that unity is still being trampled upon in many places.
So, what to do? Give up? Resign ourselves? Accept the
“inevitable”? The papers collected in this issue give us
a glimpse of alternatives to all that. In section I
(Conservation as cultural and political practice),
MacDonald begins by illustrating how conservation is
built thought interactions among disparate cultural
groups endowed with unequal powers. As conservation
organisations are bodies with the explicit or implicit
aim of determining cultural change, the question aris-
es: do these bodies really understand “culture”? And
who is watching over their cultural engineering? The
papers by Barthod, Coggins, Andersson and Adams
offer some vistas of conservation as a historical phe-
nomenon and of how misunderstanding change results
in conflict and conservation failures. And finding out
the reasons why some of our forefathers engaged in
conservation may embarrass more than a few of
today’s environmentalists. We then hear about the
long-term processes by which people adapted to envi-
ronmental conditions and developed their cultural iden-
tity... and how quickly these elaborate interplays are
destabilised or destroyed today (Ganya et al., Mayr
and Rodriguez, Pinto da Silva). But “culture” is
resilient! Dutt and Warren show us how groups and
individuals can re-invent themselves and discover new
pathways to conservation and livelihoods. And
Manspeizer, Sundberg and Wolmer powerfully argue
that politics is at the heart of it all. Conservation is a
practice of power—a fact that they explore in various
nuanced ways.
In section II (A cultural approach to conservation?) we
offer some specific cases and explore more explicitly
the questions that arise when conservation attempts to
adopt a “cultural approach”. What should we look for?
What should we try to understand? What should we
do? What have we learned? Different answers are pro-
posed by papers that deal with the USA, Senegal,
Tanzania, India, Canada, Indonesia and Madagascar.
Different perspectives give us accounts focusing on
indigenous rights, the project-based application of
social research, the prevention of human-wildlife con-
flicts or the re-invention of traditional norms into
today’s societies. In all cases, we are made amply
aware of the senselessness of pursuing conservation
without a sufficient understanding of history and cul-
ture... As stressed by Maffi and other authors in
Section IV, we are dealing with complex and inter-
linked bio-cultural phenomena, and the time is ripe to
understand them better and to apply that understand-
ing in the practice of conservation.
As the international policy arena changes to incorpo-
rate concepts of cultural rights, as some formerly mar-
ginalised groups claim increasing power and as others
feel even more marginalised, the credibility of the con-
servation movement depends on its ability to deal with
the relation between history, culture and conservation
in all its complexity and beyond the clichés. It is our
hope that this issue of Policy Matterscontributes to
this goal.Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend, Ken MacDonald and Luisa
Maffi
The Editors can be reached at [email protected];
[email protected] and
[email protected]. They would like to express their sin-
cere thanks to Olivier Hamerlynck, Jean Larivière and
Gonzalo Oviedo for their most kind help in reading and com-
menting some of the papers in this special issue. Many
thanks also to Jeyran Farvar ([email protected]) who kind-
ly took care of art work and layout.Notes(^1) J. Terborgh, Requiem for Nature, 1999 (emphasis added).
(^2) Richard Leakey, World Parks Congress, September 2003.
(^3) Steven E. Sanderson, President of Wildlife Conservation Society,
summarised from an e-mail discussion, 2004..
(^4) Safari operators sell tourist trips to visit the “big five” (elephant,
rhino, lion, leopard, buffalo).
(^5) Among them we salute F. Berkes, S. Brechin, M. Cernea, T.
Farvar, M. Gadgil, D. Harmon, J. McNeely, D. Pitt, D. Posey, S.
Stevens and P.C. West.
(^6) Among such few are M. Pimbert and K. Ghimire.
Pride of one own’s way. An essential ingredient in bio-
cultural conservation. (Courtesy Grazia Borrini-
Feyerabend—portrait of a girl from Mondoro, Mali)