Between nature and culture: exploring space for indigenous agency in the Convention on Biological Diversity

Abstract

The goals of nature conservation have changed over the last decades, but setting aside areas for nature protection is still a major part of environmental efforts globally. Protected areas often include traditional lands of indigenous peoples, and although indigenous rights have been strengthened through international treaties, conflicts over land entitlement are still common. I analyse indigenous peoples' role in nature conservation, focusing on the discursive construction of indigenous subject position in the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and using post-colonial theory to situate the discussion in its historical and political context, discussing what subject positions are made available to indigenous people, and what political agency they can be assumed to entail. The analysis shows that limits to indigenous space for agency are embedded in the Convention on Biological Diversity discourse – the analysed texts present a narrow recognition of indigenous people's role in the context of the Convention on Biological Diversity, with a heavy focus on indigenous subjects as holders of traditional knowledge, and a clear influence from colonial notions and post-colonial power relations.

Keywords:

• conservation
• protected areas
• CBD
• indigenous
• discourse
• post-colonial

Acknowledgments

This study is part of the project ‘Indigenous Rights and Nature Conservation’, funded by the Swedish Research Council Formas. The author would like to thank Camilla Sandström for many helpful comments that greatly improved the manuscript. Thanks also to the three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments. Earlier drafts of this paper were presented at the 10th Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference in Stockholm, June 2011, and at the Swedish Political Science Association's Annual Meeting in Umeå, October 2011.

Notes

1. for example, Berkes et al. (2000, p. 1252) define traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as ‘a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment'.