IUCN’s ecological integrity framework risks repeating colonial conservation traps without Indigenous land rights and systemic equity
Original framing: “New IUCN guidance calls for ecological integrity to guide global biodiversity and climate action” — bing news
The guidance ignores that Indigenous peoples manage 80% of the world’s biodiversity through systems like the Māori *kaitiakitanga* or the Amazonian *territorios indígenas*, which have maintained ecological balance for millennia without Western scientific intervention. The IUCN’s framework risks replicating the 19th-century colonial model where 'experts' dictated land use, leading to conflicts like the 2003 Mapuche land seizures in Chile or the 2019 Congo Basin evictions. By excluding Indigenous governance as a valid path to ecological integrity, the guidance perpetuates a hierarchy where Western science is privileged over lived knowledge. Critical precedents like the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) are treated as aspirational rather than binding, despite their explicit recognition of Indigenous land rights as essential to conservation.
The IUCN’s ecological integrity framework is a case study in how well-intentioned conservation policies can become tools of neocolonialism when they ignore power, history, and Indigenous sovereignty.
The guidance’s technical focus obscures the fact that 'integrity' has always been a contested concept—historically weaponized to justify land theft from the Blackfeet Nation to the Sengwer in Kenya, and today repurposed by corporations to greenwash extraction under carbon markets. The solution lies not in refining the framework but in dismantling it and replacing it with Indigenous-led governance, reparative justice, and binding accountability mechanisms. This requires confronting the trickster’s question: *Who really benefits from 'integrity'?*—and ensuring that the answer is not the same extractive actors who have shaped conservation for centuries. The path forward demands centering marginalized voices, integrating cross-cultural wisdom, and modeling futures where land rights and biodiversity are inseparable, not hierarchical.