Indigenous Peoples and Conservation Organizations

8 Conservation Partnerships
population groups as tribal is more easily
accepted by some governments than a
description of those peoples as indigenous.
Another term that has become relevant for biodiversity
conservation since the Convention on
Biological Diversity came into force is that of
“local communities embodying traditional
lifestyles,” or “traditional peoples” for short.
This term has a socioeconomic as well as a cultural
dimension. It usually implies a largely subsistence
economy based on close ties to the land.
International organizations that are working with
indigenous peoples, such as the UN Working
Group on Indigenous Populations, the World
Bank, and the European Union, have identified
the following characteristics of indigenous peoples
relative to natural resource management:
• ancestral attachment to lands and resources;
• management of relatively large territories
or areas;
• collective rights over resources;
• traditional systems of control, use, and
management of lands and resources;
• traditional institutions and leadership
structures for self-governance and
decision making;
• systems for benefit sharing;
• traditional ecological knowledge; and
• subsistence economies that are largely selfsufficient
and rely on resource diversity
rather than monocultures or simplified
ecosystems.
The question for conservation organizations is
whether these characteristics apply as well to traditional
rural peoples, mainly in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America, who generally are not called or
don’t call themselves “indigenous.” In Latin
America, for example, this question can be asked
about Afro–Latin American groups like the
Maroons of Suriname, the black communities of
the Chocó forests, and the Garífunas of Central
America. If, generally speaking, these groups
share most of the characteristics listed above, an
essential difference between traditional and
indigenous peoples has been the latter’s claimed
right to political self-determination, based on a
distinct identity and culture and often on prior
occupation. This distinction, however, is also
blurring since traditional peoples often have distinctive
cultures that marginalize them from
mainstream society, and many ethnolinguistic
communities around the world are claiming the
right to political self-determination.
In many cases, the primary difference between
indigenous and traditional peoples may be one of
aboriginality to the place in question, particularly
in cases where colonialism has uprooted and dispossessed
indigenous peoples. Aboriginality, in
many legal systems, can be used to support
claims to limited sovereignty, a right that the
occupying power sometimes has implicitly
acknowledged through the signing of treaties.
Until recently, these rights have remained latent,
and aboriginal peoples have faced a Hobson’s
choice between cultural assimilation and remaining
wards of the state. When indigenous peoples
are able to establish these rights legally, they
have an important power that traditional peoples
often lack: the power to say “no” to outsiders,
whether they are conservationists or developers.
For WWF’s conservation work, the differences
between indigenous and traditional peoples are
far less important than the similarities. Therefore
WWF policies that refer to indigenous peoples
refer also to tribal peoples, and by extension to
traditional peoples.
1.2 Population Estimates and Distribution
Using ILO Convention 169’s definition, there are
some 300 million men, women, and children
worldwide who can be called “indigenous and
tribal” people living within the borders of independent
nation states in North and South America,
Northern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. The
land they occupy spans a wide geographical range,
including the polar regions, northern and southern
deserts, and tropical savannas and forests.
Indigenous peoples account for 4,000 to 5,000 of
the nearly 7,000 spoken languages, representing
much of humankind’s cultural diversity. They
include groups as disparate as the Quechua from
Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, who collectively number
more than 10 million people, and the tiny band
of Gurumalum in Papua New Guinea who number
fewer than 10 individuals (IUCN 1997, 30).
Although these groups account for only about 6
percent of the world’s population (Hitchcock
1994), they live in areas of vital importance to