Shifting power and strengthening locally led governance

COMMUNITY INSIGHTS

 ”Why does governance matter? Because the success of restoration is not only about ecological practices...it is also about who holds the power, who makes decision, and whose voice is heard.” – Ritha Tarimo, Trias East Africa

Across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia, communities and local organisations are spearheading efforts to restore degraded ecosystems. However, they must navigate entrenched power structures and fragmented governance systems that overlook or sideline local and Indigenous knowledge. 

To better understand these dynamics, REDAA hosted two regional webinars in March 2025 under the theme “Tackling the power and politics of locally led nature restoration”. The events brought together six project leads from REDAA-funded initiatives active in Ethiopia, the Congo Basin, Tanzania, Bangladesh, India, and Nepal. Speakers offered insights into the challenges, opportunities and strategies shaping restoration efforts on the ground. This analysis captures some of the reflections and learning from those conversations.

Why does governance matter?

The events opened with remarks from the two conversation leads: Anita Varghese, director of the Keystone Foundation and lead of an initiative that tackles invasive species through community-based restoration in India, and Ritha Tarimo, regional director for Trias East Africa and lead of a project that strengthens locally led restoration among farmer and pastoralist communities in Tanzania.

Both emphasised that restoration cannot be separated from questions of power and politics, and stressed the critical role these dynamics play in shaping who controls resources, who makes decisions, whose priorities are recognised and, ultimately, whether restoration efforts lead to meaningful benefits for both people and nature. 

Unpacking the plurality of ‘local’ 

Tanzil Shafique, from the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, and lead of the ReWet project in Dhaka, Bangladesh, argued that to make restoration more effective, we must first integrate a deeper understanding of what we mean by “local”. He highlighted that restoration initiatives too often treat communities as homogeneous entities, overlooking the complexity and diversity within them and emphasised that the idea of “local” is never singular, it is layered and multidimensional. 

This understanding of diverse local interests underpins ReWet’s work to restore the Gulshan-Baridhara Lake, a critical urban wetland in Dhaka, shaped by fragmented governance and diverging stakeholder interests. The project operates across three interconnected scales to ensure that restoration efforts are locally rooted and institutionally endorsed.

At the community level, ReWet works to navigate competing local interests to build coalitions within and between Korail - Dhaka’s largest informal settlement - and the adjacent elite neighbourhood of Gulshan. In Korail, tensions exist between local leaders and farmers who cultivate land around the lake, reflecting hierarchies and internal conflicts over resource use and decision-making. Meanwhile, Gulshan elites are often less engaged with the need for ecological restoration or biodiversity on the lake, and more interested in beautification and the associated economic benefits.

At the city level, the project engages disconnected agencies, such as the planning agency, city corporation, and Department of Water and Sanitation, that rarely coordinate, despite their shared influence over the wetland’s future. And at the national level, ReWet builds strong relationships across different levels of government, not just with top officials. The project organises site visits so that policy makers can directly engage with local communities and see the project’s impact firsthand - an approach that has proven far more impactful than reports or presentations in distant offices.

By working deliberately across these scales, ReWet turns fragmented governance and diverging interests from a barrier into an opportunity for coalition-building and long-term change.

Challenging dominant restoration narratives

Lila Nath Sharma of ForestAction Nepal pointed to the risks that arise when restoration fails to account for local diversity and context, speaking to the dominant narratives that drive misguided restoration policy and practice. He emphasised that although Nepal often receives international praise for increases in total forest cover, these metrics can be misleading indicators of true restoration success. An emphasis on quantitative measures, such as restoration percentages or the number of hectares restored, can mask a more complex social and ecological picture.

In a recent national review, conducted as part of a project aimed at reorienting forest restoration around local knowledge and inclusion, ForestAction Nepal found that to date, restoration efforts have focused heavily on expanding forest cover, monoculture planting, and prioritising protected areas. This focus often comes at the expense of ecological quality, social inclusion, and cultural landscapes.

Lila highlighted how prioritising protected areas, can undermine the important biodiversity found in community-managed lands and marginalise traditional ecological knowledge embedded in these locations. He then explained how one-size-fits-all restoration models tend to overly promote megafauna conservation, while erasing the diversity of ecosystems and the varied ways local people interact with and rely on these landscapes. These narratives not only oversimplify success but risk deepening exclusion and weakening long-term outcomes.  

