Stewardship
In Atlas Amazon, stewardship refers to the systems, practices, and relationships through which lands and territories are cared for over time. It covers formal management actions, but also the institutions, knowledge systems, and social-ecological interactions that shape how decisions get made and carried out.
Stewardship is therefore dynamic. It describes how governance works in practice, and how systems respond as environmental and social conditions change.
Dimensions
Four dimensions together make up a stewardship system.
Governance Systems
Actors, institutions, and decision-making processes that define authority and responsibility.
Management Practices
Actions taken to conserve, use, or restore ecosystems.
Knowledge Systems
Scientific, local, and Indigenous knowledge guiding decisions and management.
Social-ecological Relationships
Interactions between people, ecosystems, and territory over time.
Contexts
Stewardship arrangements vary widely across the Amazon, but most fall somewhere between three reference points:
- State-led — management led by government institutions, typically within protected areas
- Collective — governance by Indigenous peoples or local communities through customary or legally recognized systems
- Shared — co-management arrangements involving multiple actors and institutions
In practice, many areas combine elements of all three, producing layered or hybrid governance.
Dynamics
Stewardship is not static. It shifts in response to environmental change, external pressures such as infrastructure and extraction, policy and institutional changes, and internal governance dynamics. Understanding a stewardship system therefore means looking at its trajectory, not only its current state.
Measuring Stewardship
Because stewardship is multidimensional, it cannot be read off spatial data or designation alone. The Atlas captures it through two structured assessment frameworks, each matched to a governance context.
PAME
Management effectiveness assessments used in protected and conserved areas.
CASE
Stewardship assessments designed for Indigenous territories and community lands.
These frameworks translate governance and management processes into structured data that can be analyzed and compared. See Assessments for how they are organized.
Outcomes
Stewardship is central to biocultural outcomes, and it explains much of why two areas with the same designation can look so different. The difference usually comes down to governance quality, how thoroughly management practices are implemented, how strong the institutions are, and how well the system can absorb pressure. That is why stewardship is essential for interpreting resilience, degradation, and long-term sustainability.
Atlas Approach
The Atlas treats stewardship as a core analytical dimension rather than a descriptive note. Assessments are linked directly to areas, governance and management data sits alongside spatial datasets, and both can be compared across governance systems and tracked over time. This supports a process-based reading of how systems function, rather than a static snapshot of where conservation has been declared.
Limits
Stewardship cannot be fully reduced to standardized metrics. Governance processes are often hard to quantify, data availability varies across regions, standardized frameworks miss some local realities, and cultural and relational dimensions may resist formalization altogether.
The Atlas therefore pairs structured assessments with flexible data systems that can hold diverse forms of knowledge.