Scaling Indigenous-led natural resource management

Rights-holders, practitioners, and researchers recognize the importance of Indigenous-led resource management for building a more ecologically just world and addressing climate change and biodiversity loss. Yet, it remains unclear how to support them in a way that increases their spatial extent and ensuring impact on equitable biodiversity conservation. We address this gap by using Diffusion of Innovations theory to explain the rapid spread of an Indigenous-led network of Locally Managed Marine Areas in Fiji. We found that 74.9 percent of adopters had a previous adopter as their nearest neighbor, and that despite contrasting patterns of adoption at the island level, such patterns could be accounted for by: perceived relative advantage, village chiefly status, distance to tourism hotspots, and presence of district-level management committees, support organizations, and trust. These insights can inform the design and implementation of Indigenous-led approaches that can scale appropriately and respond to the global environmental crisis.