Conservation and Geography II: Conservation,Justice and Indigenous People

Abstract

Indigenous people have been singing out for transformative change in the way people, communities, and societies relate to nature. Their calls are rooted in connections to the ecologies they have carefully stewarded over millennia. They follow the profoundly damaging ruptures of the combined histories, legacies, and ongoing forces of colonialism, extractive capitalism, and white supremacy. In this second progress report on conservation and geography, we consider how the calls of Indigenous people for renewed attention and action to how nature is understood, practiced, and governed are being received. Situating our author collaboration within our responsibilities to Country, we first reflect on messages brought by Indigenous people to the 32nd International Congress for the Society of Conservation Biology. We then chart: (1) how justice is being enacted from principles to practice; (2) how Indigenous ontologies and worldviews may re-orientate conservation; and (3) the courage of practice, policy, and research coalitions re-envisaging fortress approaches to biodiversity protection. Conservation, while often viewed as a benign or complimentary influence in the fight for Indigenous justice, is deeply entangled in the injuries incurred to both people and nature over centuries. How we listen to and head these calls for change now, matters more than ever.

Singing out for Conservation

At the opening ceremony to the 32nd International Congress for Conservation Biology, Baringa Barambah, guided by Auntie Maroochy Barambah welcomed some 2000 delegates to Meanjin (Brisbane, Australia) and the Country of the Turrbal and Yjagera peoples, with song. As renowned singers, and song makers, these women sang in the language of their ancestors, connecting the audience through millennia of culture in the vibration and resonance of sound, to creation stories, to histories of dispossession, and to hopes for a future of healing. In Australia, a welcome to Country is a ceremonial protocol, situating visitors to the place they have arrived at, and to their responsibilities to care for Country while they stay. It encapsulates how diverse peoples express their complex and intricate relationships with nature and community across time, to all that is, has, and will be (Rose 2000). And it remains a powerful statement of ongoing connections to place, and an expression of Indigenous sovereignty, even while it has become politicized as perfunctory (Jervis-Bardy 2025). This particular Welcome was especially impactful, setting the tone and direction of the meeting to come. In the days that followed, the visible presence of over 150 Indigenous delegates, the commitment of the National Indigenous Environmental Research Network (NIERN) to draft a statement to the conference, as well as the large number of sessions addressing Indigenous people and conservation, contributed to a palpable sense that something different was imminent for conservation.

Conservation is often positioned as a crisis discipline (Stirling and Burgman 2021; Montgomery et al. 2024), because it responds to the problem of biodiversity loss and the ongoing threats facing what remains. This positioning is no less obvious now in the lead up to 2030 and with planning ahead for 2050 (Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework), as organizations, governments and coalitions jostle over commitments to targets for the protection of biodiversity in light of ongoing damage and the existential threats of climate change. Yet scholars have mooted for some time that the discipline itself faces a crisis related to values, amongst other things (Chan 2008). More recently, there is a steadily growing chorus reiterating ideas that Indigenous people have been noting for many decades, which is that to affect the quantum leap of change required to protect and enhance biodiversity, conservation must look inward. It must re-examine its historical and ongoing problematic relationship to Indigenous and local peoples, place justice and the rights of Indigenous and local peoples within its remit, and listen to, facilitate, and empower Indigenous leadership and knowledge about and for the natural world (Dawson et al. 2021; M'sɨt No’kmaq et al. 2021). Indeed, for a flourishing coexistence (Atchison et al. 2024; Moon et al. 2025) to be realized, Indigenous people, practitioners, and policy makers have harmonized a relatively straightforward message, that there can be no effective conservation at scale, or of the kind being called for, without justice (Martin 2017; Armstrong 2024).

