INTRODUCTION

Mobile indigenous peoples (e.g. pastoralists, swidden farmers, and hunter-gatherers) have sustainably managed the lands they lived on for centuries. However, throughout the modern era and especially in recent decades, many have been displaced, dispossessed, and expelled from their traditional territories, forced to settle and prevented from practising the forms of mobility upon which their livelihoods and social systems are based. These restrictions have left many destitute and have disrupted the cultural foundations of mobile indigenous identities. While the explicit aims of settling mobile peoples are no longer stated in the rhetoric of conservation and development, practical steps toward land restitution and mobility rights have not been forthcoming. Policy has not kept pace with advances in thinking about the relationship between mobile peoples, the state, and territory. Nor do states and international actors often live up to public declarations of concern for the human rights of mobile peoples. Mobile peoples, even as rights-holders, continue to be marginalised in policy and in practice.

In 2002, the Dana Declaration  was promulgated by a group of social and natural scientists in Wadi Dana, Jordan.  The rationale for this effort drew upon the advocacy of numerous anthropologists and other scientists concerned with the growing marginalization and impoverishment of mobile herding societies in countries that did not recognize indigeneity as defining elements of their population. Either they were countries that had not experienced colonialism (e.g. the Arabian Peninsula) or where mobile herders represented the majority of the population (e.g. Mongolia). Wadi Dana was the site for the expulsion of Bedouin sheep herders from important grazing land. And the Dana Declaration was formulated in the ‘footsteps’ of the Barbados Declaration of 1971 which criticized the way in which nation states, religious missions, and anthropologists  related to Indigenous  Peoples in Latin American. The Dana Declaration was a ’compromise document’ which criticized  the way in which mobile peoples were ignored, demeaned and made invisible, but went further to put forward ways of working together for the benefit of  mobile peoples, conservationists, and the states in which they were located.  The Dana Declaration signatories established a  standing committee and tasked it  with spreading its message and continuing its work with other bodies to address the concerns regarding the welfare of mobile indigenous peoples in sustainable development in general and in biodiversity conservation in particular. Initial efforts to reach out to the larger Indigenous Peoples Movement revealed concern within that body that  a focus on mobile peoples might  fracture  efforts towards  developing a united declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. Thus, the Dana Standing Committee worked in parallel with the Indigenous Peoples Movement and noted in all its documentation that  mobile peoples were a sub-set of Indigenous Peoples. 

The  Dana Declaration on Mobile Peoples and Conservation (www.danadeclaration.org), provided guidelines for a synergistic strategy for dealing with challenging extractive industries and development,  the impact of climate change,  the requirement for environmental protection and meeting the human rights and needs of mobile peoples. Over a series of workshops with ever increasing numbers of mobile peoples participating, the Dana Declaration and its Dana +20 Manifesto  reached the United Nations General Assembly in 2024 through the report on the situation of Mobile Indigenous Peoples  which the Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Issues  of the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights delivered. 

I. BACKGROUND

Land conservation and protection efforts have been part of human society for centuries.  Government measures to set aside pristine areas of nature are generally considered to date back to the late 19^th century when significant areas of land were set aside as ‘wilderness’ to be preserved, ‘untouched by humans’  for the good of largely urban populations with little access to clean air and water.  In 1872, a tract of hot springs and geysers  northwestern Wyoming  was set aside  by the United States Federal government to establish Yellowstone National and later Yosemite and Glacier National Parks (Manning 1989). The inhabitants of these areas,  mainly  Crow, Shoshone, and other  native American  Indians, were driven out by the army which took over  the management of the area (Morrison 1993). In the United Kingdom, conservationists were mainly foresters  who stressed  that the public good was best served though protecting forests and water resources, even if this mean the displacement of local communities (McCracken 1987:190).  This expertise and philosophy was transferred aboard to all of Great Britain’s colonial holdings; in the colonies, the customary rights of indigenous peoples were often denied (Harmon 1991; Colchester 1994).  Now more than a century later,  most national parks in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the rest of the world  have been and to some extent  still continue to be created on the model pioneered at Yellowstone  National Park  and built upon by the early British colonial conservationists. The fundamental principle  remains to protect  parks and nature reserves from the ‘damage’ which indigenous communities are assumed to inflict on the land.   

