On a hilltop above Ankovana in northeastern Madagascar, a farmer pours honey onto a rock before turning the soil. The gesture is centuries old, and at the center of a new study that asks what conservation has been missing.

Before planting, a Betsimisaraka farmer in northeastern Madagascar pours honey onto a rock and speaks to the land's unseen owners, asking permission. The ritual is not incidental. For the communities living in the buffer zone of Masoala National Park, tany—the Malagasy word that holds soil, land, territory, and ancestral domain together in a single concept—is the foundation on which food sovereignty, belonging, and ecological stewardship all rest at once.

Led by Svitlana Lavrenciuc of the Wyss Academy and the Centre for Development and Environment at the University of Bern, and co-authored with Herizo Andriambololona, Paul Clément, and Tida Tzilanizara of the École Supérieure des Sciences Agronomiques at the University of Antananarivo, a new study in Geo: Geography and Environment asks what happens when conservation programmes fail to recognize that foundation. The findings, drawn from nine weeks of collaborative fieldwork across four villages between 2023 and 2024, point to a pattern that extends well beyond Masoala.

Using walking interviews, semi-structured conversations, and video documentation with 24 Betsimisaraka farmers, the research traces how tany care is woven into ancestral obligations, reciprocal labour arrangements, intergenerational inheritance practices, and sophisticated local knowledge systems. Farmers distinguish soil types by texture, colour, moisture, and vegetation indicators, applying diagnostic frameworks that are precise, empirically grounded, and currently invisible to park management. One social institution stands out in particular: fandriaka, a system of mutual aid that once mobilized neighbours to work the land together without money changing hands. Severing access to tany fivelomana—"the land that enables life"—has not only disrupted livelihoods. It has fragmented the reciprocal fabric on which food security and ecological care were jointly sustained.

Community-based natural resource management has been the dominant conservation model in Madagascar for more than three decades. The paper argues that its failures are not failures of participation. They are failures of recognition. Programmes have treated ancestral land claims as folklore, ritual calendars as obstacles, and unpaid community labour as a free input, while presenting themselves as inclusive. What communities have experienced is a more subtle form of enclosure.

Yet Betsimisaraka communities are not passively losing their connection to tany. They are actively renegotiating it. Farmers hybridize ancestral and Christian practices, diversify livelihoods while maintaining place-based identities, and invest in their children's education as a long-term strategy for restoring tany fertility. The relational fabric is frayed in places. At the same time it is also being rewoven.

The study moves beyond critique. It proposes concrete reforms: recognizing fandriaka as a conservation contribution, integrating local tany classification into park management, and securing buffer-zone cultivation rights as preconditions for legitimate governance. Shifting, in the authors' words, from participatory rhetoric to collaborative care. The research was made possible through collaboration with the Full Circle Initiative team in Maroantsetra, whose field support and institutional knowledge were central to the work.

The research is part of the Wyss Academy's work in the Madagascar Solutionscape. But the question it raises is not unique to Masoala: wherever stewardship is treated as a technical problem rather than a relational one, the same pattern tends to repeat across community-based conservation models. Communities are invited to participate in frameworks that quietly erase the very knowledge that makes them stewards.

Text: Predrag Tripkovic