Abstract
In this study I examined examples of implementation of conservation policies initiated by the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992). I focused on the 101 conservation initiatives conducted during the period of 2002-2012 on the territories of groups classified by the international law as indigenous peoples. I assessed a degree to which conservation benefited indigenous communities as means to combat poverty and ecological degradation. I focused on the connections between the provisions of the CBD Article 8(j) that specified the importance of protecting indigenous and local communities’ traditional knowledge and practices (TK) to conservation, and the actual realities of conservation initiatives in which indigenous expertise was used. I learned that despite the wide use of elements composing TK in the projects examined, only certain communities benefited from the conservation initiatives, with a predominant part of beneficiaries located in the states that insured greater degree of legal and social protection to indigenous individuals as citizens of those states. For the most part conservation was imposed upon indigenous groups; some communities suffered displacement and poverty loosing the lands and resources to the conservation authorities. At the same time in other cases conservation projects offered an opportunity for indigenous individuals to advance their perspectives on managing traditional lands and natural environments and thus, to some degree, advanced underlining these groups’ interests. I concluded that collaborative work between indigenous groups and the outside agencies remains the key means toward improving the indigenous economies and relations with external actors while also serving as a means to care for the environment across geo-political boundaries.
Background
The need to construct a mechanism (or a set of mechanisms) for protecting forms of intellectual and cultural creativities of groups classified as indigenous peoples at the level of the United Nations has been discussed from various positions since the 1980s. 1 Since the 1990s, these discussions centered on the need to protect these entities by means of policy and laws due to their value to the aims of economic development and conservation. The United Nations (UN) Conference on Environment and Development (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 1992), or as it is unofficially termed, the Earth Summit, was by and large the first key event in addressing this need. The summit concluded with the two decisions in which protection of these entities was identified, the Rio Declaration (Principle 22) and the Agenda 21 (Chapter 26), leading to adoption of legally binding instruments, with the major one being the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). An international treaty aimed at protection of variety of life forms necessary to sustain functions of the ecosystems (biodiversity), the CBD is the first and by and large most foundational legal instrument that identifies the forms of intellectual and cultural creativities as an object of protection. 2
The convention articulates the forms of intellectual and cultural creativities toward which protective measures must be applied as elements of traditional knowledge (TK). 3 These elements are specified as “knowledge, innovations and practices” in the CBD Article 8(j). 4 While there is no uniformly agreed upon definition for the term, it is interpreted in response to the specific normative requirements of the convention and includes “skills and techniques” that constitute valuable elements of “culturally diverse knowledge systems” in accord with Article 10(c) and information, know-how, and indigenous (local) technology knowledge that, as asserted, constitute a vital resource to cost-effective, participatory, and sustainable development practices in accord with Article 18(4) (UN Environment Programme, 1994, 1997). The convention does not provide a definition of the TK producers/creators/holders; neither does it specify criteria that define indigenous bearers/owners of these materials (see Article 2, “Use of Terms”). Instead, CBD refers to the producers/owners/holders of TK as “indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles.” 5
The interpretation of policies, implementation initiatives, and theoretical developments surrounding these activities suggest that the key justification for the need to create legal means of TK protection has been an asserted value of the expertise and practices of the indigenous and local communities to the development of sustainable economies. 6 This assertion relates theorizing sustainability—a model that balances social and economic needs with the requirements for environmental safety—with a need to support subsistence practices of indigenous groups, marked by their inherently friendly character, that are threatened by the postindustrial economies. A number of scholars who questioned this assertion point out that apart from the political potential of this assertion in support of indigenous rights, it misrepresents indigenous realities. What had found an articulation as indigenous-nature-friendly practices of managing the environment has been a mere prevention by certain groups of an overuse of the resources rather than a planned set of actions aimed at long-term preservation of resources, they argue. Eric Smith and Mark Wishnie (2000), for example, explicate that it is the small size of communities, relative remoteness some of them from the post-industrialized world, and the subsistence practices based on hunting, fishing, and plant gathering that might have resulted in the balanced use of resources. While sustainable as a means to continuously support community needs, they maintain, these practices can hardly be considered planned actions focused on preventing depletion of species and environmental degradation. In addition, replication of these practices on the large scale can hardly be economically feasible (Smith & Wishnie, 2000; Fennell, 2008). Other scholars add to this debate that theorizing of indigenous lifestyles as inherently nature friendly due to their “traditionality” is a new way of continuing the stereotyping of these groups as “noble savages” living in harmony with nature lost by modernity, as some of the critics pointed out (Hames, 2007; Tennant, 1994).
