Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar
In a first, the United Nations Environment Program issued a set of principles this month for private NGOs and funders to follow to ensure that the rights of local communities and indigenous peoples are protected in any conservation project. This might solidify a move away from exclusionary top-down approach.
A shrine of local deities sits in the heart of the bamboo forest in Pachgaon village in Maharashtra. Roli Srivastava/The Migration Story
The past month hasn’t been the best for global environmental policy. Global climate talks at COP29 in Azerbaijan ended in a whimper, and an agreement to curb plastic pollution failed to materialise at talks in Busan, South Korea. But amid the end-of-year gloom, came a sliver of a silver lining.
In early December, the United Nations Environment Program issued a set of principles for private NGOs and funders to follow to ensure that the rights of local communities and indigenous peoples are protected in any conservation project.
This news might not seem like a big deal. After all, it’s not a binding treaty or regulation. But the code reflects an important change in global environmentalism in recent years, especially for those who work in the countries of the Global South, from Tanzania to India. It’s a change that recognises that people need to be a part of conservation solutions—and may even be vital to their success.
For much of the past century, conservationists did not believe that. Instead, they pitted themselves against local communities, including the Indigenous groups and tribes that inhabit forests and grasslands. These communities were excluded, and even violently displaced, from their homelands in the name of conservation, with little recognition of their role in preserving the land or their right to have a say in its future. This “fortress conservation” model of national parks and sanctuaries originated in the United States in the late 1800s and spread to African and Asian countries through colonialism. To preserve nature, this model held, one must keep out humans.
The new UN principles solidify a move away from this exclusionary top-down approach. The shift stems in part from the negotiations over the Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted by countries in 2022, to ensure that 30% of the planet’s biodiversity is preserved by 2030. That framework adopted a human-rights approach to recognise the rights and role of local communities in this endeavour. “The biodiversity crisis is also a human rights crisis,” the code says, noting that local communities dependent on natural resources suffer the most from its destruction.
Studies have found a people-inclusive approach often results in better conservation. A recent review of over 600 empirical studies looking at the role of local communities and Indigenous peoples found that conservation governance that gave equal partnership or primary control to such communities was associated with more positive ecological outcomes. Similarly, a 2021 review of some 300 studies found that deforestation rates were significantly lower in areas where governments formally recognised collective land rights of Indigenous and Tribal groups. Between 2000 and 2012, deforestation rates in indigenous territories in the Bolivian, Brazilian and Colombian Amazon were “only one half to one third of those in other forests with similar ecological characteristics,” the report said.
Examples of this also abound in India. Across the country, many communities conserve areas of high biodiversity, including rare medicinal plants, in the form of traditional “sacred groves”, often centred around a local deity or temple. In the 1970s, local villagers, especially women, led a fight to save the forests of the Garhwal Himalayas from loggers, hugging the trees in the pioneering Chipko movement. More recently, in 2014, the Dongria tribals in the state of Odisha helped save their sacred Niyamgari Hills from mining.
More broadly, laws to empower local communities have helped conservation of forests in India, studies suggest. In 1996, India enacted the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA), to facilitate devolution of power to village councils and increase representation of scheduled tribes (see box: Understanding PESA). A recent study compared forest areas where the law had been implemented and where it had not found that “boosting formal representation for scheduled tribes led to an average increase in tree canopy of 3% per year”. Rates of deforestation also reduced in those areas, data showed.
Yet decades after the law was introduced, implementation lags in some parts of the country. Two of 10 Indian states where PESA was to be implemented haven’t even notified the rules so far.
That’s also the case with another law, the 2006 Forest Rights Act, which was intended to recognise the historical rights of forest dwellers and tribes over local natural resources. A survey conducted across five states found individual claims were recognised more than community ones, and that district and forest officials continued to wield disproportionate power. Later, the Act was challenged in the Supreme Court by conservation NGOs claiming it would result in land grabs and reduced wildlife protection. (The court responded by ordering the eviction of millions of forest dwellers, before staying the order.)
An estimated 300 million Indians depend on forests, according to a 2019 report. And around 1.7 lakh villages—more than a quarter of the total number of villages in the country--- are located near forests, according to the 2011 census.
The treatment of forest communities usually compares unfavourably with tourism and other commercial activity. A report earlier this year, titled “India’s tiger Reserves: Tribals Get Out, Tourists Welcome’, found that the country’s flagship wildlife protection initiative, Project Tiger, could displace more than half a million tribal and forest peoples. “The report also underscored the findings of the Comptroller and Auditor General on uncontrolled commercial and ecotourism activities in core areas of tiger reserves [in five states] even as forest dwellers were ousted without free, prior, and informed consent.”
In India, the forest department often determines the balance between people and parks. But in many countries, including in Africa, an outsize role is played by international conservation groups and funders—and it’s these groups that the new UN code is aimed at.
In Tanzania, for instance, the Masai have been fighting government attempts to evict them from national parks for the past few years. The tribe’s protests and petitions led the World Bank to suspend a $150m grant over concerns about human rights abuses related to a large park project. And in 2019, Buzzfeed News in a series of reports alleged that park rangers funded by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) violated the rights of local communities in African and Asian countries. WFF countered that the rangers were employed by local governments.
John Knox, the former U.N. special rapporteur on human rights and the environment who helped investigate those allegations, contributed to the creation of the ten human rights principles. “Indigenous peoples and others who live on undeveloped lands are on the front lines of battles against illegal mining, logging and poaching,” Knox wrote in a recent op-ed supporting the new ethics code.
Among other things, the UN’s ten principles ask conservationists to commit to funding projects that respect human rights; to respect the rights of Indigenous people to their ancestral land; to engage in good faith consultation with local communities, and to provide effective remedies from any negative impacts of conservation. The code also asks funders to ensure that law enforcement involved in conservation projects do not violate human rights and to protect rights in relationships with local government or business. “Every private organization and funder that engages directly in conservation activities or that provides financial or other support for such activities has a responsibility,” the code says.
The release of this ethics code for conservation is especially significant in the light of the global biodiversity agreement. As the world races to try and save or restore 30% of land and ocean by 2030, we are likely to see more parks and protected areas created in the coming years. How such projects treat the people living on those lands could determine their success.
UNDERSTANDING PESA Researcher Rubina Nusrat from the Centre for Equity and Social Development, National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, describes PESA as a 'Constitution within the Constitution’ in her 2023 study on the act’s implementation in Chhattisgarh. She describes it as a historic act because "it legally recognises the capacity of tribal communities to strengthen their own systems of self- governance or create new legal spaces and institutions that cannot only reverse the cultural and political onslaught on them but can also create opportunities to control their destinies.” The researcher notes: - PESA Act empowers the Gram Sabha - a council of a single village. This council can approve plans, programmes and projects and issue utilisation certificates, select beneficiaries for poverty alleviation and other programmes. - The PESA makes a consultation with the Gram Sabha mandatory before any acquisition of land in the village or before resettlement and rehabilitation of the project-affected persons in the village.
- PESA gives the Gram Sabha command over natural resources in the village, including minor minerals, water bodies, and minor forest produce. No mining lease can be granted without the prior recommendation of the Gram Sabha.
In another review of the act in the context of Odisha done in 2016, professor R.R. Prasad with the National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, describes PESA as an unprecedented law in that it gives radical self-governance powers to the tribal community and recognises its traditional community rights over natural resources. Source: Centre for Equity and Social Development, National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj - Compiled by The Migration Story |
Earth Shifts, a monthly column on The Migration Story, will analyse the impact of global green goals amid mounting climate uncertainties on lives and livelihoods
Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar is an environment and science journalist based in Mumbai
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