In much of the developing world, conservation efforts  have been largely based on the assumption that human actions negatively affect the physical environment. Problems like degradation of rangelands, desertification, and destruction wildlife have been viewed as principally due to local indigenous misuse of resources.  The common Western, urban notion of wilderness as untouched or untamed land has pervaded conservation thinking and thus many polices are based on the assumption that  nature reserves can only be maintained  without people.  They do not recognize the importance local indigenous management and land use  practices sustaining and protecting biodiversity.  Nearly every part of the world has been inhabited and modified by people in the past and apparent wildernesses have often supported high densities of people  (Colchester 1994; Pimbert and Pretty 1995).  In Kenya for example the rich Serengeti grassland ecosystem was, in part, maintained by the Maasai and their cattle  (Adams and McShane 1992).  There is good evidence from many parts of the world that local, often mobile, indigenous peoples do value, utilize, and efficiently manage their  environment (Oldfield and Alcorn 1991; Scoones et al. 1992; Abin 1998) as they have done for millennia. It suggests that  the mythical pristine environment exists only in our imagination (Pimbert and Pretty 1995:3).

From the late nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth century, conservation meant the preservation of flora and fauna and the exclusion of people. As was the case  in the formation of Yellowstone National park, armies and colonial police in Africa, Asia, Latin America and much of the developing world  have been employed to expropriate and exclude indigenous communities, many of them mobile, from areas designated as ‘protected’ often at great social and ecological costs. Forced removal and compulsory resettlement, often to lands  totally inadequate for sustainable livelihoods were common. Examples of these practices which resulted in forced settlement and destruction of  mobile livelihoods include the San in areas of the Kalahari desert, the Maasai in the Northern and Southern Maasai reserves of Kenya and Tanzania, and the Berber in southwestern Morocco’s Toubkal National park   (Jacobs 1975; Lindsay 1987).     

Despite the end of the colonial era in the 1960s, the  last quarter of the twentieth century  has witnessed  a remarkable growth in parks and protected areas designed to conserve the Earth’s invaluable ecosystems and biodiversity (Anderson and Grove 1987; Brandon, Redford and Sanderson 1998; Redford and Sanderson 2000). Much of this activity was stimulated by the Brundtland Report of 1987, ‘Our Common Future’, which identified  the need to preserve the Earth’s biodiversity. It was written by Go Harlem Brundtland, the former Norwegian Prime Minister and Chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development. The report,  which was showcased at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, called for ever larger percentages of the Earth’s surface being protected.

In 1950, the Swiss-based World Conservation Union recorded that there were about 1,000 protected areas world-wide. By 1985 this  number had grown to 3,500  protected areas; by the beginning of the 21^st century, however, it had ballooned to 29,000. These areas protected from residential and economic use, encompassed some 2.1 billion acres of land and compose 6.4 % of the earth’s land, or about half of the world’s croplands at the beginning of the 21^st century. By 2024 these figures had shot up to 261,766 protected areas (17.6 % of the earth’s surface) and encompasses 22.5 billion acres of land (UNEP/IUCN Protected Planet Report 2024). It is stating the obvious to write that the  first decades of the 21st century have seen a major biodiversity conservation goal achieved: the setting aside of large areas of the earth’s surface to protect its biodiversity. The Convention on Biological Diversity has succeeded in its target of expanding protected areas to 17% of the earth’s surface in the first decade of the 21^st century (UNEP-WCMC, 2021). Its target for 2030 is 30% of the Earth’s surface (https://www.cbd.int/gbf/targets).

Unfortunately, much of this global greening continues with very little regard for the rights of the people who are resident in them (Bell 1978; Botkin 1990; Colchester 1994; Ewers 1998; Harmon 1991; Lindsay 1987; McCabe 1992, Chatty and Colchester [2022] 2025).  Some 70% to 85% of the world’s protected areas are inhabited by human beings. In many places these local, traditional or indigenous people are viewed as detrimental to biological conservation and are often evicted, or prohibited from hunting, gathering, herding or farming.

