The Convention on Biological Diversity

In this context, Wilshusen et al. (2003: 1) recall that most of the areas considered to be of high conservation priority are also social and political ›hotbeds‹. In addition to the disturbing ecological trends described above, the majority of developing countries in tropical regions face significant social, economic and political challenges that compli-cate both nature conservation and social justice. Locompli-cated in countries such as Colom-bia, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, or the Ivory Coast, these areas feature high levels of poverty, insecure land tenure and landlessness, unstable political sys-tems, social injustice and histories of state-sponsored repression. Due to historical cir-cumstances, many indigenous peoples became subordinated to a marginal existence on the social and political peripheries of the dominant societies in the postcolonial na-tion states in which they live. The colonial interplay of social and religious transforma-tion and economic exclusion fragmented many of these societies and enhanced the difficulty to maintain cultural identities. With the increasing globalisation of capitalist economies in the late 20^th century and diverse forms of modern internal colonialism, indigenous peoples have come under another wave of pressures to assimilate into mainstream cultures and to open their homelands to resource exploitation (Grim 2001: xl). Based on the continuity of past and contemporary threats, the access and control over natural resources between indigenous communities and nation states have become a common arena of social conflict.¹⁵

2.2 The Convention on Biological Diversity

Although many governments have refused to recognise the interdependency of cul-tural and biological diversity and the legitimacy of indigenous systems of resource management in the past, the important role indigenous and local communities play as decisive stakeholders for initiatives concerning the protection and sustainable use of biodiversity has increasingly been recognised in the global environmental discourse. In particular, the contribution that local knowledge systems can make to conservation ef-forts has been widely acknowledged and has become a growing subject of national and international law. Among other agreements, the most important global policy framework for conservation strategies was negotiated at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

15 The literature on biodiversity conservation and rural development makes extensive reference to

›communities‹. The term is also evident in the case of the CBD and is widely used in related docu-ments and anthropological writings. The impression is evoked that communities somehow ›exist‹ as entities, that local people collectively share equal interests and consensual decision-making processes and agree on community membership and tend to be conservation-minded.

The cultural context of biodiversity conservation 26

One of the major outcomes in underlining the role of indigenous and local communi-ties in in situ conservation is the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).¹⁶ As the most broadly supported legally binding international agreement in world history (Posey 2000a), the CBD has three general objectives: it aims at the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources. The convention incorporates a comprehensive framework aimed at a global conservation strategy and proposes an in-tegral approach recognising that people and their social and economic needs are to be seen as an essential part of ecological systems.¹⁷ It includes a 23-paragraph introduc-tion outlining its major motivaintroduc-tions, 42 articles and several annexes addressing vital is-sues such as protection measures, conservation, investigation, incentives, access to ge-netic resources, technology transfer and biosecurity. It presupposes that sustainable development is only possible if economic, ecological and social aspects are reconciled.

In its course, a concept of biodiversity conservation has evolved that appreciates the world's biological richness as having coevolved with human societies and that conser-vation must contribute to sustainable development by sustaining livelihoods, provid-ing ecological services and ensurprovid-ing the sharprovid-ing of benefits (Oviedo & Brown 1999).¹⁸ The UNCED has been described as a »global turn« marking a moment of growing awareness of the global dimension of the ›ecological crisis‹ (Hajer & Fischer 1999: 1).

Since the conference in Rio, the CBD became one of the most widely ratified interna-tional treaties on any environmental issue and has contributed in establishing a politi-cal climate where biodiversity is seen as a key issue in environmental as well as in de-velopmental terms (Walls et al. 1999: 2).¹⁹ It is undergoing a continuous process of development and adjustment and has been followed up by succeeding conferences of global scope such as the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 in Johannes-burg, South Africa.²⁰

16 In situ conservation implies the protection of ecosystems and the maintenance of species in their specific natural surroundings and, in the case of domesticated or cultivated species, in the surround-ings where they have developed their distinctive properties. In contrast, ex situ conservation refers to the protection of components of biodiversity outside of their natural habitats, for instance in gene banks or botanical gardens.

