Locally Based, Regionally Manifested, and Globally Relevant: Indigenous and Local Knowledge, Values, and Practices for Nature

TLDR

Indigenous peoples and local communities provide knowledge, values, and practices that help understand and address social‑environmental problems. This article reviews the literature on how these communities engage with nature management through six identified pathways. The pathways include territorial management and customary governance; conservation and restoration with regional to global impact; co‑construction of knowledge for assessment and monitoring; resistance to unsustainable resource use and environmental injustice; active roles in environmental governance across scales; and alternative conceptualizations of people‑nature interrelations. The review finds that these pathways enable significant contributions to ecosystem health, knowledge production, and governance, yet their local to global impacts remain underrecognized in conservation and development policies.

Abstract

The knowledge, values, and practices of Indigenous peoples and local communities offer ways to understand and better address social-environmental problems. The article reviews the state of the literature on this topic by focusing on six pathways by which Indigenous peoples and local communities engage with management of and relationships to nature. These are ( a) undertaking territorial management practices and customary governance, ( b) contributing to nature conservation and restoration efforts with regional to global implications, ( c) co-constructing knowledge for assessments and monitoring, ( d) countering the drivers of unsustainable resource use and resisting environmental injustices, ( e) playing key roles in environmental governance across scales, and ( f) offering alternative conceptualizations of the interrelations between people and nature. The review shows that through these pathways Indigenous peoples and local communities are making significant contributions to managing the health of local and regional ecosystems, to producing knowledge based in diverse values of nature, confronting societal pressures and environmental burdens, and leading and partnering in environmental governance. These contributions have local to global implications but have yet to be fully recognized in conservation and development polices, and by society at large.