March 2003
Rebecca Zarger, Section Editor
Anthropology and Environment Section
Conservation and Community Workshop Held at AAA in New Orleans
By: Diane Russell
The workshop sponsored by the A&E Section's Conservation and Community Working Group (CCWG) in New Orleans drew an overflow crowd of over 35 people. Four seasoned conservation practitioners presented diverse community-based conservation approaches. Wendy Weisman, graduate student at Rutgers University, coordinated the workshop with A&E members Bonnie McCay, Paige West, Pete Brosius and Diane Russell. Highlights of the event and case studies presented are summarized below. The full workshop report will be available in April on A&E's revamped website (http://www.library.arizona.edu/ej/jpe/anthenv/), where members can keep up with CCWG activities.
Janis Alcorn, former Director of the Peoples, Forests and Reefs Program of the Biodiversity Support Program (BSP), began with an overview of how conservation projects are conceived and funded, and provided background on the trends in ecoregional conservation planning that have overshadowed community-based approaches. Through BSP, however, Janis funded grassroots networks of indigenous peoples in Asia. She emphasized that project blueprints don't work; effective projects require resilience to respond to challenging situations and volatile political realities. She highlighted the importance of strong allies in donor organizations and creating a communications grid to ensure that community-based conservation initiatives persist.
Alaka Wali of Chicago's Field Museum introduced the Participatory Asset Mapping approach that she and Janis use in a large conservation project around the Parque Nacional Cordillera Azul in Peru. Rapid Biological Inventories and numerous well-attended "stakeholder" planning workshops initially held in surrounding villages had convinced park staff that local people had been given a fair chance to speak up. Alaka and Janis initiated Participatory Asset Mapping to give the communities a stronger voice. Instead of sending in a team of anthropologists, Alaka trained people to be anthropologists for their own communities. The asset mapping method seeks to document and build upon a community's strengths, bringing to light knowledge, skills, and institutions that make them capable of natural resource stewardship. It includes detailing "social assets," resource use and physical assets (including sacred spaces) in terms of park "buffer zones."
Mac Chapin, Director of the Center for the Support of Native Lands, focused on his mapping work to support indigenous land claims and stewardship. In 1991 an early mapping effort, which responded to concerns about deforestation in Central America, showed that remaining forest was isomorphic with Indian territory. Ten years later, Mac initiated a large-scale mapping project in eight countries, employing a team of anthropologists, biologists, GIS specialists, and agronomists. It started with a year of gathering information, including addressing the question, "what is an indigenous person"? Mac's organization garnered funding from private foundations and the National Geographic Society, while still maintaining control of the project.
In a lively conclusion to the workshop, Owen Lynch, Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), presented his work on community property rights. He described how indigenous peoples were deemed squatters during the colonial era, and how this legal definition persisted because political and economic elites found it useful. He also highlighted critical differences between "private" and "individual" property rights, emphasizing the possibilities this distinction opens up for legal strategies to support indigenous land claims. For example, in community-based natural resource management, governments lease forests, pastures or marine areas to groups of people, but these "privileges" can be extended to private group rights, where the community defines its own perimeters and is given the right to allocate concessions within its territory.
During and after the presentations, a spirited discussion ensued about how advocacy research could be reconciled with academic research focusing on the complexities (and definitions) of community, including factionalism and power relations. Janis and Alaka reiterated that the strengths of anthropologically-oriented research methods such as Asset Mapping are that they appeal to conservationists and political bodies who are uncomfortable with such complexities, allowing ideological obstacles to be sidestepped so that community participation can occur. Issues raised in the discussion represent important unresolved debates in contemporary environmental anthropology. CCWG looks forward to organizing future events where these and other relevant issues can be constructively addressed. We invite comments and suggestions for future events. Email Diane Russell (D.Russell@cgiar.org) with your ideas.
Please send news and commentaries to Rebecca Zarger,rzarger@uga.edu.