level CCA management plans that harmonize priorities across interconnected ecosystems; and (iii) landscape-level strategies that address cross-cutting issues. This approach translates Indigenous conservation priorities into structured management systems while retaining local authority and traditional knowledge.
Preliminary evidence suggests tangible ecological and social gains, including reduced hunting, improved forest cover, and stronger local institutions rooted in traditional governance. However, challenges persist due to resource limitations, trade-offs between livelihoods and conservation, evolving institutional capacities, and the short duration of project-based support. These reflect broader global patterns: Indigenous conservation initiatives thrive not only through policy recognition but through sustained capacity building and financing. FBMP’s demonstrates clear entry points for action while underscoring the need for multi-year engagement to translate plans into lasting outcomes.
To advance transformative change, FBMP focuses on three interconnected strategies: (1) consolidating community governance through legal and financial mechanisms that secure local control and long-term funding; (2) scaling technical support that integrates Indigenous knowledge with adaptive management; and (3) promoting policy recognition of CCAs to strengthen state and donor backing while safeguarding customary decision-making. The approach integrates local governance into higher-level biodiversity planning and offers actionable lessons for scaling Indigenous-led conservation within the Global Biodiversity Framework.
How to cite: Ao, S. and Agrawal, N. K.: Strengthening Indigenous Stewardship and Transformative Conservation: Community Conserved Areas in Nagaland, India, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-88, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-88, 2026.
Ecosystem restoration initiatives increasingly recognize the need for meaningful collaboration with Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IP&LCs), yet practical frameworks for integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) remain underdeveloped. This research addresses critical gaps in how restoration programs engage with community-held knowledge systems, particularly regarding Native Tree Species management in highland ecosystems. Situated in the Kenyan Highlands—an ecologically diverse region shaped by long-standing agroforestry traditions, indigenous stewardship practices, and complex socio-ecological gradients—the study examines how place-based TEK can strengthen restoration outcomes across montane landscapes.
Current restoration frameworks prioritize ecological and biophysical data while overlooking the sophisticated TEK systems that govern seed sourcing, storage, orchard management, and habitat restoration practices. This knowledge asymmetry undermines both restoration effectiveness and community ownership, perpetuating extractive approaches that fail to hold indigenous and local knowledge in parity with conventional scientific perspectives.
Our methodology employs participatory approaches—structured interviews, focus groups, and collaborative field assessments—to systematically document and analyze TEK-based practices. Rather than treating TEK as a supplementary source of data, we position it as foundational and complementary to ecosystem management, including species prioritization frameworks, restoration planning, and implementation. This transdisciplinary approach examines not only the ecological but also cultural, social, and economic factors shaping community participation in both ex situ conservation and in situ restoration to promote adaptive ecosystem management responses that remain inclusive and holistic in a climate of rapid change.
This work directly contributes to evolving good practices for equitable IP&LC collaboration in restoration, moving beyond superficial "stakeholder engagement" toward genuine knowledge co-production. By re-visibilizing the inseparable human-nature and human-human relations embedded in traditional management systems, the research develops a holistic restoration model that integrates ecological, cultural, and socio-economic variables. Specifically, findings will demonstrate how using TEK and conventional, scientific methods as complementary approaches enhances restoration outcomes, strengthens community stewardship, and builds long-term resilience under changing climatic conditions—offering practical insights for practitioners seeking to transform ecosystem management through equitable knowledge partnerships.
How to cite: Jenkins, J., Gichira, A., Gratzfeld, J., and Coletto, C.: Bridging Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Ecosystem Restoration: Community-based Native Tree Seed Conservation as a Complementary Approach to the Management of Kenya’s Highland Ecosystems, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-526, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-526, 2026.
