Thursday, July 9, 2026

4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Room BM.1.23

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Details

Long-term biodiversity conservation depends on how effectively Indigenous Youth and Conservation Practitioners learn to work together. Conservation outcomes are largely delivered by practitioners—NGO field staff, researchers, government officers—while land stewardship, customary governance, and biocultural knowledge remain with Indigenous Youth and their communities. The future of the conservation sector and land survival can only be secured when these two groups come together, aligning their roles, expectations, and decision-making systems. Indigenous Youth are no longer content to serve as auxiliary actors; they are demanding agency, leadership, and long-term ownership. However, most capacity-building programmes focus narrowly on technical skills and privilege those who already fit into Western conservation paradigms. This neglects the cultural, governance, and relational foundation of Indigenous stewardship. At the same time, conservation practitioners, though well intentioned, struggle to navigate power dynamics, overcome colonial legacies, and support genuinely community-led and participatory conservation. Institutional and donor pressures further reinforce top-down behaviours. As a result, practitioners and Indigenous Youth often operate in parallel systems, unable to see the larger relational ecosystem that shapes leadership, agency, and conservation outcomes. Yet they must come together—their combined strengths are essential for durable, community-rooted conservation. This panel explores how systems mapping can help bridge this divide. Through participatory systems-mapping in Nagaland, Uttarakhand, and the Maasai Mara, we analysed where expectations collide, where roles and responsibilities overlap, and where conditions for shared leadership emerge. During the session, we will present our preliminary systems map and actively engage the Roundtable audience to enrich, critique, and expand it, bringing in diverse perspectives to strengthen the model. These insights on the Systems will inform a co-designed Grassroots Leadership Program —not a fixed curriculum, but a leadership approach grounded in understanding systemic interactions and merging practitioner-driven outcomes with indigenous and local youth-led leadership.

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Speakers and Presentation Titles

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Organiser