In many parts of the world Mobile Indigenous Peoples continue to be discriminated against, marginalized, or simply chased out. For some better organized and statistically more significant groups such as the Sami in Scandinavia, and the Inuit in North America, a global rights-based debate has emerged which integrates the leadership of these societies with international pressure groups which lobby  to  maintain these peoples’ rights to the lands that they have traditionally lived on (Barnes 1995; International Alliance 1997; Margolis 2000; MRG 1999; PRIA 1993; Pimbert and Pretty 1995). Such advocacy, however, hardly exists for the more loosely- structured and widely dispersed mobile peoples of the world – the nomadic pastoral societies of North and East Africa, and the Middle East, the hunting and gathering societies of southern Africa,  the tribal societies in India and the  swidden farmers and fishermen of Southeast Asia.  For them, the creation of nature reserves and protected areas on their lands  still often means  exclusion, further marginalization and in some cases eviction from  lands they have maintained for decades if not centuries.

In Latin America, an estimated 85% of Protected Areas are inhabited by peoples – many of them mobile – who traditionally use vast areas of land non-intensively.  The state of Madre de Dios in Peru, for example, is one of the last great wildernesses of the Amazon – a region of 80,000 square kilometres that still contains large, unmapped areas which are home to isolated indigenous people who have no direct contact with the outside world.   The Manu National Park includes part of the territory of isolated communities of the nomadic Yora peoples. Many conservations wish to entice the Yora into settlement outside of the park in order to preserve its integrity.  Anthropologists and indigenous representatives, on the other hand, argue that is it up to the nomadic groups themselves to decide whether and when they make contact, and what lifestyle they adopt – and they are backed up by international law (see also Chatty and Colchester 2025; CBD 1992; ILO 169, 1989; IUCN 1994; WCPA 1991).

In the Middle East and North Africa, biodiversity conservation does not have a long history. Its mainly arid land mass is not suitable as a wooded reserve and it has few species of large mammals, making it unattractive for the development of wildlife protected areas.  Animal reintroduction projects, however, have become significant conservation and human concerns in the area as a whole. At one time, large herds of Arabian Oryx did thrive throughout the Arabian Peninsula. But by 1917, the Oryx survived mainly in two pockets: one, in the Great Nafud Desert in the north; and one in and around the Rub’-al-Khali (Empty Quarter) in the south.  The northern population became extinct around 1950, but Oryx were still being sighted in Oman until 1972 when there too, they were declared extinct in Arabia.  In 1980, an area the size of Scotland in the central desert of Oman was proclaimed a wildlife sanctuary and the first Oryx from the World Herd were flown back into the country and released into an enclosure on the sanctuary.  The nomadic pastoral peoples, the Harasiis, who inhabited this desert were not consulted and, at a stroke of a pen, their traditional land claims and subsistence livestock-raising – their whole way of life – became  threatened. The same or similar scenarios have been repeated in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Israel (Chatty 2002).

Secure land rights and sustainable livelihoods for these Mobile Indigenous Peoples  around the world are under threat. This is due, in part, to the widely held view that indigenous people are a menace to environmental conservation as well as the largely invisible nature of mobile peoples’ lifestyles and livelihoods.  The lands they inhabit are often declared empty (terra nullius), thus making the land available for  extractive industry exploitation and ‘green hydrogen’ planning of immense wind farms and solar panels to create electricity in  territory traditionally held in common by Mobile Indigenous Peoples for pastures.  In a settled world, people who move as part of a strategy of sustainable natural resource use do not register on national, regional or international consciousness.

In the drive to establish reserves and parklands for the protection of habitat and to prevent species loss, traditional and indigenous peoples throughout the world have suffered limitations on resource use, land expropriation, even expulsion at the hands of national and international agencies, as well as human rights violations. While conservation agencies have publicly denounced such practices – see for example the Durban Accord and Action Plan adopted at the World Parks Congress in 2003 – progress in land restitution and protection of indigenous rights in individual nation states has been either sluggish or non-existent, particularly where the peoples concerned are mobile, dispersed, and not physically present at all times of the year. Domestic laws rarely keep up with international proclamations or policy recommendations in this domain.