As a way to test relevance of the knowledge protection policies to indigenous realities, especially the assertion that conservation and preservation of this knowledge must be conducted due to the potential of TK to meet the aims of sustainability, I ran a study of conservation projects that occurred in consequence to the sustainable development policies and took place on the territories of indigenous groups. I interpret the CBD clause “knowledge, innovations and practices” as the ideas and modes of thinking that embrace all aspects of social relations within a community and between a community and the outside actors, expressed with the use of local languages (and at times remaining tacit), and include social and ethnical norms and codes of managing natural and social settings as a way of holding a community together. I theorize that what composes “TK,” that is, what is to emerge as the core of the assistance projects aimed at meeting the aims and ethics of sustainability, must be more than mere information on how indigenous subsistence practices yield conservation but the degree and forms of indigenous engagement in these projects particularly visible in the consequences of those initiatives that took place on the territories of indigenous communities. If, I maintain, indigenous individuals benefited substantively by engagement with conservationists, and/or were able to direct or lead the projects in correspondence with the specificities of local social and economic settings, then the policy and legal actions related to protection of TK was a timely and relevant move in response to the needs of indigenous peoples. In parallel, I also examine the degree of validity of local practices and expertise to the aims of conservation to examine a relationship between indigenous ways of subsistence and relations with nature and a preservation of natural resources.
Methods and Limitations
I located 101 scholarly descriptions of conservation projects that took place on the territories of indigenous peoples from 2002 to the present. 7 I used the ScienceDirect database for most of my search and employed different combinations of conservation, sustainable development, case study, and indigenous. 8 Among an overwhelming amount of results, a significant part of which consisted works in theory, I selected 101 cases using the following logic. To construct a possibly balanced geographical representation, I located a somewhat comparable amount of works for certain geographical regions, despite, of course, that geography does not necessarily correspond to the number of indigenous groups and individuals living in a specific territory. I also, having examined works in theory, attempted to have a somewhat comparable amount of studies for each of the conservation strategies most widely practiced. While useful for the purposes of this study, this approach has serious limitations. As a rule, conservation projects employ a number of interconnected strategies; for example, a creation of a protected area may include development of ecotourism in the protected territory, which in some cases may be managed by a local indigenous community and/or conducted with the use of traditional ways of nature managing, thus combining three to four different ways of conserving within the framework of one project. I differentiated the cases by the accent placed on a specific strategy by the authors. This approached brought the composition of the studies to be examined shown in Table 1.
Composition of Studies.
Note: TK = traditional knowledge.
In addition, I classified the studies by type of ecosystem conserved, with the following distribution: forestry (18); marine ecosystems (6); wildlife by protection of particular plant, animal, or fish species (74); river ecosystem and fisheries (3).
During my examination of the cases, I documented positive and negative results despite that in some cases, only one kind of results were reported. This approach was useful as a heuristic device to navigate through the studies in response to my research inquiry yet also had significant drawbacks. First, rarely was a study a detailed examination of long-term effects of a particular conservation strategy on local livelihoods. For the most part, the authors gave an overview of the effects of the conservation projects on nature and social systems at times across geographical regions. Second, the studies present outcomes of differently shaped research methodologies molded by specificities of the discipline, research focus areas, duration of the projects, and also specificities of the settings where the projects occurred. Some authors documented more than one project, comparing results of a particular conservation strategy across different geopolitical and social settings, at times outside of one country or one geographical region. Others focused on the specificities of indigenous settings, discussing degree of correspondence of a particular conservation approach to the local settings. In a few cases, the works had an underlining advocacy element. Thus, while serving the purposes of my inquiry, this study does not allow estimation of the state of conservation research and/or practices.
In addition, the studies tended to focus on the regions where previous projects took place and/or in areas with an outstanding degree of environmental degradation, such as Amazonia, South America. 9 At the same time, some areas found no coverage (for the number of reasons that preclude working in these areas) despite that a number of indigenous groups do inhabit them, such as parts of Russia outside of the Arctic regions or parts of Africa outside of the southern and eastern African states (South Africa, Kenya, and Tanzania). A concise compilation of the cases assessed for this study is presented in the Appendix found in the online supplementary material, available at http://abs.sagepub.com/content/by/supplemental-data. In the next section, I briefly discuss the results classified by the conservation strategy practiced.
