Stewardship: An International Perspective‪.‬

Introduction The term stewardship is well known to conservationists in North America familiar with the work of land trusts and the growing array of private and public-private land conservation initiatives. Perhaps less well known is that there is growing international interest in stewardship, which we define here as efforts to create, nurture and enable responsibility in landowners and resource users to manage and protect land and natural resources. In diverse corners of the world, conservationists are drawing on local traditions of stewardship to meet conservation challenges such as land re-privatization, declining public budgets for protected areas, and development pressures.