The cultural context of biodiversity conservation - Oapen

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3.2.1 Conservation paradigms and local livelihoods
The cultural context of biodiversity conservation
It has been suggested by Furze et al. that the imposition of protected areas, »while obviously
concerned with managing ecosystems, is fundamentally about the management
of people, their aspirations and their relationship with nature« (1996: 36). The necessity
to expand perspectives towards integrated conservation strategies that would
combine nature protection objectives with human development issues has been featured
increasingly, as the aforementioned conventional practice of protected area
management generally overlooked the presence of local communities and their cultural
dependence upon the ambient world. Based on the notion of a protected area as
an uninhabited wilderness, the living conditions and concerns of residents were frequently
ignored and their specific knowledge systems underestimated. Many protected
areas had been created without prior consultation with communities living in or close
to these areas (Oviedo & Brown 1999: 99). In most cases, the fundamental operational
principle even assumed that natural resources had to be protected from local
people who affect the physical environment negatively (Chatty & Colchester 2002: 3).
As a result, restricted access to natural resources frequently caused conflicts between
the efforts of conservation agencies and the necessity of local residents to earn a living.
Such conflicts of interest frequently led to illegal and destructive encroachment
and entailed some of the most serious failures in managing protected areas. Oviedo
(2002. 20) writes that protected areas in many cases turned out to be another form of
deprivation and social exclusion for local populations, entailing opposition and even
violent protest. Although they play a crucial role in maintaining biological diversity
and ecological integrity, Wilshusen et al. (2003: 5) remind to take into account that
their creation tends to reflect the political environment in which they are embedded.
The history of nature protection often emerges out of colonial and authoritarian rule
as instruments of natural resources control. Historically, the designation of protected
areas commonly occurred via authoritarian policies in which rural communities were
forced off their lands and denied access to resources essential to their economic and
cultural well-being. Balick and Cox (1997) refer to this practice as ›ecocolonialism‹. Based
on the notion that natural resources were to be considered property and thus subject
to either private or state ownership, postcolonial administrations created most
existing tropical rain forest reserves by declaring public land to be protected or by
purchasing land from private owners. While this strategy used previously in North
America and Europe was effective in preserving the land, it was primarily focused on
meeting national needs rather than the concerns of local residents.
In regarding these conventional principles of nature conservation, a number of
critiques became pronounced in the discursive frame. Basically, they assessed the
founding premises of the protectionist approach that justified the removal of local
residents from national parks and reserves and questioned the inherent ethnocentric
assumptions that had been transferred to local settings with no regard to the complexity
of human-nature interactions and without concessions to the experiences and
knowledge repertoires of local people. Despite calls from anthropologists that the sci-