Community Stewardship and Local Governance

Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) including India’s adivasi and forest-dependent groups are the true custodians of nature. For centuries, they have sustained forests, pastures and wetlands through everyday practices like rotational grazing, seed care and water management. Their relationship with the land is not about extraction; it is built on a deep sense of responsibility, traditional knowledge and belonging.

 

Yet, a glaring gap exists in global climate action: less than 3% of conservation funding reaches these communities directly.

 

Landstack is working to flip this top-down model. We believe that effective climate action and conservation funding must directly recognize and reward the people who safeguard our ecosystems. We center our work on the agency, traditional knowledge and rights of local communities, with a specific focus on women and indigenous groups.

Our core pillar is to move away from externally designed interventions and move toward community-led resource management. To make this shift practical, we help communities make their everyday stewardship visible. By translating centuries of traditional governance into insights that donors, policy makers, and markets can understand, we ensure that global funds flow directly to the people protecting our planet.

To support this mission, we utilize a field-tested Stewardship Assessment Toolkit. Developed and refined alongside local partners over three years, this tool helps communities document their conservation practices, measure their environmental impact, and build long-term management plans. It serves as a bridge, turning local governance into a powerful instrument for both ecological health and community empowerment.