This progress review charts the latest body of work addressing conservation, justice, and Indigenous people from across the interdisciplinary field of conservation in the sciences, arts, and humanities. This body of work builds on and develops from decades of work by scholars examining the historical and problematic legacies of colonialism and extractive capitalism for Indigenous people and conservation (Adams and Mulligan 2012), and it takes conservation into new places and spaces, as coalitions of openness to other ways of doing conservation emerge (Gillette et al. 2023). In synthesizing this work, we situate ourselves as scholars with privilege in the academy, and geographers with responsibilities to listen to and elevate the voices of ancestors, elders, colleagues, and nonhuman kin who have gone before us in caring for communities and environments. Our authorship collaboration lives and works on Dharawal, Wadi Wadi and Yuin Country on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, and includes respectful and reciprocal relationships of learning between established non-Indigenous scholars (JA and LH) with settler heritage and Gundungurra woman (CA), with lived experience and who is an early career scholar. We share a commitment to decolonizing conservation and hold obligations to highlight in fora such as these, where relationships of care between people and environments are prioritized. We do this through our curation of scholarship in the following, which prioritizes and highlights the scholarship and voices of Indigenous people.

Justice, from Principles to Practice

A growing body of conservation scholarship is addressing how justice and equity can be enacted through Indigenous-led practice, participation, and decision-making in biodiversity partnerships and governance. This section explores the conceptual underpinnings for enacting justice, emergent practice-based principles, and the ongoing challenges of translating these principles into practice.

Two key ideas underpin calls for justice in conservation concerning Indigenous people; that conservation must be decolonized, and that relationships are at the heart of meaningful change. Indigenous-led conservation governance requires a fundamental shift away from the colonial and capitalist structures that underpin much contemporary conservation effort (Corbera et al. 2021; Layden et al. 2025; Eichler and Baumeister (2021). Corbera et al. (2021) for example, argue that decolonizing biodiversity conservation requires a disruption and resistance to the mainstream conservation paradigm, and propose principles that include recognition, reparation, epistemic disobedience, relationality, and power subversion to understand historical legacies and work towards healing. As many are noting, just and equitable conservation depends on a shared understanding of settler-colonial legacies and the extent to which partners acknowledge the unequal historical, political, and ongoing colonial context of conservation itself (Kamelamela et al. 2022; Eichler and Baumeister 2021; Layden et al. 2025; Saif et al. 2022).

Regarding transformative biodiversity governance, the shift in focus toward Indigenous leadership, equitable participation, and fair decision-making necessitates people and organizations coming together in ways that prioritize justice, trust, and power redistribution, guiding concepts often ignored in policy making (Pickering et al. 2022). Recent work therefore focuses on how to interpret and apply principles that will ensure fair, transparent, and just decision-making (Pickering et al. 2022; Ruano-Chamorro et al. 2022; Saif et al. 2022). Ruano-Chamorro et al. (2022), for example, promote a framework for procedural justice in formal conservation decision-making, emphasizing that effective implementation must embrace the plurality, situatedness, and complexity of justice conceptions across different sociocultural contexts. Their focus aligns with the broader aims of Pickering et al. (2022) who argue that a multidimensional understanding of justice that encompasses procedural and distributive fairness, and intergenerational, interspecies, and sociocultural considerations is fundamental to achieving transformative biodiversity governance at local and global scales.

In practice, achieving meaningful relationships in conservation requires actively addressing the deep-seated power imbalances that undermine trust (Eichler and Baumeister 2021; Saif et al. 2022; Shackleton et al. 2023). Accordingly, Saif et al. (2022) propose a framework that explicitly links trust, justice, and power and apply it to case studies. Exploring how interdependencies play out in practice, they caution that building trust without tackling underlying power asymmetry risks reinforcing existing inequalities within conservation relationships. While Saif et al. (2022) draw on environmental justice theory to orient and develop a framework that links concepts of justice to trust, Nikolakis and Hotte (2022) consider how to shift relationships into a more ethical space. In this instance, engagement, introspection, and reflection are key traits that can be implemented towards honesty, integrity, and reciprocity. Likewise, Shackleton et al. (2023) draw on social theories of power to direct conservation practitioners and researchers to better engage with power in research and practice.

