The Centre for Indigenous Conservation and Development Alternatives () supports multidisciplinary research partnerships that attend to the ‘life projects’ of Indigenous peoples globally. With regional emphasis on the Americas, Africa, Australia, and the Circumpolar North, CICADA projects are conceptually grounded in Indigenous ontologies and cosmovisions to actualize community-defined conceptions of ‘living well’.
The centre’s extensive network includes more than twenty-seven Indigenous nations, more than seventy academic co-investigators and collaborators as well as postdoctoral fellows and students from international universities and institutions. By supporting co-designed and co-led community-based research, CICADA identifies and responds to diverse issues that affect Indigenous life-ways and the larger communities of life within which they reside. CICADA is particularly concerned with issues that relate to conservation governance, territorial rights, resource extractive conflicts, and neoliberal growth, and supports numerous projects that are ordered within the following thematic axes: customary land tenure, conservation and protected areas, livelihoods and food sovereignty, politics of resource extraction, community mapping, and visual methodologies. Through its ongoing international efforts, CICADA forwards innovative approaches for environmental protection and Indigenous-defined visions of alternative development.