International conventions, national laws and sustainable development policies are increasingly giving a role to indigenous peoples regarding the management of biodiversity by recognizing that they have collective rights over natural resources. These collective rights are assumed to establish the influence of these peoples in the implementation of participative management plans which they need in order to access and use the resources. These obligatory tools are requested in a large number of states (especially in the Amazon) and by institutions working in the field of sustainable development. Their goal is to integrate all environmental, economic, social and cultural aspects of the problem, and to establish rules allocating the rights and duties of each stakeholder. The purpose of this paper is to question the concept of collective rights, i.e. who holds them, and their importance, i.e. to what extent can these peoples influence the making of the norms. In order to do that, we attempted to produce a definition of “collective rights” which acknowledges their mutual dependence with individual rights. We also tried to propose a method for the making of management plans, which builds on the already existing rights of indigenous peoples in order to specify, in each context, the rights and duties of each stakeholder.