of cultural traditions,” “capacity building,”
and the “creation of alternatives to tradi-
tional subsistence practices”.^27These contradictory imperatives present two
dangers. First, training usually involves
indoctrination. Not only are indigenous lead-
ers given new types of skills, they are also
immersed in the cultural
values that go along with
them. Second, conserva-
tionists frequently use
lack of community capac-
ity as a reason not to
involve local people in
protected area manage-
ment. In spite of these
dangers, the issue of
community capacity is
pragmatically important.
Even the Ute Mountain
Ute, who would prefer to
keep westerners out of
their business, cautiously
engage experts to teach them the skills
necessary to run their tribal park. Finally,
the question of capacity is a two way street.
While western conservationists are usually
well trained to do conservation, they fre-
quently lack the capacity for intercultural
communication necessary to work effective-
ly with indigenous communitiesConclusion
“The reformulation of norms is an essential-
ly political process. It is not merely an epis-
temological exercise, nor is it the discovery
of some self-evident truths” (Sheth, 1987:
163).As I cautioned in the introduction in this
article, the variables presented here are not
a comprehensive paradigm for understand-
ing community-based conservation. Rather
they are offered as a tentative guideline for
future research, and hopefully suggest
some ways in which community-based con-
servation might be reconceptualised inorder to become more effective.Community-based conservation is often con-
ceptualised as a global project that builds
on the diverse cultural values and conserva-
tion practices of communities around the
world. Part of this project, therefore, is to
discover and describe the relationship of
culture to conservation in diverse local con-
texts so that they might be incorporated
into conservation interventions. A more
fruitful perspective, I suggest, would be to
conceptualise culture as a contested and
historically contingent process, which is fun-
damentally shaped by global historical
processes. Conservation, including commu-
nity-based conservation, can then be con-
ceptualised as one of the many global his-
torical processes that influence cultural
debates in diverse local contexts.On one level, this perspective is less appeal-
ing than a straightforward cataloging of
indigenous environmental knowledge –
since it renders the task of conservation
policy makers much more complicated.
However, it provides a more nuanced under-
standing of the local situations in which
community-based conservation will neces-
sarily unfold, thereby providing opportuni-
ties to avoid the pitfalls experienced by pre-
vious approaches. This approach provides a
guide for making informed guesses about
how historical and cultural variables might
influence the outcomes of planned conser-
vation interventions. More importantly, it
has the potential to reveal how conservation
interventions might be reconceptualised in
response to different local contexts. For me,
this approach begins with a series of ques-
tions:
Have local peoples’ experience with “offi-
cial conservation”to this point been posi-
tive or negative? If they have been nega-
tive, is it possible to address their histori-
cal grievances in ways that might give
them a more positive view of conserva-
tion?Conservation aas ccultural aand ppolitical ppractice
A ffundamental ddis-
connect iis cclearly
illustrated iin ppolicy
documents tthat
simultaneously ppre-
scribe tthe ““revitalisa-
tion oof
cultural ttraditions”
but aalso ““capacity
building” aand tthe
“creation oof aalterna-
tives tto ttraditional
subsistence ppractices”.