The way someone looks after something that has been put in their care — and the fact of being responsible for it. You almost always see it as 'someone's stewardship of something': a minister's stewardship of the economy, a family's stewardship of the land, a coach's stewardship of the team. Two feelings live inside the word. First, the thing is not really yours; you are holding it for someone else, or for the people who come after you, so you should hand it on in good condition. Second, you can be judged on how well you did it — people say good stewardship and poor stewardship, and a newspaper writing about a leader's stewardship is usually about to say whether they made a mess of it. Because of that first feeling, the word turns up constantly when people talk about the environment, about money given to a charity, and in churches. It is formal. In ordinary conversation you would say 'the way he looked after it' or 'while he was in charge'. There is also a narrow time sense — the period during which someone was in charge: 'under her stewardship, the museum doubled its visitors.'