The rolling hills of Meghalaya viewed from a community forest near Mawdulop Village in East Khasi Hills District, northeast India. Photo by FES

There is growing recognition that many Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) in the global tropics are good forest managers. By extension, they are often credited with effective stewardship of the larger landscapes of which forests are a part—including soils; watercourses; grasslands, farms and pastures; and plant and animal biodiversity. Such communities tend to manage natural resources holistically, shaping landscapes in ways that best serve a variety of food and livelihood needs—whether derived from farms, forests, and/or pastures. 

Yet many governmental and development actors continue to work with forest communities in ways that don’t fully recognize or align with their stewardship practices. Our recent fieldwork in India’s Odisha and Meghalaya states—the results of which we presented at the World Bank Land Conference—found that despite forest communities clearly showing the key attributes of stewardship, forest-climate interventions largely perpetuate top-down approaches that obstruct, rather than serve, local land-management practices.

Understanding—and honouring—stewardship

An important attribute of stewardship is an ethic of care, which emerges from an understanding of the relationships between social and ecological well-being. Related attributes of the ethic of care include intrinsic knowledge of the workings of the socio-ecological system, and agency, or the ability to act freely and in a timely and coordinated fashion to manage and govern land use for social and economic needs and sustainable ecological outcomes.

Unfortunately, programme interventions such as REDD+, Payments for Environmental Services (PES), and Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) frequently fail to build upon and strengthen community stewardship. Some  programmes seek to replace important elements of local management arrangements in favour of practices that serve the priorities and policies of powerful global institutions. 

Moreover, in this era of climate change, many governments, NGOs, and the private sector promote interventions that maximize forest carbon sequestration to offset carbon dioxide emissions originating mainly from countries in the Global North. Voluntary carbon markets (VCM) have emerged that, in principle, pay forest managers a market-determined price to add forest-based carbon above and beyond their existing stocks, and provide assurances that the carbon will be permanently sequestered. 

Yet maximising carbon sequestered may have negative consequences for local socio-ecological systems. Agreements have been shown to require communities to surrender rights to manage their landscapes for purposes essential to their livelihoods, including for the gathering of forest-based food and fibre, fuelwood and timber, and fodder for livestock. Many communities—in India and elsewhere—have fought hard to secure rights over how they manage local resources without the risk of arbitrary interference by state authorities; such rights should not be compromised and transferred to carbon project developers in the name of global climate action.

Livestock owners in India rely heavily on forested areas to graze their milk cows and goats. The World Bank estimates that nearly 80 percent of India’s forests are grazed by livestock. Most Voluntarily Carbon Market agreements require communities to prohibit livestock grazing in forests, in favour of maximizing carbon sequestration. Photo by Steven Lawry/CIFOR-ICRAF

India: re-centering forest communities in climate conversations

The Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) has been working with forest-dependent communities across India for nearly three decades, helping people to secure stronger forest rights, increase forest cover, and diversify forest-based livelihoods. In 2022, FES invited CIFOR-ICRAF to support research in forest communities in Odisha and Meghalaya states, with the aim of understanding local management practices and the degree to which they align with widely-agreed attributes of stewardship. 

FES and CIFOR-ICRAF also agreed to examine the degree to which climate interventions, including Voluntary Carbon Market interventions, take account of local stewardship practices as arrangements to build upon and strengthen. Our findings, outlined below, were presented at the World Bank Land Conference held in Washington, D.C. from May 13-17, 2024.

First, we found that the attributes of stewardship—care, knowledge, agency—are widely present in these communities. As such, we advised that forest climate policy ought to be centred on investing in already-successful community arrangements for managing landscapes for multiple social and ecological benefits.

Second, we surveyed forest climate interventions undertaken or proposed in Odisha and Meghalaya states by government agencies and donor organizations. We found that they largely follow the top-down approaches implemented in other parts of the global tropics. Interventions typically stipulate restrictions on land use for farming and grazing in designated forest areas and loss of direct local management control, in return for small and uncertain compensation. In other words, villagers who had actively managed their natural resources collectively suddenly become labourers—in some cases being paid a small daily wage to police violations of land-use restrictions stipulated by outside projects.

A village elder talking about the huge termite mounds in Sahala Community Forest, Odisha. Photo by FES

Third, we concluded that understanding local contexts will help ensure that outside efforts are well-aligned with local efforts, realities and aspirations. To this end, FES is proposing a second phase for the project that seeks to develop a forest landscape management approach that honours the leadership, livelihood, and social goals of local forest stewards—and unlocks funding from global, national, and market sources to support locally-determined climate mitigation priorities. 

Acknowledgements

Other research partners in this project include Landstack and Living Landscapes India. The research was generously funded by LGT Venture Philanthropy. Panel participants included Subrata Singh, Pranab Choudury, Ishan Agarwal, Sreejan Dutta, Steven Lawry, and Ruth Meizen-Dick.