Indigenous Peoples and Conservation Organizations

4 Conservation and Indigenous Peoples
By the 1980s, some conservation organizations
began to develop new strategies designed to turn
local communities into allies of park conservation.
Some approaches focused on creating rings
of low-intensity development around parks that
would act as barriers to colonization by migrant
farmers who practiced slash-and-burn agriculture.
Others focused on projects that more actively
involved local populations in managing wildlife
and other resources in ways that gave them a tangible
stake in preserving habitat not only around
but in protected areas. Sustainable development
that merged income generation and conservation
became a new watchword.
WWF published a book about its experiences
during a decade of work with rural communities
in integrated conservation and development
projects (Larson et al. 1996). Valuable lessons
were learned that are being applied in working
with communities around the world. Yet this
field experience also suggested that the rural
poor are far from monolithic, varying not only
from country to country, but within national
borders. In fact, many of the projects involved
populations that were marginalized from the
mainstream by language and culture as well as
class and income. And it became increasingly
evident that these groups were not intruders to
wilderness ecosystems but integral parts of
them. Indeed, in many places national reserves
and parks had been carved out of their traditional
territories. Conservationists were in danger
of adding to the misery of the world’s most
disenfranchised peoples. WWF responded by
drafting a policy statement respecting the
integrity and rights of traditional peoples and
establishing guidelines for its relations with
them (see Annex).
It became apparent that working with indigenous
communities involves complex issues that pose
new challenges but also open up new opportunities.
Indigenous peoples are in many ways more
organized and better able to represent their own
interests and make their case to outsiders than
ever before. Indigenous groups around the world
have established more than a thousand grass-roots
organizations to enhance their livelihoods and
gain greater control of their land and resources
(Hitchcock 1994). Many indigenous groups are
politically active and play an important role in
influencing national and international environmental
and sustainable development policies.
At the same time, these communities stand at a
crossroads and confront an uncertain future. If
many indigenous groups once lived in relative
balance with their environments, that equation has
been severely disrupted. Indigenous peoples face
mounting pressures from the outside as encroachment
by agribusiness, by petroleum, mineral, and
timber combines, and by uprooted, landless farmers
shrinks traditional territories. They also face a
growing internal challenge as their population
densities increase and the market economy undermines
subsistence strategies and the cultural traditions
that supported them. Indigenous peoples are
not only in danger of losing their land but the
identity the land gave them. They are increasingly
under pressure to augment rates of resource
extraction to unsustainable levels. If they resist
doing so, someone else is ready to argue for the
right to do so—and the state, starved for funds, is
often more than ready to listen.
Indigenous groups that have maintained close
contact with the land know it well. Where cultures
and traditional resource management practices
remain relatively intact, they often have
mechanisms for dealing with resource scarcity or
other changes in the natural resource base, but
have limited means for assessing the side effects
of new technologies or new kinds of exploitation.
A potential role for conservation organizations is
to help indigenous groups obtain relevant legal,
scientific, and economic information, weigh their
options, and select strategies that are appropriate.
This is more complicated than it seems, since
many traditional peoples face the dual challenge
of organizing themselves institutionally, first to
claim legal title to their land and second to manage
the land wisely.
In looking at the issue of conservation and
indigenous peoples, two key questions emerge:
What are the common concerns of conservation
organizations and indigenous peoples? How can
they collaborate effectively?
To better understand the issues involved, WWF’s
Latin America and Caribbean Program (LAC)
decided in 1996 to survey its experience working
with indigenous peoples. From a decade of
funding, 35 projects were identified that had at
least one component related to indigenous peo-