Moving from principles to practice, scholars note that while acknowledgement and recognition of Indigenous peoples’ rights and knowledge systems are essential starting points, they are not enough on their own. Effective conservation requires a fundamental shift beyond Western, top-down approaches to embrace such knowledge as part of Indigenous-led governance (Martinez et al. 2023; Newing et al. 2024) and biocultural frameworks (Kamelamela et al. 2022; Nelson and Reed 2025). A fundamental challenge in this shift is negotiating ontological difference, or as Sabaheta (2025) refers to it a ‘deep transformative Unlearning’. More on Indigenous ontologies below but we highlight here that some communities are already moving forward with Indigenous-led stewardship, and these examples serve as models for how to work with ontological difference and bring principles of Indigenous led governance and inclusion into practice (Campion et al. 2024; Jacobs et al. 2022; Martinez et al. 2023; M’sɨt No’kmaq et al. 2021). For instance, Martinez et al. (2023) advocate for moving beyond the conventional North American model of wildlife management toward one centered on principles of relationality and kincentricity. Their examination of three stewardship programs (beaver, elk, and condor) highlights how these worldviews, embedded in lived experience, offer models for future conservation that prioritize collective responsibility and less hierarchical conservation practices. Similarly, Kamelamela et al. (2022) describe the biocultural framework at the heart of a Hawaiian forest restoration project. They demonstrate how conservation can be guided by Indigenous principles, such as building trust, understanding injustice, enhancing cultural values, focusing on community benefits, and cultivating a sense of joy and shared purpose. Expanding on this need for transformation, Nelson and Reed (2025) argue that nature-based solutions cannot be separated from Indigenous sovereignty, justice, and leadership. Instead, they advocate for incorporating Indigenous knowledges and ethical frameworks to facilitate respectful and meaningful integration of different knowledge systems.

Alongside these examples, a series of good practice principles and guidelines for partnerships have also emerged. Based on their experience working in collaborative projects, Newing et al. (2024) provide a practical framework of 14 principles for ethical participatory conservation research with Indigenous peoples and local communities which cover ethical considerations across the research process, such as tailoring the approach to the local context, engaging communities early, building on traditional knowledge, ensuring free prior and informed consent, and working to reduce power imbalances while respecting intellectual property and cultural rights. To address structural challenges within Indigenous conservation partnerships, Jacobs et al. (2022) unsettle marine conservation by centering Indigenous voices within the “7 R's” framework based on rights, respect, responsibility, relationships, reciprocity, relevance, and reconciliation. From Australia, the ‘Our Knowledge Our Way’ guidelines establish a foundation for best-practice in Indigenous-led land and sea management based on “strengthening Indigenous knowledge, strong partnerships, sharing and weaving knowledge, and supporting Indigenous networks” (Woodward et al. 2000: 20).

Despite the emergence of principles and pathways for just conservation noted above, there are enduring challenges that limit or prevent principles under discussion from being fully realized. A primary challenge is that conservation is a political process susceptible to state and neoliberal control. For example, Sylvander (2021) illustrates through the “territorial cleansing” policy in Nicaragua, how conservation can be a tool for state power and exclusion even when Indigenous territories are legally acknowledged. This political reality means that even seemingly progressive approaches can unintentionally uphold colonial structures by limiting Indigenous leadership and knowledge (Martinez et al. 2023; Nikolakis and Hotte 2022; Townsend and Roth 2023). While Indigenous-led conservation produces important outcomes, partnerships between Indigenous peoples and conservation organizations continue to struggle with issues of power and integration of worldviews and knowledges (Nelson and Reed 2025; Nikolakis and Hotte 2022). Schneider's (2023) analysis of buffalo restoration in the American West demonstrates that efforts can still uphold settler-colonial relations by focusing only on the work at hand without unsettling the underlying system responsible for its destruction or recognizing the deep relationality between Indigenous people and more-than-human kin. These struggles also manifest as fundamental challenges across the research process, including issues with local participation, methods for data collection, and ethical oversight (Newing et al. 2024).

