Becoming allies

For well over a century - even before the world’s first national park was established at Yellowstone in the US in 1872 - western conservationism was dominated by the idea that humanity was inimical to nature and the only way wild landscapes could remain pristine was by fencing them off and expelling indigenous communities.

As a result, millions of people have been displaced from their traditional homelands as conservation groups worked to establish national parks across the world that were “not materially altered by human exploitation and occupation,” according to a report published in the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s forestry journal.

But in the past few decades, approaches to conservation have changed and now many nature organizations are trying to work with local communities to protect the environment in which they live, working under the articles set out in the Convention on Biological Diversity. The UN’s World Conference on Indigenous Peoples on September 22 and 23 is to address the issues affecting the around 370 million people considered to be indigenous in countries on continents all over the world. It is hoped that by bringing knowledge of the traditions and customs that have shaped communities and local conservation to the forefront of discussion, it will help change policy and bring indigenous people into decision making.

But, Maurizio Farhan Ferrari, an environmental governance coordinator at the Forest Peoples Programme, which supports indigenous peoples in asserting their rights, told Global Ideas that global conservation agencies should be doing more to make sure such resolutions are implemented as part of projects on the ground. This, he says, would help both conservationists and local people learn mutual respect.

Global Ideas: Why have conservation organizations and indigenous peoples been at odds when it comes to working together to protect certain regions?

Maurizio Ferrari: Unfortunately, I think it's due to the failure of many conservation organizations in the past to understand that local people in these communities have a tremendous amount of knowledge about the environment in which they have developed over centuries or millennia. That traditional knowledge should be recognized and the right to resources and land needs to be taken fully into account whenever conservation projects are thought about.

What mistakes do you think are being made when NGOs try to work with indigenous peoples?

There is a gap between what world conservation agencies, both government and NGOs, adopt and approve and what they support at the international level and what they implement at the national and local level. The Convention on Biological Diversity has got many positive decisions respecting the rights and ensuring participation and supporting communities in conservation areas. But, the gap really exists between the international level policy and the implementation on the ground. The channel of communication seems not to be very effective, so there needs to be a much stronger effort by those organizations themselves to bring down those messages and policies from the headquarters to the national and local level.

What effect does this have on the ground?

There are still many cases where we receive information about people being displaced when protected areas are established. We had very recent news from a reserve in India where people were threatened with eviction and their livelihoods severely curtailed. We are also engaged in a project in Kenya where a few months ago, many of the houses of the indigenous people were burned down because they were allegedly in a protected forest, which had actually been set up much later than when the people started living there. When this happens, the communities can no longer access the resources for their livelihoods and of course there’s no option other than to leave or put up a fight and in many cases conflict emerges.

How does the Forest Peoples Program work with indigenous peoples to combat such issues?

We have had a few projects in the past years, where we've gotten involved in these issues, for example in the Ob Luang National Park in northern Thailand. There was a very severe conflict between national parks and conservation organizations on one side, and the Karen and Hmong hill tribes, on the other. Some of them were threatened with resettlement to the lowlands from the highlands and so they asked for our support to help them document how traditionally they'd been managing and using the highlands, forest and watersheds. We provided technical support for a community mapping project that started in 2003 and by 2006, they had created sophisticated community maps in about 40 villages where they demonstrated how the traditional use of the forest ecosystem and the watershed was fully in line with sustainable use of biodiversity and conservation.

The national park authority has had to recognize the positive role of communities and there is now a collaborative management project where everybody sits around the table and contributes to the sustainable management and conservation of the whole area. This has been documented as part of a process to launch the Whakatane Mechanism at the forthcoming IUCN World Parks Congress in Sydney in November.(http://whakatane-mechanism.org)

Do you think conservation organizations are getting better at working with indigenous communities? And what can they do to improve?

There’s definitely been some positive movement. There’s even a network of organizations, a conservation initiative on human rights and so a lot of them are aware of these issues and they’ve taken steps. There are more and more people within the organizations that are actually accepting a new paradigm of conservation based on recognition and respect for the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities and their role and participation in protecting nature. But there is still quite a long way to go. While there has been a lot of progress in terms of policy development and resolution, there are still a lot of problems to be dealt with in terms of implementation on the ground in many areas.

Are indigenous communities becoming more open to conservation organizations?

If you talked about 10 to 15 years ago, there would have been very few indigenous groups that would have welcomed conservation organizations on their land. Many of them had by then developed very skeptical attitudes because of the way conservation organizations had behaved over previous decades. There are indigenous organizations that feel conservation is an imposed vision on how the land should be used from the western and middle classes and what they should actually promote is the sustainable use of nature and biodiversity based on traditional knowledge. But since about 2003, the last IUCN World Parks Congress in Durban, there’s been a strong movement to have a much deeper discussion and appreciation of the social impact and issues associated with conservation. There’s been some kind of better understanding between the various sides and indigenous peoples have started to think of conservation agencies as potential allies, if they truly respect them.