Community-Based Monitoring (CBM) is recognized as a valid approach for data collection on biodiversity and climate effects. Strengthening of local communities agency in discussions on forest policy and recognition of land rights are well established as common co-benefits of CBM. Building on this experience, civil society organisations like Danmission have been using CBM as a tool to advocate for inclusion of Indigenous peoples and local communities in forest governance. In this context, data of relevance to conservation and climate-resilience has been secondary to the recognition of local voices in decision making processes on management of local and national resources. The characteristics and potential of CBM programmes, designed specifically to drive local and national policy changes, remain underexplored.
Drawing on experiences from Danmission programmes in Cambodia, Lebanon, Myanmar, Tanzania, and Kenya, we examine the design of monitoring programmes aimed primarily at advocacy and explore the degree to which the programmes supported the agency and recognition of local communities in environmental governance.
Through interviews with engaged communities and programme managers, the objectives of the Danmissions CBM-programmes, and the design choices made to support them, have been mapped. The the level of engagement generated by publication of monitoring results, has been mapped through interviews and analysis of media engagement.
The study shows that CBM programmes designed for advocacy are still generating high-quality, nationally and internationally relevant data, that contribute to monitoring national and global biodiversity targets. The agency of local communities is in turn strengthened by their ability to provide valuable input to these processes. CBM can also greatly increase national and international media attention on environmental governance, which in turn strengthen the recognition of local communities voices in public debates regarding natural resource management. Lastly, the study highlights the potential for CBM data to inform the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) and National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs).
The results show that CBM can be effectively used as a tool to enhance local recognition and agency in its own right.
How to cite: Brofeldt, S., Argyriou, D., Theilade, I., and Jürgensen, E.: Community Based Monitoring (CBM) as a driver for recognition of local voices, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-651, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-651, 2026.
Spiders have inspired cultures across time and geography, from Akan people’s Anansi to Lakota’s Iktomi, but remain part of the invertebrate gap in biodiversity teaching and research. A collaborative science-based interdisciplinary project transformed the effects of constructing a bridge across a canyon into a bridgebuilding among human communities while caring for some of the smallest animals in this ecosystem.
Around the time an arachnologist noticed large rocks split open in her study site, a US Forest Service Lands Specialist noticed the direct conflict of two permits: one for behavioral ecology research and environmental interdependence; the other for a multi-million-dollar bridge replacement project. When a spider population at this site faced tremendous impact from this project, Operation SpiderSave, was born.
Their combined efforts brought together nearly every department of a US Forest Service Ranger District to move rocks holding spiders’ shimmery egg sacs across the highway to create a “rock nursery” – letting spiders complete their life cycle and supporting overall ecological balance. Wildland firefighters, trail crews, a NEPA coordinator, a permit administrator, and the entire River Ranger crew extracted rocks, burying them in the same relative depth and angle as their original site within this nursery.
Spiders play key roles in ecosystems especially with insect population health, which in turn ripples out to impact fish, bears, eagles, anglers, river runners—and beyond. Operation Spider was not just protecting a single species. The volunteers’ actions were in support of our collective interdependence. Invertebrates like these form critical foundations of life and are experiencing dramatic global declines Spiders can remind us that vibrating any thread affects the entire web.
While we humans may not produce silk, we have imagination and capacity-for-care; combined these can increase the beneficial role humans play throughout the web of life together.
Operation Spider is a testament to how people can come together beyond politics and borders to share information to help unravel the mysteries of our world and put this knowledge exchange in service of our shared home. It also illustrates how sharing stories like this can inspire further actions.
Our fates are intertwined.
How to cite: Karikó, S., Milo, A., Radue, M., and Stiles, T.: Operation Spider: a Bridge, a Rock Nursery, and the Web of Life, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-577, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-577, 2026.
