When protecting nature means taking power away

Global conservation ambition is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. From marine protected areas (MPAs) to biodiversity finance and the 30×30 commitments under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), governments, NGOs, and philanthropies are moving quickly to safeguard large portions of the planet’s remaining ecosystems.

This ambition is both necessary and overdue. Many of these efforts are led by committed practitioners working under intense political and ecological pressure, and they have delivered real conservation gains. The concern is not with conservation intent or urgency. It is whether current governance models can sustain those gains over time.

Across marine and coastal systems, a recurring fault line is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore: conservation initiatives often expand protection while quietly narrowing — or displacing — Indigenous sovereignty and customary marine governance. When that happens, conservation may look successful on paper, but its legitimacy, durability, and ecological effectiveness are weakened in practice.

The governance gap at the heart of 30×30

At its core, 30×30 is a spatial ambition. It prioritizes how much territory is placed under protection and how quickly that designation occurs. What it often leaves under-specified is who governs those spaces, under what authority, and according to whose knowledge systems.

In many coastal and marine contexts, Indigenous peoples are not simply stakeholders in conservation areas. They are rights-holders with existing jurisdiction, legal standing, and stewardship responsibilities that long predate modern conservation institutions. When MPAs or biodiversity finance mechanisms are layered onto these places without fully recognizing that authority, conservation risks reproducing older patterns of enclosure — this time in the name of protection.

The result is a governance gap: conservation expands formally, but is locally contested; rules are established, but compliance erodes; legitimacy weakens even as targets are met.

FPIC is not governance

Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) is often presented as the mechanism that resolves these tensions. In practice, it is frequently treated as a procedural checkpoint rather than recognition of ongoing governing authority.

Consultation does not equal jurisdiction. Participation does not equal decision-making power. And benefit-sharing does not substitute for control over rules, enforcement, and adaptation.

Where Indigenous authority is reduced to advisory input, conservation governance becomes brittle. Enforcement depends on external actors. Adaptation to ecological change slows. Trust frays. The result is not stronger protection, but fragile protection—vulnerable to political shifts, funding cycles, and local resistance.

Conservation outcomes depend on sovereignty, not scale

This disconnect between reported protection and lived governance is not abstract. It is visible across many high-profile marine conservation initiatives, where large protected areas exist on maps but struggle to translate into durable ecological outcomes.

Through my doctoral research on Indigenous governance and environmental history in Bristol Bay, Alaska, I have examined a contrasting case. There, conservation outcomes have remained strong not because governance was centralized, but because stewardship authority was never fully separated from Indigenous sovereignty. Ecological protection endured precisely because decision-making power, responsibility, and accountability remained locally grounded.

The lesson is not that protection must be small-scale. It is that scale without legitimate governance produces fragile results, regardless of ambition.

When conservation becomes a new enclosure

In the rush to meet global targets, conservation risks becoming a new form of enclosure — not through extraction, but through regulation. Authority shifts upward; customary tenure is narrowed; Indigenous governance systems are tolerated rather than trusted.

This is not only an equity failure. It is an ecological one.

Indigenous stewardship systems are adaptive by design. They evolve with changing species distributions, climate variability, and social conditions. When conservation governance sidelines these systems, it replaces adaptive authority with static rules—often ill-suited to dynamic marine environments.

Recognizing Indigenous jurisdiction does not weaken conservation authority. In many contexts, it is precisely what makes conservation enforceable, adaptive, and legitimate over the long term.

A governance-first model for conservation

The choice facing conservation is not between protection and sovereignty. It is between durable protection grounded in legitimate authority and fragile protection imposed from above.

A governance-first approach to conservation would treat Indigenous sovereignty not as a risk to manage, but as foundational infrastructure for ecological resilience. That means:

• Recognizing Indigenous marine tenure and jurisdiction as a starting point, not a constraint

• Designing MPAs and conservation finance mechanisms that embed Indigenous decision-making authority

• Shifting success metrics from area covered to legitimacy sustained over time

• Treating stewardship systems as governance institutions, not cultural inputs

This is not a retreat from ambition. It is a recalibration toward outcomes that last.

Protecting nature without taking power away

30×30 will only succeed if it confronts its central contradiction: conservation cannot endure if it weakens the very governance systems that have sustained ecosystems for generations.

The future of marine protection will be decided less by how much area is designated, and more by whose authority is recognized within those spaces.

If conservation is serious about permanence, legitimacy, and resilience, it must move beyond participation and toward shared — and in many cases Indigenous-led — governance. Otherwise, protecting nature will continue to mean taking power away, and conservation will remain vulnerable to the very failures it seeks to prevent.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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