Collective Lands

In Atlas Amazon, Collective Lands are areas governed through collective tenure systems, customary institutions, and community-based decision-making. The category covers Indigenous territories, local community lands, and Afro-descendant territories — areas defined primarily by their governance systems, territorial rights, and long-standing relationships between people and place.

Across the Amazon, Collective Lands account for a substantial portion of the landscape and play a central role in sustaining forests, freshwater systems, and biocultural diversity.

Defining Collective Lands

What defines a Collective Land is that rights, responsibilities, and decision-making are held collectively rather than individually. The legal footing for that varies: some systems are formally recognized under national law, others rest on customary tenure and traditional authority, and many are partially recognized or still working through formalization.

In every case, governance is embedded in social, cultural, and ecological relationships that shape how a territory is used, managed, and sustained over time.

Collective Land Classes

Collective Lands are organized into three classes.

Indigenous Territories

Lands governed by Indigenous peoples through customary systems and, in many cases, formal legal recognition.

Local Community Lands

Lands governed collectively by non-Indigenous local or traditional communities.

Afro-descendant Lands

Territories governed by Afro-descendant peoples with distinct historical and legal recognition.

Governance Systems

Governance is the defining feature of Collective Lands, and it takes three broad forms.

In practice these often operate simultaneously within the same territory, and the balance between them shifts over time.

Stewardship Practices

Collective Lands are associated with stewardship practices that follow from those governance systems and the ecological knowledge behind them — forest management and conservation, hunting, fishing, and resource use systems, protection of culturally significant areas, seasonal or rotational land use, and territorial monitoring and enforcement.

These practices are usually embedded in long-term relationships between communities and ecosystems rather than designed as conservation interventions.

Conservation Role

Collective Lands are not defined as conservation areas, yet they frequently deliver conservation outcomes: maintaining high forest cover, reducing deforestation and degradation, supporting biodiversity and ecological connectivity, and sustaining complex social-ecological systems.

How far they do so varies with the strength of governance, the external pressures they face, and how conditions change around them.

Data Governance

Data on Collective Lands requires careful handling, because it can include territorial boundaries, governance systems, stewardship practices, and culturally sensitive information.

The Atlas therefore supports approaches in which communities themselves define what data is shared, how, with whom, and at what level of detail — in line with Indigenous data sovereignty and responsible data governance. See Data Sovereignty and Control.

Collective Lands in the Atlas

Within the platform, each Collective Land is mapped as a spatial area, classified using the taxonomy, linked to governance and identity metadata, associated with stewardship assessments through CASE, and connected to indicators and regional datasets. This is what allows governance systems and stewardship practices to be analyzed across very different contexts.

Relationship to PCA

Collective Lands and Protected and Conserved Areas (PCA) are the two primary Area Types, and the distinction between them is analytical: PCA are defined primarily through conservation designation systems, Collective Lands through governance and territorial rights.

The two frequently overlap in practice. Indigenous territories may be recognized as protected areas or OECMs, conservation instruments may apply within collective lands, and co-management arrangements may bridge both systems. The Atlas keeps the distinction while allowing the overlap to be represented.

Why this Matters

Collective Lands have historically been underrepresented in conservation datasets and policy frameworks. Including them explicitly gives a more complete and representative account of conservation across the Amazon — one that recognizes that long-term ecological outcomes are often sustained by governance systems operating well outside formal conservation designation.