17 In the present context, the term ecology is used as a conceptual referent for human-earth interac-tions, rather than as a scientific discipline studying the interrelationships of organisms in ecosystems.

18 The CBD also aims to promote the networking among the various institutions involved in the ambit of environmental conservation. These embrace different sectors including research initiatives acting on global to local levels. Article 12 calls its members to establish and maintain programmes for scientific and technical education and training devoted to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and its components. At a national level, academic institutions should encourage research activities concerned with issues related to global environmental change. In doing so, particular ac-count is to be taken of the special needs of developing ac-countries.

19 By January 2007, 190 parties have acceded to the CBD (168 signatures). For a current state of rati-fications, see www.biodiv.org/world/parties.asp

20 Since it only marks a starting point, the CBD will not be discussed in detail in the present context.

For an anthropological perspective on the proceedings and outcomes of the UNCED, see Ritual, Power and Ethnography at the Rio Earth Summit by Little (1995). In particular, the relevance of power structures underlying the CBD negotiations has been approached critically by social scientists. For

The global context 27

Within the conservation framework of the CBD, the protection of biodiversity in its natural surroundings is given priority. The main strategy for in situ conservation is the establishment of protected areas. According to the convention, a protected area is »a geographically defined area, which is designated or regulated and managed to achieve specific conservation objectives« (Gündling 2002: 36). Article 8 of the CBD contains specific references to this issue and provides a general groundwork for the contracting parties. According to Gündling, the most important requirements for such a contract are: the establishment of a system of protected areas where special measures are taken to conserve biological diversity; the regulation or management of biological resources important for the conservation of biodiversity, whether within or outside protected areas; the protection of ecosystems, natural habitats and the maintenance of viable populations of species in natural surroundings; the promotion of environmentally sound and sustainable development in areas adjacent to protected areas; the rehabilita-tion and restorarehabilita-tion of degraded ecosystems; the establishment and maintenance of means to regulate, manage or control the risks of living modified organisms; the con-trol of the introduction of alien species and the protection of threatened species and populations; the regulation and management of processes and categories that have significant adverse effects on biodiversity (2002: 12f.).

Since the degradation of biological diversity in all its dimensions has become a ma-jor issue of international concern, the number of protected areas such as nature re-serves, national parks, natural monuments, biosphere rere-serves, protected landscapes and world heritage sites has increased significantly worldwide.²¹ Given the geographic overlap of regions of high natural value and indigenous territories, much of the land that indigenous people occupy has been designated protected areas. Oviedo (2002: 18) estimates that more than 50 percent of the existing protected areas have been estab-lished on ancestral domains of indigenous and traditional peoples. With reference to the Latin American context, Borrini-Feyerabend (1999: 224) claims that even more than 80 percent of the protected areas are thought to be inhabited by indigenous and local communities. Most protected territories are state or communal property and less frequently under private ownership. A common feature, however, is that the respon-sibility for the management is assigned to a single agency, which is either a public body such as a state agency, a ministerial department or at times, a delegated NGO.

this, see, for instance, The Survival of the Fittest? The North-South Power Struggle in the Formation of the Con-vention on Biological Diversity by Arts (1994).

21 The global network of 30,350 protected areas extends over an area of 13.2 million km², which represents 8.83 percent of the total global land area (Green & Paine 1999: 20).

The cultural context of biodiversity conservation 28

However, it is important to remember that while the establishment of protected areas is beneficial not only on a national but also on a global scale, the opportunity costs arising from the prohibitions or limitations imposed on the direct use of the natural resources they contain are transferred to local residents living in or near these areas.

Restricted access to natural resources in protected areas has frequently resulted in con-flicts between the efforts of conservation agencies and the necessity of local people to earn a livelihood. In most accounts, the underlying causes of such conflictual encoun-ters are to be found in protected area management. Historically, the concept of pro-tected areas emerged with the establishment of national parks in the United States at the end of the 19^th century. It is based on the idea of a protected area as an uninhab-ited wilderness. Following this ideal, the further establishment of such areas in many parts of the world often resulted in indigenous and local peoples being excluded from the resources they needed for their development and even survival (Furze et al. 1996).

