Cultural diversity and conservation

Abstract

“The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity”. Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt The biocultural perspective, a direct result of the crisis narrative regarding cultural and biological extinctions, overemphasises the homogenising effects of globalisation and fails to recognise processes that actively produce diversity. Cartographic visualisations depicting overlapping zones of biological and cultural diversity simplify complex realities and provide little guidance for policy and practice. Moving beyond this perspective requires problematisation of essentialist notions of culture, analysis of the politics surrounding the production of knowledge, and acknowledgement of the anthropogenic nature of landscapes often deemed “pristine”. The biocultural perspective is reviewed within the context of recent trends in conservation, from community‐based conservation to the more recent “Strategic Turn” in conservation. To define a new perspective linking cultural diversity and conservation, the authors argue that we need a new politics of knowledge that: (a) moves beyond notions of TEK as the only valid form of local knowledge that can be integrated into conservation planning, (b) examines how local perspectives are translated between scales, and (c) creates new linkages between local knowledge and the policy domain. This new politics of knowledge can help make visible multiple actors, multiple forms of agency, and multiple regimes of credibility and can elucidate the ways in which knowledge about cultural diversity and biological diversity is produced, circulated, and incorporated into decision‐making.

Unexpected Consequences: Wildlife Conservation and Territorial Conflict in Northern Kenya

“…The trend toward greater involvement of local populations entails a fusing of trans-nationalized discourses on biodiversity conservation, cultural autonomy and indigenous practices (Brosius and Hitchner 2010;Escobar 1998;Igoe 2005). This is paralleled by a rhetoric that rests on the "widely accepted premises" that indigenous populations should have privileged or exclusive rights to territories that are perceived to have been used exclusively by their ancestors (Kuper 2003:390).…”

The challenges of maintaining indigenous ecological knowledge

“…For one, drivers of cultural and biological change, while closely linked at some scales, may differ at finer resolutions. Moreover, it is not assured that any single program could effectively address complex challenges in social-ecological systems (Brosius and Hitchner 2010). Similarly, biocultural conservation approaches will need to explicitly address the multiple objectives inherent in the concept and design effective mechanisms for weighing the tradeoffs between objectives (Berkes 2007).…”

‘Knowledge Making’: Issues in Modelling Local and Indigenous Ecological Knowledge

“…Yet the various categorisations (Local Knowledge, Indigenous Knowledge, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, etc. ) are frequently critiqued in the research literature of the humanities and social sciences (Berkes et al 2000;Agrawal 2002Agrawal , 2009Robbins 2003;Ellen 2004;Palmer and Wadley 2007;Lepofsky 2009;Sillitoe and Marzano 2009;Brosius and Hitchner 2010;Davis and Ruddle 2010). Within narratives of development, local knowledge has been depicted variously as a barrier, as a crucial inclusion for success, and as an inherently problematic categorisation likely to lead to significant error (Sillitoe et al 2005).…”