strategy

Managing wild renewable resources through local communities

Synonyms:

Improving wildlife management by local communities
Husbanding community ecological resources
Establishing community-based wildlife management systems

Context:

This strategy features in the framework of Agenda 21 as formulated at UNCED (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), now coordinated by the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and implemented through national and local authorities. Agenda 21 recommends improving rural income and employment through promoting and supporting eco-tourism and the management of wildlife, including farming, and encouraging and supporting the husbandry and cultivation of wild species, thus ensuring economic and social benefits without harmful ecological impacts.

Excluding communities from managing local renewable resources may lead to mismanagement and abuse of those resources. Awarding its property rights, land tenure and stewardship to the local community can provide strong incentives to manage those resources sustainably. By the same token, communities can benefit from revenues earned if renewable resources are successfully managed. This can be particularly the case with indigenous peoples and other groups with a long "attachment and understanding" to a particular area.

Implementation:

In the humid tropics, traditional agriculture is based on natural resource management, and agricultural ideology reflects a concern for managing natural processes. Natural resource management is not an activity separable from how people make a living. While natural resource management is generally taken to mean the focused management of particular naturally occurring useful items such as wild game, water, soil, minerals, and timber producing trees, tropical peoples focus on processes not items; items are seen to be the result of processes. Agricultural structures, agricultural 'scripts', and the agricultural knowledge of individuals reflect an ideological stance that natural processes are agricultural resources. Examples from two neotropical farming groups, the Bora of the Peruvian Amazon and the Huastec of Mexico, support this thesis. This agricultural ideology is different from the agricultural ideology outside observers bring with them. By focusing on agroecosystems from a temporal perspective, outsiders can better appreciate the knowledge of traditional farmers. Agronomists and foresters may develop new strategies for the humid tropics not only by taking traditional knowledge into account but also by adopting the traditional farmers' attitude that the natural processes are valuable resources.

Claim:

There is a growing recognition that a community's rights to ownership and tenure of wildlife resources is integral to sustainable wildlife management. Wildlife management will only be sustainable ecologically, socially and economically if it can be made sufficiently attractive to local communities for them to adopt the practice as a long-term livelihood strategy.

Broader:

Improving
Improving wild animal management
Harvesting wild resources sustainably
Utilizing traditional indigenous skills
Instigating community resources management
Stimulating renewable resources management
Using agro-ecosystems in conservation management
Integrating nature conservation and rural development
Advancing environmentally sound technology and management systems

Narrower:

Strengthening community-based land resource protection
Benefit-sharing of community level biodiversity conservation
Establishing participatory approaches to wetland biodiversity management
Developing business strategies with traditional groups for biodiversity conservation

Facilitates:

Using forest resources sustainably
Integrating wildlife management in farming systems
Promoting joint farmer and environmentalist activities

Facilitated by:

Applying culture-based knowledge systems
Legalizing community rights to resource use
Promoting alternative perspectives of biodiversity
Delegating sustainable development to appropriate level
Collecting information on sustainable strategies of local authorities

Values:

Nonlocal
Community
Nonglobalized
Unsustainable
Mismanagement
Anticommunity

References:

Freeman, Milton M R and Carbyn, Ludwig N: Traditional Knowledge and Renewable Resource Management in Northern Regions
Anon: Wildlife and People: The Human Dimensions of Wildlife Ecology