This study falls within a sociology-of-knowledge perspective in the tradition of Karl Mannheim. This approach rests upon an understanding of knowledge as a social phenomenon and, as such, is limited to this specific understanding of knowledge-making practices. 10
Results
Conservation Practices and the Use of Local Knowledge
The largest group of studies, accounting to 31, focuses on the relationship between the local groups’ ideas and expertise and conservation projects. The cases described occur in all the geographical regions, employ diverse conservation strategies, and yield positive and negative results. Positive outcomes are reported in cases of employment of local tenure and resource management practices in the implementation of conservation projects, such as in the case described by Shankar Aswani and Richard Hamilton (2004). The collaborative research between the Rovina Lagoon indigenous groups of the Solomon Islands and marine scientists conducted in response to the local sea-tenure system concluded in a set of techniques of protecting endangered species of fish important for local cultural and substance practices (Aswani & Hamilton, 2004). Ian Baird and Philip Dearden (2003) likewise report successful planning of managing tropical protected areas in Cambodia using the local Brao people’s resource tenure arrangements. Inspiring are the studies from the Pacific. An investigation of the causes of fish poisoning by scientists and the indigenous elders of the Malanbarra Yidinji clan of Australia, for example, led to development of ways to protect culturally important fish species (Gratani et al., 2011); similarly, collaborative work on sustainable harvesting of a culturally important pigeon helped to conserve the endangered bird using New Zealand Māori management strategies (Lyver, Jones, & Doherty, 2009). One of the key projects from the Pacific is a 14-year-long research partnership between the Rakiura Māori and ecologists and statisticians of the University of Otago, New Zealand. This project concluded with the development of strategies of collaboration and research methods that incorporate and/or rest upon indigenous worldviews and ways of investigating reality (Crawford, 2009; Moller et al., 2009). Somewhat comparable to the developments in Pacific are the projects from Scandinavia. The reports, included in this study, focus on the dynamics of adopting the Sámi traditional techniques of human-animal relations to the ecological, technological, social, and legal changes that influence animal behavior and the Sámi ways of life (Tyler et al., 2007; Vuojala-Magga, 2011). A few among these reports document collaborative work between the Sámi and policy and science institutions, such as the Jane Heikkinen et al. (2004) assessment of the results of the RENMAN initiative, a 3-year project between reindeer herders and researchers from nine institutes located in five countries. The initiative aimed at developing participatory research strategies and means of sustaining reindeer management in the Barents Euro-Arctic and concluded with some success despite many difficulties (Arctic Centre, n.d.). Another interesting report from the Arctic is a study of international partnership between indigenous communities living on the both sides of the Bering Strait, Arctic Russia and the United States. Facing similar conditions of managing walrus and polar bear populations, people from these communities collaborate on conserving the animals and supporting their own survival of the threats related to climate change, poverty, political pressures, and economic instabilities (Meek, Lovecraft, Robards, & Kofinas, 2008).
A few studies document consequences of the embeddedness of knowledge in the local social, political, and cultural settings. Martha Dowsley and George Wenzel (2008), for example, discuss how Inuit’ ways of describing and explaining reduction of number of polar bears in Nunavut, Canada, are at times limited to locally observed occurrences or presented with a compliance to a group opinion rendering more of a cultural point of view rather than a set of facts related to conservation of these animals. Melissa Leach and James Fairhead (2002), on the contrary, report on the practices used by environmentalists in presenting Mande hunters’ knowledge (Mande are indigenous groups in Guinea, West Africa) in alignment with the European donors’ aims and perceptions, thus subtly drawing in the local individuals into the projects that may or may not directly benefit them.