An improved understanding of the causes of environmental damage is slowly occurring and the conservation movement has re-examined its approaches to biodiversity protection, especially the assumptions underlying the exclusion of indigenous peoples from protected areas (Chatty and Colchester 2025; West, et al. 2006; Brockington et al. 2008; Gilbert 2018). The beginning of the 21st century has been marked by a new understanding of indigenous peoples’ positive contributions to their local ecosystems and conservation (Rio Declaration, Article 22; Convention on Biological Diversity, Articles 8j and 10c; Resolutions on Indigenous peoples, IUCN General Assembly 1996; Beltran, IUCN and WWF, 2000; and the Durban Accord and Durban Action Plan: IUCN, 2004). This nuanced recognition of the special knowledge, roles and rights of such peoples has resulted in increasing efforts to integrate indigenous, traditional, and local communities into the planning and management of conservation areas or, at the very least, ameliorating the negative impact that such schemes have on the sustainability of their livelihoods (Borrini-Feyerabend et al. 2007; Renard et al. 2007; Colchester 2020). When indigenous peoples are sedentary and relatively organised due, in part, to the density of their habitation patterns, developing and building capacity to take part in conservation-based negotiations are normally straightforward. However, when indigenous peoples are mobile, then standard sedentist efforts to reach them often fail.

Mobile Peoples are a subset of traditional and indigenous peoples whose livelihoods depend upon mobility and extensive common property use of natural resources; mobility is both a management strategy for sustainable livelihoods and land and a distinctive source of cultural identity[1]. In some parts of the world, such as Latin America, Mobile Indigenous Peoples do have an organised presence within the Indigenous Peoples Movement. In many other parts of the world, however, such as Africa, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, Australia, and the Pacific, they remain largely excluded and peripheral to the main dialogues on Indigenous Peoples – Biodiversity Conservation – Sustainable Development.

Mobile peoples – be they pastoralists, hunters and gatherers, far-ranging swidden agriculturalists or other similarly land-based groups – are marginalised due to the mobility that they exercise as a fundamental aspect of their livelihoods. The requirement to be widely dispersed and spread out over extensive territory makes them largely invisible in their natural habitats but also marginalises them, when they are forced to settle on the edges of their former territories, be it desert, savannah or forest. The removal of Mobile Indigenous Peoples from their traditional lands often goes unrecognised because there is no organised protest, outcry or interest group advocating their right to remain mobile both within the borders of their traditional lands and beyond. This is the case even when their land management practices are such that the lands that they occupy are of high biodiversity value and meriting conservation. Furthermore, the special knowledge that mobile indigenous peoples have about their environment and the special role that their mobility plays in the conservation and sustainable use of biological resources often go unstudied and unrecorded.

II. THE DANA DECLARATION AND INTERNATIONAL POLICY AND SOFT LAW

In April 2002, nearly 30 experts – social and natural scientists – from around the world attended a five-day conference in the Dana Nature Reserve, Jordan. They came together to address a difficult and sensitive issue: the relationship between Mobile Indigenous Peoples^[2] and conservation. After intensive debate, in which contrasting perspectives were offered, common ground was successfully developed around an agreed statement of principles – the Dana Declaration on Mobile Peoples and Conservation (see www.danadeclaration.org).  A special issue of the Journal of Nomadic Peoples (Vol 7 no 1, 2023) documented those proceedings by presenting edited versions of the keynote addresses of both the social and natural scientists as well as the case studies prepared by scholars working in Borneo,  Australia, Peru, East Africa, Southern Africa, and Jordan. 

