DEMOCRATIC CONSERVATION GOVERNANCE

Kalpavriksh believes that conservation cannot be sustainable or just if it ignores the livelihood needs and aspirations of local communities living in and around natural resources. Effective and ethical conservation governance must therefore prioritize local communities, while recognising that these communities are internally diverse, shaped by differences of caste, class, gender, and politics. This perspective underpins Kalpavriksh’s commitment to democratic conservation governance, which emphasizes participation, rights, and shared visions for sustainable development.

In India, the Forest Rights Act (2006) provides a key framework for such an approach by empowering forest-dwelling communities to manage and protect forests. Kalpavriksh’s focus on democratizing conservation emerged in the late 1990s following legal interventions around protected areas, which highlighted the harms of exclusionary conservation. Since then, it has promoted participatory planning, contributed to national biodiversity processes, and advocated for progressive environmental laws that balance ecological protection with social justice.

Under this theme, our activities include ensuring the reach of the law to remote communities through imparting training, producing and disseminating simplified policy briefs that speak to ground realities; focusing on the law’s implementation within Protected Areas; carrying out studies on good examples of democratic forest governance; issuing public statements and publishing other communication pieces for advancing rights-based conservation; conducting fact-finding studies on FRA implementation and; producing status reports of FRA implementation.