Land Protection and Social Equity

Land protection initiatives play a key role in supporting biodiverse, resilient, and productive land systems. Understanding how they affect and interact with social equity is critical for long-term conservation success. Here, we review equity-relevant design and implementation aspects of protected areas, community-based conservation, indigenous governance, payments for ecosystem services, and direct regulation. Existing literature shows that unless effective benefit-sharing mechanisms are in place, land protection often transfers economic surplus from local communities to regional beneficiaries or reinforces existing distributional inequalities. Future work can contribute to understanding these mechanisms, including the institutional structures that facilitate procedural equity and the causal pathways that enable greater equity in specific economic, biophysical, and social contexts.