Conservation by Means of Community Management
Seventeen reports collected for this study evaluate conservation practiced by means of community management that is reported to take place across all geographical regions and in correspondence to local settings. Among the best practices are perhaps initiatives that took place in Australia under the state-sponsored Indigenous Protected Areas program, which aims to facilitate protective management of lands and/or sea territories owned by indigenous communities (Australian Government, n.d.). Despite potential dependency of indigenous groups on the state support and complexities of an administrative nature, the land-managing agreements that recognize indigenous right to self-governance help to meet interests of indigenous communities and can be instrumental in facilitating intercultural and intergenerational dialog and conservation within the framework of this program (Hill, 2011; Langton, Rhea, & Palmer, 2005; Szabo & Smyth, 2003). Similarly, the cases reported from Canada reveal potential of co-management to strengthen indigenous ties with the land and maintain cultural practices despite significant challenges related to the nascent state of this management practice (Bastien-Daigle, Vanderlinden, & Chouinard, 2008; Berkes, Berkes, & Fast, 2007; White, 2006). These challenges are associated with the lack of mechanisms that can help in reinterpreting indigenous views and practices into a language compliant with science, and social and professional inequities between indigenous communities and government and academic entities, which remain the key voices in policy and planning. A study by Paul Nadasdy in this respect is especially telling and thought-provoking. Using the case of co-management between the Yukon government biologists and the Kluane people (Canada), Nadasdy (2003) questions the potential of co-management to support indigenous interests by pointing out ways in which government biologists retained de facto control over the Kluane people’s natural resources and gained access to, and practically took possession of, intellectual products created through collaborative work conducted under the framework of co-management. Similar insights are provided in studies from Scandinavia, where collaborative research on reindeer management indicated the inferior position of the Sámi herders in planning, administration, and data gathering and interpretation (Heikkinen et al., 2004; Tyler et al., 2007).
The cases reported from Africa show very different kinds of community management practices best exemplified perhaps by the implementation of the Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE). Initiated in the 1980s in Zimbabwe, the program became a popular means across the African continent to practice conservation. The program granted rural communities rights to sell the state-owned but communally held land to private companies, which in turn could develop conservation-friendly enterprises on these lands, such as tourism and hunting (USAID, 2006). The examined studies reveal that complexities of a social and legal nature prevented many indigenous communities across Africa to generate some form of income from the community management projects comparable to CAMPFIRE. Despite some degree of conservation success, these projects benefited only a select number of indigenous individuals while creating social inequity and ways to expropriate community resources by private actors (Holmes-Watts & Watts, 2008; Logana & Moseley, 2002).
Conservation by Means of Tourism Industry
Fifteen studies collected for this analysis focus on ecotourism and cultural tourism, a form of conservation practice reported to take place across most of the geographical regions and on the territories of national parks, reserves, and protected lands. In the settings where indigenous groups retain some or, in rare cases, full degree of control of the industry—mostly in Canada, Scandinavia, and Australia—benefits to indigenous communities tend to be more significant when compared with those in the settings where industry is operated by external actors (reports from South America, Asia, and Africa). Among most-often-reported benefits to indigenous individuals are economic opportunities, promotion of indigenous cultural practices, and creation of means of cultural education. Negative consequences range from economic and cultural control over indigenous lands and practices to stereotyping of indigenous groups and commercialization of traditional items and activities. 11 Julia Ohlschacherer, Mannigel, Kirkby, Shepard, and Yu (2008), for example, document how introduction of tourism in Manu National Park, Peru, led to violation of traditional land rights. Local indigenous communities lost the land rights to conservation authorities, suffered disturbance of the sacred sites, and received minimum benefits from the initiative (Ohlschacherer et al., 2008). Scholars working in Asia and Africa report similar results (Hitchner, Apu, Tarawe, Aran, & Yesaya, 2009; Hunter, 2011; Kaltenborn, Nyahongo, Kidegesho, & Haaland, 2008; Lai & Nepal, 2006). The projects that took place in North America, the Arctic, and Australia, while ensuring some benefits to indigenous groups, also had serious drawbacks. For example, in the case reported by Martha Dowsley (2009), the creation of the industry led to the conflicts between indigenous and conservation communities related to different ethical and normative approaches to managing polar bears. While for local Inuit communities, hunting the bears remains an important traditional activity also profitable to some degree, for conservationists, hunting means violation of conservation ethics (Dowsley, 2009). Other negative consequences are related to uncertainties of the industry, which operates seasonally and often in close dependence on the interest of the outside actors in indigenous (“exotic”) ways of life (Lemelin, Johnston, Dawson, Stewart, & Mattina, 2012; Lynch, Duinker, Sheehan, & Chute, 2010; Müller & Huuva, 2009). A thought-provoking study by Kjell Olsen (2006) focuses on the intentional use of stereotypical Sámi images by the Sámi in Norway as a strategy to attract tourists and strengthen political claims using indigenous difference as a tool of ethno-identity politics. Such representations, while pragmatically useful, Olsen notes, recreate cultural and social marginalization of indigenous peoples (Olsen, 2006).
