The Community Stewardship Initiative is a long-term landscape governance and stewardship programme grounded in a foundational conviction: that Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) are not passive beneficiaries of conservation, they are the primary stewards of the forests, commons and ecological landscapes they have inhabited and cared for across generations. The initiative seeks to make that stewardship visible, measurable and actionable, so that communities can engage on equal terms with the policy, funding and market systems that shape their landscapes.

 

The initiative began in 2021, when LGT Venture Philanthropy, FES and Landstack set out to ask whether carbon markets could be made to work for communities and whether communities were equipped to engage with them on their own terms. What that inquiry revealed was a deeper problem: the rapid expansion of technocratic and market-led climate finance into tribal and forest-dependent regions was proceeding without any recognition of the customary governance systems, ecological knowledge, care labour and tenure realities that had actually sustained these landscapes. The response was to build evidence, a community stewardship evidence base grounded in care, knowledge and agency, that could challenge the dominant narrative and support communities in designing their own conservation and PES pathways.

 

Over four toolkit iterations and deployments across more than 30 villages in Odisha, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Manipur, the initiative has grown from a stewardship evidence generation exercise into a community-led planning and ecosystem governance framework. It now integrates with Community Forest Resource Management Planning (CFRMP) and other state-recognised landscape governance processes and has seeded a regional coalition, CLANS, for operationalising a dedicated Stewardship Fund for Northeast India.