Finally, the aspirations of co-production can be undermined by significant practical and institutional barriers. Kadykalo et al. (2021) found that despite a stated value for diverse knowledges, conservation managers rely less on Indigenous or local knowledge due to a lack of trust, concerns of reliability, and effective knowledge exchange. Integrating diverse knowledges is further complicated by short-term funding cycles and a lack of institutional capacity, especially when reporting systems are privileged over placed-based Indigenous worldviews, kin obligations, and caring practices (Campion et al. 2024; Kadykalo et al. 2021). Integrating Western science with Indigenous and local knowledge requires dedicated resourcing, time, and a change in institutional culture that values diverse knowledge systems, understands the need for long-term relationship building, and supports the implementation of procedural justice policy levers (Ruano-Chamorro et al. 2022).

Indigenous Ontologies and Worldviews

With the challenges noted above in mind, here we turn to the actual and potential differences that Indigenous thinking makes to conservation. Indigenous ontologies open conservation to the truth that life is relational, calling people to practice care, responsibility, and accountability to their more-than-human kin. Taking these ontologies seriously reorients conservation from managing “resources” toward sustaining reciprocal responsibilities enlivened through ceremony, law, language, and ways of being (Aini et al. 2023; McAllister et al. 2023; Campion et al. 2024). Rather than a single alternative to Western naturalism, Indigenous worlds are plural and place-made, yet share commitments to relationality, kinship, and obligations that unsettle nature–culture binaries (Fletcher et al. 2021; Kelbessa 2022; Martinez et al. 2023).

Work from northern Australia illustrates how centering ontological difference changes both the “what” and the “how” of conservation. The Balpara approach keeps ranger programs answerable to Country and clan by walking slowly, camping together, and using Balpara (companions) to shape engagements with outside agencies, so that monitoring and planning remain expressions of kin obligations rather than bureaucratic outputs (Campion et al. 2024). This is not accommodation of cultural values within conventional paradigms, but rather assertion of a pluriverse (Escobar 2011) in which activities are co-constituted with Country, funders accept long timelines, and non-Indigenous partners inhabit ethical uncertainty. In Aotearoa (New Zealand), Kaitiakitanga is often mistranslated as stewardship, yet McAllister et al. (2023) show its meanings are embedded in Māori cosmologies, for example, whenua as both land and placenta, binds guardianship to intergenerational relations and authority. Superficial uptake risks managerial slogans. Instead, meaningful engagement requires processes aligned with tikanga (customary law), mātauranga (knowledge systems), and iwi/hapū (governance) (McAllister et al. 2023).

In some jurisdictions governance is already guided by the wisdom of Indigenous ontologies. In Papua New Guinea for example, locally founded non-government organization Ailan Awareness grounds marine management in Vala, a ritual law renewing ecological and social relations through ceremony and Elder authority, demonstrating that what outsiders may deem non-scientific, performs concrete regulatory functions (Aini et al. 2023). In other areas, scholars note ontologies are critical but overlooked and propose how worldviews can “re-Indigenise” biodiversity conservation grounded through local language and ecologies (M'sɨt No’kmaq et al. 2021, 839). Problems persist, however; a review of the Amazon finds Indigenous peoples central to freshwater conservation but under-represented in authorship and agenda-setting (Athayde et al. 2025). Equitable governance therefore requires recognizing cosmologies and management systems as co-equal expertise (Athayde et al. 2025).

Taking ontologies seriously means recognizing Spirits, Ancestors, and sentient places as actors in conservation governance. Among Karen communities in the Thai–Myanmar highlands, Nats (forest guardians) require permissions, enforce prohibitions, and communicate through signs. Excluding people from forests disrupts offerings and conditions for order, with ecological consequences (Htoo et al. 2023). This animist mode provides calendars, taboos, and tree relations for sustainable use, dislodging conservation's monopoly on expertise. Comparable insights emerge from Walalkara Indigenous Protected Area (IPAs; southern Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, Australia), where Tjukurpa (Dreaming Law) motivates participation, structures programs, and underwrites leadership and learning. Dreaming here is not a ‘value’, but the law that makes conservation ethical and effective (Robin et al. 2022).