Throughout the first half of the 20^th century, conventional practice followed the early protectionist philosophy of an idealised pristine wilderness and implied the preserva-tion of flora and fauna and the exclusion of people. Forced removal and compulsory resettlement were and still are common, often at great social and ecological cost (Chatty & Colchester 2002). Although this model of protected areas has been widely adopted, including the fundamental principle to protect the park or reserve from the damage local residents were supposed to inflict, an obvious shift has occurred in the past decades towards a less ›exclusive‹ philosophy of protected area management. Ac-cording to Wilshusen et al. (2003), the 1982 World Congress on Parks and Protected Areas marked a turning point in conservation practice by encouraging approaches that pro-nounced greater local participation and sustainable use of natural resources. The link between resource management systems and the use and conservation of biodiversity gained increasing attention. Top-down policies were generally replaced in the conserva-tion agenda in favour of more bottom-up approaches. Based on the growing awareness that protected areas cannot be treated as isolated islands, but must be viewed in a lar-ger context, conservation strategies operate on the scale of ecosystems and the wider surrounding landscapes to protect biological and cultural diversity.²²

At the same time that it was realised that biological diversity was becoming scarce, information about biological resources contained in local or indigenous knowledge systems was recognised as a valuable source to be addressed in the frame of more ›in-clusive‹ conservation approaches. This conceptual turn is reflected in the provisions of the CBD that foster a new development paradigm based on ecologically sustainable strategies and the enhanced role of local communities. Within the provisions related to in situ conservation, clear reference is made to the significance of indigenous kno-wledge in environmental protection, which will be discussed in the following section.

22 General issues and anthropological perspectives on the specific issue of protected area manage-ment will be further discussed in chapter 3.2.

The global context 29

2.4 Biodiversity conservation and indigenous knowledge

As indigenous communities inhabit many of the remaining significant areas of high natural value, they depend directly or indirectly upon the wealth of these ecosystems for their livelihoods. It has been widely acknowledged that the economies of indige-nous peoples are closely adapted to the natural resources of their particular environ-ments, of which they reveal a high degree of knowledge based on observation and long practice. In this way they have developed and maintained a cumulative body of knowledge representations based on extended histories of interaction with specific natural environments. This acknowledgement points to one of the most frequently discussed elements of the CBD with regard to indigenous peoples, namely the direc-tion it takes on the central role of knowledge in the formadirec-tion of local-global reladirec-tion- relation-ships. The preamble claims to recognise the close dependence of many indigenous and local communities on biological resources and gives expression to the desirability of sharing equitable benefits arising from the use of traditional knowledge relevant to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. In several provisions explicit ref-erence is made to the importance of such knowledge. Official commitments embod-ied in article 8(j) mark the starting point the present study is departing from. The sec-tion requires the contracting parties to take measures ›as far as possible‹ and ›subject to their national legislations‹ to

respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communi-ties embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological di-versity and promote their wider application with the approval and involvement of the holders of such knowledge, innovations and practices and encourage the equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilization of such knowledge, innovations and practices (Gündling 2000: 8).²³

With reference to in situ conservation, article 10(c) likewise calls upon the signing countries to »protect and encourage customary use of biological resources in accor-dance with traditional cultural practices that are compatible with conservation or sus-tainable use requirements«. Article 17(2) addresses the exchange of information. This includes the »exchange of results of technical, scientific and socio-economic research, as well as information on training and surveying programmes, specialized knowledge, indigenous and traditional knowledge [...]. It shall also, where feasible, include repa-triation of information.« Article 18(4) states that parties shall »in accordance with na-tional legislations and policies, encourage and develop methods for cooperation for

23 Gündling (2000: 9) assumes that the term indigenous ›communities‹ as opposed to indigenous

›peoples‹ was chosen intentionally in order to avoid the debate over the concepts of ›people‹ and

›peoples‹, which has been under way for years in the international arena and UN institutions. Behind the concept of ›peoples‹ lies the notion of self-determination, following the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as noted by Oviedo (2002: 4). Just as the term ›indigenous‹ lacks a coherent understanding, the term ›local‹ with its multiple meanings not only relates to questions of scale. In the CBD, there is neither a definition nor orientation as to what a ›community‹ is and how the phrase ›embodying traditional lifestyles‹ is to be understood.

