Building Relationships and Sharing Expertise: Co-created approaches for forest conservation with Indigenous communities

Overview

In Peru’s Amazon, Indigenous communities and their representative federations organise to demand justice, shape forest conservation, and challenge exploitative systems of resource management. This article describes a collaboration involving Indigenous leaders from the San Martín region and scholars from Michigan State University and the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. Drawing on five years of engagement and building from empirical studies, we are developing practical guidance for forest conservation with Indigenous communities. In this article, we describe our methods for co-creating a toolkit that supports conservation alignment with four community-identified priorities: Indigenous Knowledge, community planning, gender and inclusion, and territorial rights. Co-creating the toolkit entails developing new metrics and criteria to improve benefit distribution, better tailor conservation to community needs, and monitor the results. We emphasise the importance of building relationships, identifying shared priorities, and centring the experiences of Indigenous collaborators in this process. Our analysis applies anthropological theories of worlding and decolonisation to elaborate how these strategic engagements can challenge hegemonic modes of research and governance. We argue that aligning conservation agendas with community priorities and expertise is an essential step towards effective and democratic forest governance for a sustainable future, and that collaborative research can buttress these efforts.