The Role of Indigenous Knowledge in Biodiversity Conservation: Bridging Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Modern Conservation Frameworks 

Communities holding customary rights over their own land account for at least a quarter of the world’s land area, and a 2019 global assessment found that biodiversity loss on this land has generally been slower than elsewhere. This finding has pushed traditional ecological knowledge, the practical knowledge communities build up over generations about their own land, water, plants, and animals, toward the centre of conservation policy. International instruments, including Article 8(j) of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Nagoya Protocol, and Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, now ask governments to recognise this knowledge and the rights of the people who hold it. India offers a detailed, rarely examined domestic attempt to answer that call. Without using the term “Indigenous Peoples,” which its government generally avoids, India has built laws – the Forest Rights Act, the Panchayats (Extension to the Scheduled Areas) Act, the Wildlife Protection Act’s community and conservation reserves, and the Biological Diversity Act – meant to connect traditional ecological knowledge to modern, state-run conservation. This paper asks whether these legal bridges actually work, or mostly exist on paper while older, exclusionary habits of conservation continue underneath them. It examines this through three illustrations chosen for contrast, not representativeness: the Bishnoi community’s customary tree-protection practices in Rajasthan, the Soliga community’s court-recognised forest rights inside Karnataka’s BRT Tiger Reserve, and Jharkhand’s Sarna sacred groves alongside its unresolved Saranda forest dispute. The paper sets out the resulting research gap, questions, objectives, and method.