Conservation by Means of Creating Protected Areas
Creation of protected areas has been a continuously growing conservation strategy that since 1996 has expanded more than 50% worldwide despite a history of disturbed livelihood and forced resettlement associated with it (West, Igoe, & Brockington, 2006). The 19 studies examined for this work focus on creation of protected areas across most of the world geography in the form of national parks, reserves, and protected areas and territories with different degrees of success. The most disturbing among these studies focus on Africa, where creation of protected areas caused dispassion and poverty in local communities. In Africa, the proportion of the land given to protected areas remains one of the largest in the world. 12 Michael Cernea and Kai Schmidt-Soltau (2006) estimated that current and planned creation of 12 parks across the African continent will conclude with close to 300,000 displaced individuals and an additional 150,000 to 300,000 forced into being the “hosts” of the parks, that is, the individuals suffering income lost, food insecurity, marginalization, and loss of access to a common property resulting from the creation of parks in close proximity to their households. Other theorists likewise questioned the validity of creating protected areas in light of the negative consequences this form of conservation may cause to the protected species: displaced individuals living close to the parks may kill the protected animals and plants for subsistence and/or security of livestock and/or threaten them by overuse of the park’s water reserves for agriculture (Okello, 2009; Struhsaker, Struhsaker, & Siex, 2005). Despite these gloomy predictions, it is possible to engage local groups in managing protected areas by, for example, creating small wildlife sanctuaries to help the local people to raise cattle, allowing them to pick plants from the protected lands for food and/or commercial purposes, and leasing community-owned lands to private actors (Wishitemi & Okello, 2003). The cases from North America bring further evidence in support of creating protected areas managed and/or co-managed by indigenous groups, despite that these practices had also some negative aspects, such as the case of creating Marine Protected Areas by the Canadian government in collaboration with the representatives of the First Nations (Guenette & Alder, 2007). In the report from Alaska, likewise the co-management of national parks by the Tlingit indigenous communities peoples brought a mixed degree of success, helping to support indigenous perceptions and worldviews (Thornton, 2010).
Alternative Means
The final category comprises 19 studies that focus on conservation strategies I term “alternative” for methodological reasons. These strategies embrace combinations of methods that found a significantly lesser degree of coverage in the literature and as such could not be grouped into separate classes. Most popular among these strategies are forms of compensation to local groups for conservation-friendly practices or services, and advocacy projects. Kerstin Zander et al. (Zander, Drucker, & Holm-Müller, 2009), for example, document how conservationists compensated the Borana peoples, a group inhabiting southern Ethiopia and some parts of Kenya, for conserving a culturally and commercially important and endangered breed of sheep by substituting it with a different breed for subsistence. Donna Kwan and colleagues (Kwan, Marsh, & Delean, 2006) inform on the steps to preserve a culturally important species of fish used by Torres Strait islanders; these steps combined financial assistance from the state, support of a local protection agency, and a research study of hunting patterns. Susanna Heicht (2012) reports on the decreasing deforestation in Brazil (70% since 2004) that resulted from interrelated political, social, and economic changes, such as new government policies promoting resilient land use, social movements, and state payments for environmental services.
A few studies report on advocacy, a strategy that is truly alternative in comparison with the forms of conservation discussed, as it uses legal and political actions to achieve conditions that favor conservation rather than a set of professional practices of preserving nature. Sharon Milholland’s (2010) study is particularly inspiring. The study documents the famous Snowbowl case, where construction of a sky resort on the San Francisco Peaks (Arizona) was prevented by the Navajo and Hopi rights struggle to protect their traditional lands, where conservation emerged as a by-product of a self-determination struggle. Other exciting examples include studies by Stuart Kirsch (2007) and Alabi Saheed (2012). Saheed, who discusses the latest move by the Nigerian government to request the UN Environment Programme to assess the environmental damage of Ogoniland, continually affected by oil spills and gas flaring, touches upon particularly disturbing subject matter. The Ogoni peoples had been suffering a number of human rights violations related to the oil developments on their land since the late 1950s; these violations took the form of military repression in the 1990s, with thousands being killed, raped, detained, and exiled and the leadership executed in response to the Ogoni protests. Current international attention to the situation in Ogoniland brings some hope for a better future for the Ogoni and the natural environment damaged and destroyed.