"Currently, biodiversity conservation approaches are very singular,” Lila said. “When dominant narratives are challenged, dominant actors reflect on their strategies and approaches, and through these actions and through change narratives, we will inform policies.”  

By challenging these problematic narratives and promoting place-based, participatory, and pluralistic restoration strategies, ForestAction Nepal advocate for a more just, inclusive, and sustainable approach to forest restoration. 

Challenging top-down approaches

In Ethiopia, Awdenegest Moges of Hawassa University, who leads the SMILE (Sustainable Management of Indigenous Livelihoods and Ecosystems) project, described how top-down governance approaches often translate dominant narratives into rigid programs. He explained that despite widespread efforts to restore degraded land, government-led mass mobilisation initiatives are often over-prescriptive with planning and timelines, limiting genuine local engagement and reducing the power of communities to shape decisions about their landscapes.

Working in Halaba, SMILE offers a different model to rehabilitate degraded gullies and communal lands. The project promotes participatory and inclusive approaches, with training programmes that strengthen local capabilities and provide support in local land use planning, nursery development and job creation, particularly for youth and women.

Awdenegest described the challenges of working across multiple disconnected institutions, where overlapping mandates and poor coordination often lead to fragmented restoration efforts and missed opportunities for synergy.

Awdenegest went on to reveal how the physical landscape itself can amplify these challenges. In Halaba, runoff from upland areas carves deep gullies that erode farmland downstream, with the damage cutting across multiple administrative boundaries. The lack of coordination or judiciary system across these administrations makes it harder to manage shared landscapes fairly. 

SMILE responds by supporting local dialogue, developing community bylaws and lobbying for stronger legal frameworks that recognise and manage these cross-boundary dynamics. 

Restoring rights to land and resources

In the Congo Basin, Lassana Koné of the Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) drew attention to another layer of complexity in governance, the tension between state legal systems and customary law. Strengthening locally led restoration requires not only local participation and leadership but also the establishment of legal rights and, crucially, their enforcement in practice. This challenge is especially evident in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Republic of Congo (RoC), where Indigenous Peoples have long conserved forests without formal recognition.

While landmark laws like the 2022 Law on the ‘Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Indigenous Peoples’ in DRC offer opportunities, Lassana warns that they remain largely symbolic without enforcement. Crucially, he emphasises that Indigenous Peoples should not have to prove their ability to protect biodiversity in order to have their rights recognised. Instead, their rights to land and resources must come first, with conservation benefits seen as the outcome of securing those rights, not a prerequisite for them.  

Through legal gap assessments, community-led land mapping, and support for Indigenous participation in policy consultations, FPP works to transform national policies and revise land and forest laws to embed Indigenous rights and free, prior and informed consent into national frameworks. Their goal is to secure sustainable, community-driven governance of land and resources. 

A call to action for inclusive restoration governance 

As the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration moves forward, experiences across Africa and Asia show that effective restoration depends on embedding local participation, leadership, and rights at every level to enable locally led action, and recognising that ‘local’ is never singular but layered and multidimensional.

Speakers highlighted the need to address governance systems that exclude local voices, legal frameworks that fail to protect Indigenous rights in practice, and dominant narratives that reduce success to simplistic metrics and perpetuate problematic top-down restoration models. They described how they are working to overcome these barriers by strengthening coordination across fragmented institutions, creating opportunities for community decision-making and leadership, supporting legal reforms that secure and uphold rights, engaging policymakers with communities, and developing place-based, participatory approaches that reflect the diversity and complexity of local realities.  

As Ritha said, “Restoration should not be technocratic.” Instead, it must be “equitable and inclusive,” with governance systems that “reflect diverse voices, especially those of women, youth, and Indigenous communities, whose connection to nature is often deep and longstanding.”  

To those with decision-making power, Ritha urged, “be bold in shifting power, creating and upholding spaces for local actors to lead. Commit to listening and co-designing with communities rather than speaking for them.” And to communities, she offered a message of affirmation, “Your leadership is critical. Continue to assert your rights, share your knowledge, and demand meaningful inclusion in policy spaces.” 

Author: Janine Duffy, IIED.

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