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. 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. 

In the Colombian Amazon basin, Gaia Amazonas fought a four decades long battle to help Indigenous Territories gain formal legal tenure. As a result, Indigenous Peoples control 25 million hectares of forest, and are on a path toward setting up formal local governance structures akin to municipalities under Colombian law.

2. Governance: The Critical Glue

Once a community has sovereignty over the land, it has to be able to govern it, to make communal decisions about how to use it. Good governance builds buy-in, enforces rules, and ensures benefits are shared fairly. It can take many forms—formal councils, customary law, or hybrids—but it has to keep people aligned and deter bad actors.

For example, Planet Indonesia works with communities to form local, informal governance structures to protect and manage their territory. In the remote islands and forests where they work, the communities are often fractured. Planet Indonesia’s team helps form councils around savings and loans funds: this gives financial incentives for people to join in conservation efforts that also improve their livelihoods. Communities then create formal positions and elect leaders that hold everyone accountable. They launch patrols that get community members involved in protection, tracking and reporting illicit activities like mining and over-fishing.

And they know it’s working. A recent study produced high quality data demonstrating that better governance is correlated to better environmental outcomes. 

3. Protection & Management: A Plan for the Land and Threats Against It

Protection and management are a long-term strategy to protect natural resources and manage them for the long haul. These plans—often built on a combination of science and local know-how—guide everything from reforestation to zoning for rotational grazing. A plan makes it easier to say “no thanks” to shady extractive deals and keep an ecosystem healthy, generation after generation. It also implies monitoring and protecting against threats, inside and out. 

In Brazil, Instituto Jurua helps communities protect freshwater ecosystems and the valuable fish that inhabit them by creating a protection and management plan. They support communities to build guard posts at the entrances of lakes in their territory to monitor and deter illegal fishing. Communities also patrol the edges of their territory regularly to document illegal activity. Within the lakes, Instituto Jurua generates ecological data to set fishing limits, helping communities grow their fish stocks and protect against overfishing. Their planning and protection leads to incredible results: in Instituto Jurua areas, fish population increases by 425%, and other important species (like turtles and caimans) can increase by up to 50x. Having a plan helps communities not only protect their direct resources, but in this case, creates knock on effects that improve the entire forest ecosystem. 

4. Livelihoods: A Recipe for Thriving 

The best way to protect an ecosystem is to ensure that people benefit more—short and long term—from caring for it than abusing it. People need tangible returns from managing their forests, grasslands, or reefs well. Otherwise, they’re pushed towards short-term profits—like logging, clear-cut agriculture, or mining—because they have no other option to make a decent living, to have a decent livelihood. 

Most of what conservationists traditionally think of as “land management” and “threats” are simply about people trying to make a living on their land and can best be dealt with as such. If you define livelihoods broadly as “a means of securing the necessities of life,” it’s more than just dollars—it includes cultural and spiritual values, food, education, healthcare, and infrastructure for communications and transportation. Money is essential—often central—but not nearly enough.

There’s a lot of things that communities can do to meet these basic needs. Commodity crops, internet access, ecotourism, remittances, livestock, value-added processing—the list of potential solutions is long. The hard thing is selecting the right livelihood approach to pursue in a particular place. 

We find it useful to think of the set of things people in these communities have and do to meet their needs as a livelihood “stack,” much like a capital stack in a business. Some of it already exists within those places and simply needs to be explicitly included in the stack, while other needs must be addressed anew.  The big task of anyone serious about CLC is to assemble a stack that maximizes livelihoods within the guardrails of ecosystem health. 

The problem is this: livelihoods are the lynchpin to the whole thing and we’re not very good at them. There is a consistent set of problems: an over-dependence on carbon deals and ecotourism (and the expulsion of places where those aren’t workable), the repetition of failed approaches, and the reinvention of what has already been sorted out elsewhere.

We have substantial expertise within the Mulago portfolio, but there is a lot to learn. This month, we’re bringing CLC leaders together to share what they know, start figuring out what they don’t, and who else needs to be at the table to help. Our goal is to put livelihoods at the center of conservation. We need a systematic approach that gets communities to be eager and able guardians of nature. We’ll share what we learn in Part 2 of this post.