POLLINATORS POLLINATION AND FOOD PRODUCTION

THE ASSESSMENT REPORT ON POLLINATORS, POLLINATION AND FOOD PRODUCTION
CASE EXAMPLE 5-26
GUNA GOVERNANCE, INTELLECTUAL RIGHTS AND POLLINATORS
Location: Panama
Indigenous people: Guna; Atencio López oral account, p. 44-45 (López et al., 2015)
Co-produced case example
Underpinned by direct
interactions with indigenous
and local knowledge-holders
“I summarise the Guna system of governance: Indigenous
peoples speak of autonomy, which does not just mean the
day to day administration, but also governance of resources.
In February 2015, the Guna celebrated 90 years of autonomy.
There are 2 systems of authority and control: 1) the communities
(52 communities) make decisions on collective rights. There is
no private property as it is understood in western culture; 2) the
other authority is the caciques, the Guna General Congress is
the political administrative organ, while the General Congress
of Culture is the spiritual-religious organ, which has the priests.
When it is related to natural resources, no project can be
implemented in the communities without the approval of the
General Congress. There are also projects that are proposed
by the communities that the General Congress must approve.
Within the Guna community, there is a [customary] law that the
government does not officially recognize, but that is respected
nevertheless.”
Guna people used their governance, even though it is not
government-recognised, to protect their intellectual property
rights over the pollinator-dependent cacao fruit. The Congress
imposed a fine on a business called CocoaWell for using Guna
imagery, and negotiated an agreement that they must pay a
percentage of their profit (López et al., 2015).
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5. BIOCULTURAL DIVERSITY, POLLINATORS AND
THEIR SOCIO-CULTURAL VALUES
Heri, 2015; Perez, 2015; Samorai Lengoisa, 2015). In
November 2014, they argued a case in the African Court On
Human and Peoples’ Rights that Ogiek community’s rights
to life, property, natural resources, development, religion
and culture were being infringed by persistent harassment
and evictions from their ancestral lands in contravention
of the international human rights standards of free, prior
and informed consent (Samorai Lengoisa, 2015; Tiampati,
2015). A decision is due in 2015. Forests under common
property and customary law systems have been shown
to produce both livelihoods and biodiversity conservation,
complementing biodiversity outcomes from protected areas
(Persha et al., 2010). Significant evidence that rights-based
approaches work for conservation came from a study of
80 forest commons in 10 countries across Asia, Africa, and
Latin America showing that larger forest size and greater
rule-making autonomy at the local level are associated with
livelihood benefits, and high carbon storage in trees, thereby
protecting pollinator resources from the flowering of those
trees and presumably also the pollinators (Chhatre and
Agrawal, 2009). The authors argued that local communities
restrict their consumption of forest products when they own
forest commons, and that transfer of ownership to these
communities would help support conservation. From this
perspective, the global growth in indigenous and community
reserves, territories and protected areas is likely to be
making a positive contribution to the conservation of wild
pollinator habitats (Berkes, 2009; Rights and Resources
Initiative, 2014).
Nevertheless, the means of implementation of RBA
have a critical influence on their effects. In Cambodia,
simultaneous implementation of individual titles for farmers
and communal title for indigenous communities has
fractured forest commons management systems (Milne,
2013). Land titling in a national park in Cambodia led to a
decrease in traditional practices that had maintained agrobiodiversity
(Travers et al., 2015). The Forest Rights Act in
India, promoted as a means of recognizing rights of tribes
and forest dwellers, while providing positive benefits to
pollinators through support honey hunters as noted above,
has also undermined some common property systems and
imposed a new set of external agents engaged in defining
their affiliations that have been detrimental to social and
cultural values (Bose et al., 2012; Kumar and Kerr, 2013).
Two major lessons have emerged from these and other
experiences in rights-recognition of tenure for conservation
(Johnson and Forsyth, 2002). First, the nation-state’s efforts
to recognise rights are influenced by the broader public
discourse and contest between commercial interests that
opposed minority groups’ rights to valuable resources, civil
society interests that may negotiate rights-regimes within the
wider public spheres in which rules, rights, and “community”
are established, and defended (Johnson and Forsyth,
2002). Second, community-driven planning and capacity
building are essential to support implementation of rights
in ways that contribute to conservation of biodiversity and
ecosystem services.
5.4.7.3 Knowledge co-production
ILK, in co-production with science, can be source of
solutions for the present challenges confronting pollinators
and pollination. Initiatives that are co-producing relevant
knowledge range across classical science-driven
investigations of the conditions under which diversified
farming systems are underpinned by ILK protect of
pollinators and pollination (Webb and Kabir, 2009; Perfecto
et al., 2014), through long-term science-ILK projects
involving common research design and implementation
(Wolff and Gomes, 2015), to projects focused on