The Dana Declaration Steering committee was tasked with working to move the Declaration into international policy and soft law. Concern among the Indigenous Peoples movement that a focus on mobility would undermine their efforts towards drafting a United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Dana Standing Committee agreed to work on its own but in parallel with the Indigenous Rights movement. Over the past twenty-three years, the Dana Declaration Standing Committee has organised initiatives specifically designed to build capacity among Mobile Indigenous Peoples to represent themselves and advocate their rightful place in the context of biodiversity conservation, extractive industry activity, and sustainable development. One aim has been to promote wider recognition of Mobile Indigenous Peoples’ specialist knowledge, customary systems of resource management based on mobility and their fundamental human rights. Another aim has been to slow down – and perhaps eventually stop – the displacement, dislocation, and forced sedentarisation of Mobile Indigenous Peoples; and to move toward restoration of the communal land rights and territoriality upon which mobility depends. Taking a global perspective, these initiatives combined several simultaneous strategies to develop and build capacity among mobile indigenous peoples as well as to raise awareness of their special needs within the general indigenous peoples’ movement. The Dana Declaration Dana and Dana+10 endeavoured to: promote research and dissemination of Mobile Peoples’ traditional knowledge and practices; build the capacity of mobile peoples’ customary institutions by facilitating their representation at international fora; advocate for their inclusion in planning for biodiversity conservation and sustainable development; facilitate the inclusion of addendums to international guidelines relating to indigenous peoples (especially the World Congress of Protected Areas [WCPA], International Union for the Conservation of Nature [IUCN], International Labour Organisation [ILO], United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], and World Wildlife Fund [WWF]); and develop networking capacity across Mobile Indigenous Peoples groups.

The Standing Committee for the Dana Declaration has succeeded in implementing all of the above. It has disseminated the Dana Declaration to key conservation actors through a dedicated website (www.danadeclaration.org) and arranged an effective presence at the World Parks Congress (WPC) in 2003 in Durban, South Africa, where the Declaration was endorsed in the WPC Workshop Recommendation 5.27. It supported the attendance of representatives of Mobile Indigenous Peoples at the Congress and encouraged their participation in the Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus at the Peoples’ Park – a parallel event in Durban. It encouraged the formation of the World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples (WAMIP), which came together at the WPC in Durban in 2003, at the IUCN 3^rd and 4^th Congresses in Bangkok in 2003 and Barcelona in 2008 and at the Dana+10 workshop in 2012. At the 4^th World Conservation Congress organised by the IUCN in Barcelona in 2008, the Dana Declaration was finally endorsed as part of the working principles for social development in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (see www.danadeclaration.org). And it has supported the production of several issues of Policy Matters identifying good practice among mobile indigenous peoples and bringing these to the attention of biodiversity conservation organisations (Vol. 13, 2004; 15, 2007).

The Standing Committee for the Dana Declaration also supported representatives of Mobile Indigenous Peoples from Kenya, Ethiopia, Namibia, Tanzania, Mali, Morocco, Jordan, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Socotra/Yemen, India, Mongolia, Peru, and the United States to attend the Pre-World Conservation Congress Indigenous Peoples’ workshops in 2004 and 2008. It facilitated their attendance at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) in 2006 and 2008; it also conducted capacity-building workshops and side events at the UNPFII, where information regarding the Dana Declaration was disseminated through round table discussions on the impact of climate change and extreme weather on Mobile Indigenous Peoples’ livelihoods.  The Dana Standing Committee has sent representatives of the Dana +20 working group to the Convention on Biodiversity Declaration  (CBD) Conference of the Parties (COP)  in Montreal in December 2022 to disseminate the  Dana+20 Manifesto. 