For millennia, Indigenous people have been guided by the values of co-existence, interconnectedness, and mutual respect between human and non-human relatives. There were no words for conservation, restoration, even philosophy; these were simply inherent in the relationship with land, which kept everything in a healthy state of balance. As settler colonialism persists, those values have faced an ongoing battle against Western ideologies of anthropocentric biodiversity conservation. The Coeur d’Alene Tribe faces ongoing challenges to the philosophical and political ethics that drive conservation efforts. Settler-colonialism prompted a forced attempt at the destruction of Indigenous land-based knowledge systems and replaced them with maximizing material value as the primary motive for conservation. This settler ideology continues to bring devastation to Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s wellbeing. Less than two centuries ago, massive resource extraction began in the area, leaving little undamaged, beginning with the fur-trading near extirpation of beaver by the mid-19th century; the removal of salmon and decimation of trout in Tribal waters; and widespread contamination of Tribal waters from upstream silver/lead mining. Forest biodiversity obliteration through removal of 78% of forest cover; the native Palouse prairie, which contained myriad plants of Tribal cultural significance, experienced a 99% conversion to monoculture agriculture with a 98% loss of biodiversity in the last century, inflicting near irreparable physical and spiritual damage.
Despite decades of landscape-scale restoration work and relationship-building, the Tribe faces continued opposition, most often from external partners’ unwillingness to acknowledge the values driving Tribal land management. The continued erasure of the destruction that accompanied Euro American settlement is apparent in Western conservation movements that still exclude the Tribe and are intertwined with the global environmental dispossession of Indigenous people by continuing to privilege extractive industries. The Tribe experiences the settler expectation of obligatory Indigenous accommodation to settler colonial philosophies in our efforts for biodiversity conservation on our own lands. Purchasing land back, competing for scarce funding, being diplomatic in predominately western realms, or compromising our own values to satisfy opposing players, are all present effects of settler colonial ideologies that threaten Tribal sovereignty and pervade the success of long-lasting biodiversity conservation efforts.
How to cite: James, A., Campbell-Daniels, S., and Laumatia, L.: Indigenous Land-Based Ethics and the Contradiction of Settler-Colonial Ideologies on Biodiversity Conservation, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-896, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-896, 2026.
Local Ecological knowledge serves as a shared cognitive framework that aligns conservation objectives with traditional norms, thereby facilitating collective action. However, the extent to which this knowledge influences conservation outcomes depends on the nature of community involvement and the structures of the stakeholders’ networks that mediate decision-making process. Integrating these perspectives can help identify governance failures and design collaborative systems that are ecologically effective, socially equitable, and resilient. We examined local knowledge of landscape elements, local actors’ perceptions of landscape change, and the drivers of landscape connectivity degradation using five localities in the Dahomey Gap region (Benin Republic) as case studies. Additionally, we investigated the involvement of local communities in landscape conservation activities (LCAs) and the structure of the stakeholder network. We surveyed 387 households. To identify dimensions underlying perceptions of landscape change, we analyzed the data using descriptive statistics, and exploratory factor analysis. Through social network analysis (SNA), we analyzed the structure of stakeholders’ interactions. The most acknowledged landscape change indicator was agricultural expansion. Climate-related hazards (drought, storms) as well as agricultural expansion were identified as the driving forces of landscape change. Most respondents were involved in activities such as afforestation/reforestation, environmental education, ecotourism, community development, integrated land management, participatory/community science, and environmental law enforcement. The results also show that education level, ethnic group, natural resources equity, place attachment, and role in the community significantly influenced involvement in LCA. The SNA revealed NGOs and local authorities as the network’s primary brokers. Community members, while they participate widely, do not occupy strategic bridging positions in the network. Researchers and local chiefdoms contribute to information exchange but do not dominate network coordination. In contrast, government agencies, tourism agencies, and international institutions appeared more peripheral. These insights can contribute to improving landscape management in the region.
Key Words: Local Ecological Knowledge; Dahomey-Gap; Benin Republic; Landscape conservation activities; social network analysis
How to cite: Agossou, P. S., Curatola Fernández, G., and Ifejika Speranza, C.: Integrating Social Networks and Local Ecological Knowledge in Landscape Management in Benin Republic, West Africa, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-791, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-791, 2026.
