Territorial Governance

Through our work on Territorial Governance, we seek to innovate and implement mapping, monitoring and management tools to aid territorial governance and provide the resources that indigenous peoples and forest peoples need to sustainably manage their lands. Mapping and monitoring supports communities to document their traditional knowledge and feed into other areas of our work, including community conservation of biodiversity, knowledge diversity policies and cultural resilience.

Context

There are approximately 1.5 billion indigenous peoples and local communities in the world, and these communities are estimated to hold as much as 65% of the world’s land area through customary, community-based tenure systems. Yet in many countries these peoples and communities do not have secure tenure over these areas. This means they can be denied from entering and using their territories because of inadequate government policies, extractive industries’ activities, or conservation initiatives, such as protected areas. In places where some form of security is in place, communities are impacted by an increasingly wide range of threats and the ways in which they govern and manage their lands often needs to evolve in response.

We aim to ensure our partners can expand, advance and deepen their territorial governance strategies and processes. This includes internal community self-governance, and through further development of territorial management and land use plans, where appropriate. We aim to introduce, where needed and requested, appropriate and tailored new technical support and input, particularly to support participatory mapping, and community-led and owned monitoring.