In 2024, the Dana Declaration Standing Committee, following the Action Plan for the Dana +20  Workshop sent  four representatives of  Mobile Indigenous Peoples  to attend the UNPFII  in April 2024 to engage with the  Forum’s themes of self-determination and youth participation and  to  disseminate the Dana +20 Manifesto and its concerns with regards to sustainability, climate change discourse, and development paradigms, as well as  articulate the impact of implicit biases in much contemporary practice and policy. This action, which the  Dana Declaration Steering Committee organized with the Rights and Resources Initiative as well as the Forest Peoples Programme, brought  the concerns of Mobile Indigenous Peoples to a larger  international audience  as well as  the support team for the Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples of the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights. In October 2024, the Special Rapporteur ,  Jose Francisco Cali Tzay,  presented his report on the situation of Mobile Indigenous Peoples to the United Nations General assembly  demanding recognition  for their basic human rights as well as  creating  broader  networks and alliances  for future engagement. This  participation coincided with preparation for the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP) in 2026 and helped build a strategic framework for reducing the invisibility  and marginality of Mobile Indigenous Peoples as well as generating advocacy for enhancing  Mobile Indigenous Peoples’ rights to self-determination  in international,  national , regional, and local contexts.  Dissemination of the Dana +20 Manifesto and encouraging governments and  local organisations to adopt the Dana Declaration  as working principles for the basic  human rights of Mobile Indigenous Peoples  remains  a high priority and urgent challenge in the face of the continuing invisibility of peoples whose livelihoods depend on mobility.

CONCLUSION

Since 2002 when the  Dana Declarations was first promulgated  significant advances have been made in international human rights law concerning the rights of Indigenous Peoples and others with customary ties to the lands and natural resources that they depend on. In 2007 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The UNDRIP sets out minimum standards on the rights of Indigenous Peoples and, among much else, affirms their rights to: self-determination within the framework of nation-states; self-governance; self-definition; and free, prior, and informed consent to any measures that may affect their rights (UN 2007).

These advances in Indigenous peoples’ rights have been accompanied by major achievements in national and international jurisprudence. For example, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have upheld the rights of Indigenous and tribal peoples to their territories, to free, prior, and informed consent and the restitution for lands taken without consent. Importantly for Mobile Indigenous Peoples, this jurisprudence notes that a “guarantee of the right to territorial property is a fundamental basis for the development of indigenous communities’ culture, spiritual life, integrity and economic survival” and that these territories “extend beyond settlements of specific villages to include lands that are used for agriculture, hunting, fishing, gathering, transportation, culture, and other purposes” (Organization of American States  2009: 1, 13).

The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights has also made landmark judgments relevant for Mobile Indigenous Peoples. The court has recognized the rights of the pastoral Endorois people of Kenya to the restitution of the territory they lost to imposed conservation areas (Gilbert 2007 2014). Likewise, in two judgments on the eviction of the hunter and gatherer Ogiek people from the Mau Forest, the court has ordered the government of Kenya to compensate the people for losses and to reinstate their rights to their ancestral lands (African Court 2022).

English common law judgments and laws derived from them, in countries like Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, likewise make clear that territorial rights are not just rights to property but also jurisdictional rights and attaches to  people as collective groups. Such rights do not depend on an act of the state but derive from customary rights, practices, and usages and obtain until lawfully extinguished. Such rights may extend over hunting and fishing areas and seasonally occupied foraging areas and explicitly go beyond settlements and cultivated fields. Moreover, such rights are both collective and intergenerational (McNeil 2016).

Many Mobile Indigenous Peoples assert rights that overlap the rights of others, such as seasonal transhumant pastoralists, some of whom range across national boundaries. This reality was recognized in 1989 in the International Labour Organization’s Convention No. 169 on Tribal and Indigenous Peoples. Article 15 requires that “measures shall be taken in appropriate cases to safeguard the right of the peoples concerned to use lands not exclusively occupied by them, but to which they have traditionally had access for their subsistence and traditional activities. Particular attention shall be paid to the situation of nomadic peoples and shifting cultivators in this respect.”  The problem for Mobile Indigenous Peoples is not that their rights are not beginning to be recognized by international human rights law but that these rights are not adequately upheld by national policies and laws and are often not respected by conservation agencies and corporate investors.

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[1]. Common property systems gave well established community rules for use /ownership. They are not the same as open access and include such land use types as seasonal grazing, and community conserved areas.

[2] By ‘mobile peoples’, we mean a subset of indigenous and traditional peoples whose livelihoods depend on extensive common property use of natural resources over an area, who use mobility as a management strategy for dealing with sustainable use and conservation, and who possess a distinctive cultural identity and natural resource management system