Conclusion
Overall, the results indicate that the role of indigenous individuals in conservation projects that had been conducted on their territories since the 1990s remains, for the most part, secondary. The majority of the projects examined had been imposed upon indigenous groups with varied degrees of success as tools of conservation and of creating social equality. The factors that most influence the degree and forms of indigenous involvement relate to the state of indigenous rights and mechanisms for their protection within a specific state. Another factor that directly determined the success of conservation as tools of indigenous support was the degree to which the projects corresponded to the specificities of social, economic, and political settings in which indigenous communities live. The settings where indigenous communities tended to benefit most are those states where indigenous individuals enjoy a greater degree of legal and social protection as members of cultural minorities and citizens of specific states. Likewise, those indigenous individuals who live in the states with a great degree of poverty and corruption remained most vulnerable to conservation initiatives conducted on their territories (perhaps, however, sharing the fate of other social segments of the society where they live).
The most commonly reported positive consequences, the majority of which occurred in North American, Arctic, and Pacific communities, include creation of economic opportunities for individuals, support of communities’ cultural needs, and enhancement of traditional practices and development of constructive relations between indigenous and state, conservation, and academia communities. The most disturbing reports (those from the African states) documented displacement and poverty, leading some researchers to question the significance of protecting nature at the cost of disturbed livelihood and destroyed cultural practices. Unequal distribution of benefits, partial (and in some cases nonexistent) attention to indigenous needs and perspectives, creation of social tensions within and between groups involved in the projects, dependence on outside funding, and commercialization of indigenous cultural practices and items complement the list of negative consequences. The most practiced forms of TK protection are the technical means of collecting, preserving, and disseminating research findings coproduced or created with some (or at times with no) involvement of indigenous individuals in the conservation research. At times, these activities had only partial relevance to the needs of local people; in a few cases, these projects brought disadvantage and harm, as reported by Paul Nadasdy (2003). These findings suggest that the current forms of implementing policy and legal approaches toward protecting TK only partly correspond to the ethical framework of sustainable futures and, in certain cases, protect interests of actors other than indigenous communities.
The ways in which TK is theorized on the level of CBD and work on implementation of the convention also only partly correspond to the findings on the nature of this phenomenon visible from this study. The way the communities, termed local and indigenous, conceptualize processes of social reality and of the natural world tend to differ from the way policy theorists approach these processes; the notion, however, does not imply that local ideas are less sophisticated and/or informative if compared with the scientific ones. 13 Rather, indigenous ideas are, as a rule, expressed by metaphors and using languages different from those employed as tools of scholarly communication, which at times may confuse the scientists working in indigenous settings, as visible in Martha Dowsley’s (2009) study. When, however, abstracted into an object of policy and/or legal protection, these very different forms of intellectual activities of groups categorized as local and indigenous communities take on a character of elements of one category termed in different contexts as indigenous and/or TK. Such a categorization prescribes a similarity of properties to these entities that in reality does not exist to the degree asserted in the mechanisms of protection. In addition, assessment of local ideas and practices from a position of aims of conservation and development leads to (a) identification of those knowledge species that are to be protected as “the privileged knowledge,” which misrepresents the way in which the ideas categorized as valuable are perceived and perhaps even used by those from whom these ideas were taken, and (b) creation of information products derived from the research with and without collaboration of local people that might or might not be useful and/or even accessible to them. As findings of these studies imply, at times these groups remain targets rather than beneficiaries of sustainability, conservation, and related projects, perceived, as Chris Tennant (1994) poignantly noted, similarly to the endangered species that, as victims of modernity, are faced with the threat of extinction. The finding is a disturbing one in light of the ongoing debates surrounding creation of the next set of legal and policy instruments aimed at protecting forms of indigenous intellectual and cultural creativities now with the means of intellectual property (see the work of the World Intellectual Property Organization). As these developments suggest, the struggle over the principles, means, and forms of protecting indigenous traditional creativities is a battle surrounding entitlement of rights for intellectual resources possible to generate from the indigenous settings and potentially profitable for development of new products. In light of the current lack of sound international mechanisms to protect indigenous communities by means of prior informed consent as well as to ensure indigenous rights to equitable benefit sharing, the focus on knowledge versus people is a disturbing one leading to potentially further impoverishment for many indigenous communities already affected by the history of colonization and dominant regimes over their lands and lives. At the same time, these projects often remain the only means for indigenous individuals to advance their perspectives on managing traditional lands and natural environments and thus, to some degree, advance underlining these groups’ interests. The kind of knowledge that emerges from collaborative work and/or from involvement of indigenous individuals may be the means of change toward improving the indigenous economies and social state relations with external actors while also serving as a means to care for the environment.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author Biography
References
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