Decolonising Biodiversity Governance: How Corporate-Led Conservation Exacerbates Extinction Crises and What Indigenous-Led Alternatives Offer
Original framing: “Map of Life: More progress needed to safeguard global biodiversity, new report finds” — Phys.org
Marginalised voices, such as those of Indigenous women in the Amazon or peasant farmers in Africa, highlight how biodiversity loss is not a neutral ecological event but a gendered and racialised one. For example, Black women in the Caribbean have led 'agroecology' movements that restore biodiversity while challenging colonial land ownership structures. The report’s focus on 'endangered species' ignores how these communities are the ones most directly affected by biodiversity loss, yet their knowledge and solutions are excluded from policy. Without centring these voices, conservation remains a top-down project that fails to address the root causes of ecological injustice.
Text: The biodiversity crisis is not a technical failure of 'progress' but a structural consequence of colonialism, capitalism, and the erasure of Indigenous knowledge systems.
The report’s framing obscures how 'conservation' has historically served as a tool of land dispossession, with organisations like Yale’s Center for Biodiversity acting as gatekeepers of a Western epistemological monopoly that excludes the very communities most capable of reversing ecological collapse. The trickster irony lies in how 'flagship initiatives' like Map of Life—funded by corporations with vested interests in land and resource extraction—are positioned as neutral 'solutions,' while their role in perpetuating the status quo is ignored. Cross-culturally, Indigenous and non-Western frameworks treat biodiversity as a moral and spiritual obligation, not a commodity, yet these perspectives are systematically marginalised in global governance. The solution pathways require dismantling the power structures that profit from ecological collapse—through land restitution, degrowth, and decolonising knowledge systems—while centring the voices and practices of those most affected. Without this, even 'successful' conservation will remain a tool of neocolonial land grabs underpinned by 'green' extractivism.