Indigenous ontologies ground conservation in law, ceremony, and lived relationships with place. They also clarify debates often framed as policy choices. For example, ‘Wilderness’ imaginaries erase Indigenous presence and care, reproducing harms even in well-meaning initiatives. Replacing wilderness with biocultural restoration instead centers sovereignty, livelihoods, and situated knowledge (Fletcher et al. 2021; Fletcher 2025). In North America, proposals to Indigenize wildlife management models reframe core tenets, for example, public trust becomes shared accountability across Indigenous and non-Indigenous governments within holistic governance, while insisting that words alone are insufficient without structural change (Hessami et al. 2021; Martinez et al. 2023). Arctic scholarship similarly shows Indigenous-led conservation aligns climate adaptation with food sovereignty and guardianship, advancing global aims because it centers Indigenous authority, mentorship, and knowledge systems (Buschman and Sudlovenick 2022).

Crucially, Indigenous ontologies do not only inform assessments; they initiate them. In Kitasoo Xai’xais Territory (Klemtu, Canada), Indigenous observation and relational responsibility to the land and animals prompted an investigation into declining mountain goat populations (Jessen et al. 2022). This process did not begin with scientific inquiry but with listening to nature—with the attentive noticing of hunters, Elders, and community members who recognized changes in animal movement, body condition, and presence. Guided by these observations, the Nation implemented a tri-method evaluation that combined knowledge holder interviews, aerial surveys, and harvest data, revealing population declines overlooked by centralized management regimes (Jessen et al. 2022). The study demonstrates how Indigenous-led monitoring systems, grounded in lived relationships and ethical obligations to kin species, can drive more responsive and precautionary approaches to conservation.

As previously noted, decolonizing conservation requires more than including Indigenous knowledge; it requires recognizing that such knowledge is inseparable from the ontologies, living worlds of relation, law, and responsibility, from which it emerges. Grappling with these ontologies means engaging with how knowledge is contextualized within diverse systems of meaning and obligation that extend beyond human authority. As Ens et al. (2022) observe, closing the gap between knowledge and implementation depends on recognizing Indigenous governance structures, land ownership, and epistemic authority as foundational pillars of just conservation. The endurance of these conversations underscores that without structural shifts, acknowledgement alone remains hollow. Thirty years after their landmark synthesis, Gadgil et al. (2021) remind us that recognition without redistribution of power, jurisdiction, and resources will not pacify an “angry earth.” To engage Indigenous ontologies is therefore to accept different terms of relationship, ceremony, law, and practice, and to reimagine conservation as an ethical practice grounded in reciprocity and accountability to kin and Country (Tynan 2021). When these responsibilities are upheld, conservation is not merely informed by culture but awakened by living law and nourished through ongoing relationships that hold people and Country in balance.

Beyond the Fortress: From Hotspots to Hopespots

In this final section we highlight scholarship that documents moves away from the damaging ontological and epistemological binaries of nature and culture that are embedded in much conservation thinking and practice. Our focus here is on collaborations and actions towards hope, with an understanding that hope is and must be more than an emotional response to conditions of change, but something to be understood and practiced within everyday lives (Head 2016). It is worth being reminded then, that Indigenous people gift all a foundation of hope. For instance, in the first global analysis of the overlap between Indigenous lands and terrestrial mammal habitat, O’Bryan et al. (2021) found 2695 species (60% of assessed species) had greater than 10 per cent of their ranges on Indigenous lands. For threatened mammals, 473 species (47%) occurred on Indigenous lands. Likewise, Estrada et al. (2022) noted Indigenous lands accounted for 30 per cent of the world's primate range and 71 per cent of species in a context where 68 per cent are threatened with extinction, and Seebens et al. (2024) found Indigenous lands host 30 per cent fewer “alien” species. Meaningful engagement with Indigenous people and their lands will therefore be fundamentally important for conservation success going forward.

