1.Front section - IUCN

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Friends for Life: New partners in support of protected areas
efforts. More than in Western approaches to protected
areas, conservation and protection of lands and
resources in indigenous communities is a vital and
integral part of cultural strategies for survival.
Conservation as part of indigenous rights.
Indigenous peoples often emphasise conservation and
natural resource management as an integral part of a
broader set of territorial rights connected to selfdetermination.
In Australia, designation of protected
areas by indigenous peoples in their lands has been
advocated as an expression of self-determination –
“self-declaration for self-determination” as coined by
Szabo (1996) and others. Durban outputs recognised
the right of indigenous peoples to freely consent to
activities affecting them, setting a new benchmark for
how conservation agencies go about design and
management planning for protected areas in
indigenous lands and territories, and implicitly
recognising the self-determination dimension of
indigenous peoples’ involvement in decision making
on these matters.
Interests in management. Indigenous conservation
interests go beyond the “substantive” issues, and also
relate to process and cultural questions: how to
effectively participate in protected area design and
management and what mechanisms are or should be
at their disposal for that. Indigenous peoples have long
emphasised the role of their customary institutions
(such as common property regimes), practices (e.g.
conflict resolution) and representative organizations in
these processes.
Such a list of indigenous conservation interests does
not minimize the importance of real conflicts between
conservation actors and indigenous peoples. Such
conflicts are often significant in areas with
considerable cultural change, strong external
pressures, population growth and increasing market
demands. Some indigenous groups or individuals
practice unsustainable use of natural resources. There
are cases where they are involved in ‘poaching’, overexploiting
or harvesting species close to extinction.
Others may support non-conservation friendly land
use priorities or be in favour of expanding extractive
industries. As in other segments of society, indigenous
peoples harbour a vast diversity of relationships to the
IUCN Photo Library © Jim Thorsell
environment, values attributed to conservation and the
priority given to (un)sustainable development.
However, the presence of diverging priorities, in
particular cases, does not remove the particular
conservation interests of indigenous peoples, and the
fact that vast portions of their lands and resources
overlap with protected areas and with areas of high
conservation value. Rather, this provides an important
basis for indigenous peoples and conservation
agencies to re-establish common ground for moving
towards new ways of addressing such conflicts. If
protected areas are to strengthen their relevance to
such internal debates and discussions, it is
fundamental that their relevance is consolidated
through real and tangible contributions to indigenous
conservation interests. This is already happening in
many countries, where indigenous peoples are
actively involved in and promoting protected area
establishment reflecting their rights and concerns.
Durban showcased several examples of indigenous
peoples establishing their own protected areas both
within and beyond the formal protected area system,
and explicitly integrating protected area management
objectives in their self-development strategies.
Durban emphasised the need to “fill the gaps” in
protected areas coverage and effective protection
through comprehensive systems in order to fulfil the
2010 target to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss.
Recognising the wide presence of indigenous peoples
A char fish caught by an Inuit in the Northwest Territories
Province, Canada.
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