Weaving everyday environmental heritage into modern conservation policy: Insights from Indigenous communities in northern Thailand

Signatories of global conservation treaties have pledged to support Indigenous peoples' rights and roles in maintaining biodiversity and ecosystems. Movements embracing biocultural concepts (e.g. Indigenous ecological knowledge, cultural ecosystem services) and governance approaches (e.g. sacred natural sites, biosphere reserves) have provided important impulses, but existing frameworks offer limited insight into the complex interplay between Indigenous communities, ecosystems, and conservation policy. A complementary approach that centres the analysis on ‘doing’ biocultural heritage, the processes that constitute and unsettle it, and the broader context to which it connects can offer new pathways for informing conservation policy. This article introduces such an approach through the concept of everyday environmental heritage (EEH). We define EEH as an inherently intangible and unstable process of producing and transmitting culture through artefacts, spaces and practices in a way that creates direct and indirect links to people's local ecosystems. Its main analytical value derives from (1) engaging with the communal processes and external contextual factors that shape contemporary heritage expressions; (2) interrogating their intrinsic value and instrumental functions; and (3) exploring the behavioural, social, and political systems to which they connect. We illustrate a subset of the possibilities of the EEH concept in an exploratory case study of forest management by Indigenous communities in northern Thailand. Data were collected using participatory ethnographic methods in two Pgaz K'Nyau (Karen) and two Hmong villages in Chiang Mai province from 03/2022 to 05/2024, which involved 75 Indigenous participants and eight community consultations. Through inductive thematic analysis, we highlight three key manifestations of EEH: intrinsically valued practices without direct links to external conservation stakeholders, instrumental practices for contesting state conservation policies and land‐use restrictions, and emerging practices with the potential to stabilise into one of the first two types. Local social and institutional networks were key to support EEH practices. We discuss how varied expressions of EEH, their political antecedents, and their systemic consequents can help identify and promote sustainable and Indigenous‐led conservation approaches. We conclude that future work should systematically explore conservation effect mechanisms and bottom‐up policy design process models centred on the concept of EEH. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.