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Large areas of Oaxaca, southern Mexico, exhibit high biodiversity in the absence of official protected areas. This paper discusses some of the key mechanisms and practices employed by local communities to help conserve their forest resources. The findings suggest that learning from local resource management systems should become an important component of future conservation planning in Mexico. This will require conservationists and the wider public to consider local communities to be a necessary part of territorial and ecological processes and, in some instances, to give them a greater role in biodiversity conservation and stewardship of the country's forest commons. However, such a shift in thinking is unlikely to occur until more research is carried out to determine the specific impacts of these land-use systems on biodiversity and ecological integrity.

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Migration is of particular concern to Indigenous peoples and communities. It physically separates those who migrate from the land upon which collective processes of labour and ritual practice are often based, it affects congruence between individual and collective rationality (as migrants make the choice to maintain or relinquish community membership), and it robs communities of the adult residents who can be essential for projects of collective action. Using the concept of comunalidad, created by Indigenous intellectuals in Oaxaca, Mexico to analyse the importance of alternative practices surrounding land, labour, governance, and ritual found in the region, we show that while Indigenous villages are profoundly affected by different forms of migration, migration itself is not necessarily a "death knell" for Indigenous peasants. We argue that communities struggle-often successfully-to find ways to evolve and reconfigure themselves economically and politically, incorporating migration into the fabric of their daily lives and organizational structures. To make this argument, we draw on ethnographic research conducted with Indigenous Oaxacan transnational communities, both in the United States and Mexico.

Resource regimes are complex social-ecological systems that operate at multiple levels. Using data from two distinct cultural and environmental contexts (Mexico and India), this paper looks at the susceptibility and response of such regimes to rural out-migration. As a driver of demographic and cultural change, outmigration impacts both the practices and institutional arrangements that define territorial resource use and management. The research shows that critical yet poorly recognised shifts in migration dynamics can increase the pressures felt locally and serve to reduce the effectiveness of institutional adaptations at the community level. From an environmental perspective, the research adds to the body of work examining the impacts of rural depopulation on land and seascapes and associated biological diversity. We question the assumption that rural-urban migration necessarily simulates ecosystem recovery and aids conservation. This finding is timely as funding agencies and government programs show belated interest in the consequences of out-migration for environmental management, resource use and rural livelihoods in tropical country settings.