Perhaps the clearest recent example of hope in action comes from Levis et al. (2024), who examine the relationship between ecological diversity and cultural diversity created and enhanced through cultural niches. Their review of five case studies from South America, illustrates the coupled and positive relationships between Indigenous people and biodiversity in a range of ecological contexts. Inspired not by biodiversity hotspots, but by a cultural continuum of maintenance and connectivity, Levis et al. advance the idea of socio-ecological hopespots, where sophisticated landscape management by Indigenous people that facilitates increasing biodiversity is illustrated. Ecological hotspots are valued in contemporary conservation for their exceptional biodiversity but also critiqued as a focus for efforts based on arguments that they promote nature exceptionalism, may ignore local histories, and deflect attention from wider processes of degradation (Murdock 2021). Noteworthy in Levis et al.'s article, are the collaborations of Indigenous people and scientists working together to illustrate complex environmental relationships and bring their significance into policy and practice.

Increasing attention to the possibilities of IPAs is another hopeful example of justice being placed at the center of refiguring how conservation gets done. In Canada for instance, there is something of a paradigm shift underway in targets being set for the designation of new Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (Mansuy et al. 2023). With aims to declare 30 per cent of Canada's landmass within IPCA's by 2030, government ambition for embedding Indigenous people and their interests in conservation is apparent. What such moves mean for a shift in conservation practice, however, is debated. Also from Canada, Youdelis et al. (2021: 991) note that while IPAs broadly, provide “glimpses of productive, alternative sustainabilities,” the two case studies they explore from Grassy Narrows Indigenous Sovereignty and Protected Area (ISPA) and Dasiqox-Nexwagweẑʔan in Tsilhqot'in Territory, British Columbia illustrate ongoing “two-faced” behavior of governments which continue to facilitate extractive capitalism unwanted by First Nation owners. Such critique is significant in the case where scholars are suggesting governments elsewhere look to emulate the Canadian model (Merino and Chinchay 2022). Further critique, also from the Canadian context, is the idea that IPAs are being narrated as contributing to national reconciliation movements, prompting suspicion from Indigenous people about ill-defined agendas being imposed on them without due recognition of their own ambitions and goals for advancing protected area designation (Townsend and Roth 2023). At a finer scale, a report from Walalkara, one of the longest running IPAs in Australia, underscores the significance of Indigenous perspectives in orienting non-Indigenous people to the meaning of successful conservation practice, something that occurs beyond written frameworks and management plans (Robin et al. 2022).

Finally, we highlight how relationships feature in the hopeful work of conservation, and where there is scope for recalibration. We’ve noted already the significance of power and how it is wielded is often in the frame in critique of conservation; acknowledging how past power imbalances have operated, and new ones promulgated are seen as key by many (Buschman 2022; Dawson et al. 2021; Saif et al. 2022). Power dynamics can be overt and addressed more overtly, as per Milner-Gulland's (2024) call for conservationists to attend to issues of justice related to their work. Noting global conservation is often focused on parts of the world where high biodiversity and the world's poor co-occur, yet interventions to conserve biodiversity in those places are leading to human rights violations, they argue tackling power imbalances requires conservationists to engage in real-world negotiations about rights and livelihoods and develop collaborations that embed social justice from the beginning. Examples of such embedded relationships are available, illustrating the power of careful work done over decades to bring about cultural and policy change. In their opinion, Wall et al. (2025) argue such work leads to better outcomes, illustrated through the example of the IPCA knowledge basket project—a catalogue of evidence built in practical support of Indigenous conservation.

Conclusion

In this review, we have highlighted the importance of addressing the underlying historical, colonial, and political context of conservation. Even seemingly progressive or well-intended conservation efforts risk perpetuating colonial power dynamics by failing to address the historical relationship between conservation and Indigenous dispossession and exclusion. In the rush to include, engage with or partner with Indigenous people in conservation, there is thus an ongoing risk for Indigenous people that conservation frames its view of what is relevant about Indigenous people to conservation without their input, for example, by disconnecting knowledge from practice, or rights from sovereignty, etc. We have shown where conservation is strengthened or even remade when Indigenous ontologies are centered as law, ceremony, and lived relationships, remaking governance around responsibilities to kin, Country, and the pluriverse of living worlds. Some 35 per cent of the scholarship we have cited here comes from Indigenous scholars, or from Indigenous scholars working in collaboration with others. That is both a cause for hope, as well as a reason for conservation to listen and attend.