Indigenous Peoples and Conservation Organizations

108 The Foi in Papua New Guinea
long-lasting partnership to conserve the land and
its resources.
The challenge confronting WWF in PNG has been
in forming an effective and meaningful partnership
with indigenous communities. As this case study
indicates, their goals and priorities often do not
match those held by conservation groups. Partnership
is not a given; it usually must be created.
That involves a long process of dialogue and
action to learn about one another, develop trust,
and find where a mutuality of interests exists
between conservation and development.
In the case of the sustainable management of
subsistence fisheries in Lake Kutubu, the goals of
the Foi and WWF overlapped to provide firm
ground on which a partnership could be built
almost immediately. In successfully carrying out
the project, the communities began to appropriate
for themselves certain conservation goals. The
linkage of conservation to resources crucial to
the community was vital to this process. Now
that the notion has taken root, the lake communities
are beginning to apply it in other initiatives.
WWF supplied needed skills, knowledge, and
resources to facilitate the process. In turn, the
communities taught WWF much about this particular
corner of the world that the Foi and their
ancestors have tended for thousands of years.
Lessons that might be of use in building effective
partnerships elsewhere include the following
six points:
• Do not approach indigenous communities
with predetermined goals and a rigid conservation
agenda. Local priorities must be
the starting point for a transparent dialogue
about means and ends. The knowledge,
skills, and culture of the indigenous group
must be expressed if any project is to take
root and flower. On its side, a conservation
organization must be frank about dispelling
unrealistic expectations about what it can
deliver. Both parties can then search for
areas where their goals are complementary
or overlap, and build on them for broader
conservation initiatives.
• Search for appropriate institutions with
which to work. Do not limit this search to
formally structured organizations such as the
WMAC or village courts or local government
officials. Traditional leadership structures
are often more powerful and influential
institutions and better reflect the voice of the
community than formal organizations.
• Improve community capacity through
meetings, workshops, and training that
build awareness, skills, and knowledge
needed to make informed resource management
decisions. Involving the Foi in
the collection and analysis of the data they
needed to assess fish populations made it
possible for the community to believe that
they owned the project and could claim
credit for the results. This increased
capacity, in turn, has built a foundation for
refining results and taking on new challenges
in other areas.
• In engaging the community in dialogue,
conservation organizations must make conscious
efforts to recapture traditional
knowledge and resource management skills
and look for ways to supplement that
knowledge with modern tools and techniques
that the community can appropriate
to achieve conservation goals. The values
and practices of indigenous communities
are the foundation for building lasting solutions.
Without a strong sense of cultural
identity, a community is unlikely to mobilize
the broad support needed to form decisions
and make them stick. Specific
cultural forms may also be latent resources,
waiting to be tapped in new ways. Beliefs
among the Foi about forest spirits and
ancestral obligations, for instance, may
prove key to devising culture-based strategies
for protecting the resource base for
future generations.
• In reaching out to the community, conservation
organizations also need to be more
resourceful and creative in involving
women, who after all are often the primary
actors in subsistence activities.
• Finally, one must always be aware of the
long-term, even when the step being taken
is short-term and halting. This spotlights
the importance of reaching out to the
young as the fishery project did when it
involved schoolchildren as well as their
elders. It also means that youth should be