The cultural context of biodiversity conservation 30

the development and use of technologies, including indigenous traditional technolo-gies« (Gündling 2002: 39ff.).²⁴ Although the CBD does not further specify the con-cept of knowledge, its notion becomes clear in other official documents such as the report Traditional Lifestyles and Biodiversity Use issued by the World Conservation Monitoring Centre of UNEP, which makes reference to »traditional biodiversity-related knowl-edge« (UNEP-WCMC 2003).²⁵

As previously indicated, the significance of knowledge, innovations and practices of in-digenous and local communities becomes most evident in the field of food and agriculture where it plays a fundamental role in sustaining local resource use practices, whether they be small-scale farming, hunting, fishing or gathering of wild produce. Almost 90 percent of the food requirements in the ›South‹ are met through local production and two-thirds are based on community farming systems (Christie & Mooney 2000: 321).

It has been recognised that local crop populations are more diverse in such traditional farming systems than in agricultural areas dominated by agro-industrial technologies.

The variety of cultivated plants has been framed in terms of agro-biodiversity as »that part of biodiversity which, within the context of agricultural production, delivers food, contributes to people's livelihoods and conserves habitats« (GTZ 2000: 3).

The slash and burn agriculture as practiced widely in tropical agro-ecosystems in parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific offers one example of a sustain-able farming system based upon traditional knowledge and practice that enhances bio-logical diversity (Nakashima & Roué 2002: 318f.). In these countries, small-holders have developed highly sophisticated knowledge on the selection and improvement of crops and in most cases have developed agricultural practices with few external inputs.

Thus, agro-biodiversity has been fostered following traditional land use systems that created a genetic diversity including local cultivars and breeds of crops and animals best suited to specific local environmental conditions. Such knowledge in not re-stricted to subsistence activities, but includes detailed observations of population ecology and species interactions that arise from long-term association with a particular flora and fauna. And like biological diversity, such intellectual diversity enhances the evolution of cultures and their ability to adapt to a changing world (Kimmerer 2002).

In this way peasant communities have maintained modes of production and plant in-ventories that contain crop and domestic animal diversity adapted to a wide range of environmental conditions and complex agro-ecosystems. Thus, peasant landscapes

»are often de facto botanical gardens of incredible complexity – stores of biological diversity and natural compounds, providing sources of new hybrids« (Brush 1996: 1).²⁶

24 For an analysis of provisions of the CBD as related to indigenous peoples, see Posey (1996a).

25 Terminological and conceptual approaches will be discussed thoroughly in chapter 3.4.

26 In Mesoamerica, for instance, since communities began to emerge about 6,000 years ago, maize was domesticated through selective breeding from a wild grain (Carrasco1990: xxi). Over the course of centuries, the largest number of maize varieties worldwide has been created by farmers inhabiting rural areas of present day Guatemala. Today around 600 local varieties are threatened by genetically modified varieties promoted by multinational seed companies. Government policies keep the price of locally produced maize varieties low while hybrid seeds are imported. Their use severely increases farmers' dependence on agroindustry (Gómez & Pacay Caal 2003: 204).

The global context 31

Fig. 2.2 Local maize variety cropped in Guatemala

Traditionally, farmers maintained their crop varieties by keeping household seed stocks and by obtaining seed through generational and intra- and inter-community exchanges. Some of these customary networks have been disrupted or no

Traditionally, farmers maintained their crop varieties by keeping household seed stocks and by obtaining seed through generational and intra- and inter-community exchanges. Some of these customary networks have been disrupted or no