Governance (Draft)

Governance metadata records who makes decisions about an area, how authority is structured, and which instruments guide management.

Core metadata defines what an area is and Designation metadata describes its legal status; Governance metadata explains how decisions are actually made.

Fields

Governance Type

governance_type classifies the governance system in a way that is consistent across every area, which is what allows comparison at regional scale.

Governance Subtype

governance_subtype captures the basis of the governance system rather than who holds it.

This distinction carries particular weight in the Amazon, where governance commonly combines legal recognition with customary authority — and where recording only one of the two would misrepresent the system.

Management Authority

management_authority identifies the entity actually responsible for managing the area. In practice that ranges from national agencies such as MAATE (Ecuador), SERNANP (Peru), and ICMBio (Brazil) through to municipal governments and Indigenous governance bodies.

The field exists because legal designation authority and day-to-day management responsibility are not always the same body, and conflating them hides a meaningful difference.

Management Instruments

management_instrument records the tools, plans, or agreements through which governance is put into practice — management plans, Life Plans (Planes de Vida), PGTAs (Territorial and Environmental Management Plans), community regulations or statutes, co-management agreements, and contracts or concessions.

Taken together, these instruments show how governance is operationalized rather than how it is described on paper.

Role of Governance Metadata

Explaining stewardship outcomes

Recording governance systems is therefore what makes it possible to analyze how different arrangements relate to forest cover and degradation, biodiversity outcomes, resource use patterns, and long-term sustainability.

Supporting assessment frameworks

Governance metadata connects directly to the assessment frameworks: PAME evaluates management effectiveness in protected areas, while CASE evaluates stewardship in collective governance systems. Many of their indicators depend on knowing the governance type, who participates, and which management instruments exist.

Enabling comparison

Because the fields are standardized, they support comparison across countries, analysis across governance types, and aggregation of indicators by governance system — the basis for seeing patterns at basin scale.

Capturing complexity

Governance in the Amazon is frequently multi-level, overlapping, and in flux. Allowing multiple actors, hybrid systems, and free-text notes lets the metadata hold that complexity instead of forcing a single clean answer.

Relationship to Other Metadata

Governance metadata sits between several other categories:

• Core — provides the classification context for governance systems
• Designation — legal recognition may shape governance, but does not fully define it
• Social Context — governance is often tied to identity, culture, and community
• Assessments — governance is a key dimension evaluated in both PAME and CASE
• Indicators — governance variables help explain patterns in resilience, degradation, and pressure

Example

In Practice

These fields are contributed and refined over time, are often multi-valued and context-specific, and are central to interpreting outcomes and trends. Because governance systems themselves evolve, expect these values to be updated as new agreements, actors, or instruments emerge.