People can’t protect their land if they can’t provide for their kids. Mulago’s mission is to meet the basic needs of the poorest people, and one of the most basic needs is a healthy environment, which can be provided through an approach known as community-led conservation. All of the most salient environmental problems—climate change, biodiversity loss, soil degradation, air pollution, and shrinking water supplies—hit the poorest the hardest.

Most of what remains to be conserved in the world is in the hands of local people, mostly indigenous groups and long-time settlers who use and manage their territories communally. Conservationists for too long saw these people as the enemy, when in fact they play a critical role as stewards and protectors of the territories they inhabit. “Fortress conservation” doesn’t work and empty territories won’t save themselves. People need nature and nature needs people. Nia Tero—an organization partnered with over 300 indigenous peoples—has a tag line that captures it perfectly: “Thriving peoples. Thriving places.” (we like it so much that we stole it for our title).

Community-Led Conservation (CLC) is one of the few conservation approaches that consistently works. CLC is focused on settings where people use and manage the territory communally—as a commons. We have reviewed hundreds of CLC efforts and funded a lot of them. Seeing this kind of volume, we’ve noticed that there are consistently four pillars of good Community-Led Conservation—four things you have to get right. These are:

  1. Sovereignty – Clear rights to the territory and its resources.
  2. Governance – A local governing structure that enforces rules and shares benefits.
  3. Protection & Management – The ability to manage resources well, and deal with threats inside and out. Because there are always going to be threats.
  4. Livelihoods – Ways for people to meet their needs from that land.

We’ve learned a lot about each of these. They help us make sense of various models and compare across them. This is what we mean:

1. Sovereignty: More Than Tenure

Communities need the legal—or at least de facto—authority to manage their territory. Without it, someone bigger or richer can swoop in, grab the land, and crush local control.

The past few decades have seen major pushes to secure sovereignty, led by groups like the Rights and Resources Initiative and the Tenure Facility. Research consistently shows that sovereignty is a critical ingredient to conservation (see this big recent study that showed this in the Amazon basin). Every year new data emerges showing that land controlled by local communities and Indigenous Peoples has better environmental outcomes and less degradation.

Read the full article about community-led conservation by Rohit Gawande at Mulago Foundation.