Indigenous peoples represent 5% of the world population. Although they play a key role in environmental management as they influence more than one quarter of the earth’s surface and hold unique indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) valuable for sustainable stewardship of nature, the consideration of ILK in environmental management is still limited. In their recent study, Burgos-Ayala et al. (2020) explore how environmental government institutions in Colombia have involved indigenous communities and their ILK in environmental management projects between 2004 and 2015. In order to identify where and how these projects fostered transformative change within indigenous territories, the authors applied a leverage points (LP) perspective.

Indigenous and local knowledge is situated knowledge about the relationship of all living beings with one another…