ABSTRACT Conservation and food systems are at a crossroads. Although exclusionary conservation approaches have long been critiqued, community‐based natural resource management (CBNRM), the dominant conservation model in Madagascar for over three decades, has similarly failed to achieve genuine power transfer to local communities, functioning instead as new forms of enclosure under participatory rhetoric. These failures have disrupted agroecological practices and undermined place‐based stewardship, particularly in the buffer zones of protected areas such as Masoala National Park. This study examines how tany —the Malagasy term encompassing soil, land, territory and ancestral domain—mediates relational values within Betsimisaraka farming communities. Drawing on frameworks of anchoring and belonging and the IPBES relational values typology, we employ collaborative rapid ethnographic methods—walking interviews, semi‐structured conversations and video documentation—with 24 participants across four villages over nine weeks of fieldwork. Thematic and narrative analysis reveals how tany care is entangled with ancestral continuity, collective labour, intergenerational inheritance and agroecological stewardship. Findings show that Betsimisaraka communities actively construct belonging through tany , negotiating ritual obligations, maintaining sophisticated local classification systems and navigating the transformation of mutual aid institutions such as fandriaka. These relational values persist across diverse economic contexts and are dynamically reconfigured. However, CBNRM programmes that restrict land access systematically undermine the anchoring work through which communities establish themselves in landscapes. We argue that CBNRM's failures stem from a fundamental inability to recognise tany relationalities as foundations of environmental stewardship and propose a shift from participatory rhetoric to collaborative care—recognising care as labour and redistributing actual authority. Concrete reforms include recognising fandriaka as a conservation contribution, integrating local tany classification into park management and securing buffer‐zone cultivation rights as preconditions for legitimate governance.
Lavrenciuc et al. (Thu,) studied this question.