do anything so ridiculous?” If I asked them,
however, whether they ever managed the
environment in ways that were beneficial to
wildlife, they often responded, “Of course,
don’t you see that more animals graze in
the areas that we burned last year than in
other areas?” In short, most of my inform-
ants didn’t describe conservation as an
activity, but as an alien force over which
they have no control.
This situation stands in contrast to the Inuit
who wanted to “join the Sierra Club.” Other
groups, like the Anangu in Australia and the
Kayapo in Brazil, have also sought alliances
with western conservationists. The Kuna
started a conservation initiative that
achieved international renown. While mem-
bers of these groups might not see conser-
vation as a wholly positive thing, they obvi-
ously can see that it has possibilities. It can
become the basis for alliance to protect tra-
ditional homelands and to promote conser-
vation models the respect their cultural val-
ues.
In short, peoples’ attitudes towards conser-
vation, based on historical experience with
conservation, will shape local cultural
debates surrounding conservation. By
extension they will also shape peoples’ cul-
tural values and conservation practice.
Indigenous Environmental
Knowledge and the Issue of
Capacity
We felt that under new African
Governments, all prospects for conservation
in nature would be ended. Max Nicholson,
founding member of the WWF, explaining
the interference of western conservation
organisation in the internal affairs of Kenya
and Tanzania during the 1960s (Bonner
1993: 64)
In the discourses of community-based con-
servation, indigenous communities are rep-
resented as ideal conservation partners.
They have been managing ecosystems for
generations. Their knowledge of those
ecosystems must be intricate indeed.
Furthermore, since they depend on the con-
tinued viability of those ecosystems for their
survival, they must have a vested interest in
seeing them conserved. On the other side
of the coin, however, is a niggling doubt
that members of these communities lack
the skills and mindsets necessary to do con-
servation correctly.
This contradiction reveals a fundamental
oversight of the historical and cultural
processes briefly addressed in this paper.
The historical legacy of national parks and
conservation bureaucracies make it difficult
for conservation programmes to incorporate
indigenous environmental knowledge that
does not serve the agendas and bureaucrat-
ic imperatives of these institutions.^24 Finally,
recent work by social scientists has increas-
ingly questioned notions of indigenous
knowledge as integrated systems of infor-
mation that can be known and incorporated
by conservation policy makers. Like other
aspects of culture, indigenous knowledge is
contested and changing. Furthermore, since
knowledge is embedded in practice, the
idea of applying indigenous environmental
knowledge to conservation issues that do
not resonate with local practices is inherent-
ly problematic.^25 As Agrawal argues, unless
communities have significant authority over
the disposition of natural resources in their
midst, indigenous environmental knowledge
is of little use to conservation interventions
targeting indigenous peoples.^26
These complex issues are complicated by
the fact that the participation of indigenous
peoples in community-based conservation
requires them to acquire skills, such as
accounting and grant-writing, which are not
parts of their ‘traditional’ knowledge sys-
tems. This fundamental disconnect is clearly
illustrated in a WWF policy document, which
simultaneously prescribes the “revitalisation
History, cculture aand cconservation
