Indigenous people & local knowledge

There is a great diversity of indigenous or traditional societies, who have inhabited and manipulated forests in all tropical forest regions - sometimes for millennia, sometimes only recently or transiently. Indigenous peoples are one of the groups of people that are frequently overlooked in centralised forest management decisions. They depend for habitat, food and all other aspects of their existence on the forest. Forests play a fundamental role in the cultural and spiritual lives of these people. Everywhere, indigenous communities are faced with problems: encroachment of forestry and non-forest land uses, confrontations with state power and state legislation that is not compatible with traditional systems, displacement, disregard of their culture, beliefs, values and history.

The conversion and degradation of forests worldwide has led to a dramatic loss of cultural diversity, and with it a corresponding loss of traditional forest -related knowledge. The importance of traditional knowledge was explicitly recognised in the CBD and was further elaborated on in the IFF. The CBD is the designated organisation to follow up on recommendations of the IFF regarding traditional forest based knowledge.

The knowledge of these societies includes a wealth of traditional ecological knowledge, relating to management and conservation of the environment; it includes systems of classification, sets of empirical observations about the local environment, and local management systems governing resource use. Indigenous knowledge of forest ecology and forest biological diversity complements modern scientific knowledge and is increasingly being used to define sustainable management regimes. It is often used to mean wisdom, which implies a blend of knowledge and experience integrated with a coherent worldview and value system. This knowledge has usually been accumulated by societies in the course of long experience in a particular place, landscape or ecosystem.

The CBD distinguishes the following features of indigenous knowledge:

• information about the various physical, biological and social components of a particular forested landscape;
• rules for using them without damaging them irreparably;
• relationships among their users;
• technologies for using them to meet the subsistence, health, trade and ritual needs of local people; and
• a view of the world that incorporates and makes sense of all the above in the context of a long-term and holistic perspective in decision-making.

Most forms of indigenous knowledge are relevant only to the environment where it arose and could be used for sustainable forest management in those places. This requires that the owners of the knowledge are actively involved in partnerships regarding the ownership, planning and management of those lands. Some forms of indigenous knowledge, such as knowledge of medicinal plants, are commercially relevant beyond their local context. In the recent past there has been a surge of interest in this type of knowledge (bioprospecting). A final form of indigenous knowledge concerns universally applicable knowledge without direct commercial value (e.g. the knowledge of plant names). National legislation is required to ensure fair and equitable sharing of benefits derived from all these forms of indigenous knowledge and to recognise the intellectual property of indigenous peoples. The IPF suggested that such legislation arrange

• that groups possessing indigenous knowledge are recognised in law so that they can enter into access agreements concerning indigenous knowledge;
• that the indigenous knowledge concerned is recognised in law as the common property of the group entering into the access agreement;
• that all access to indigenous knowledge is through an access agreement with its owners, where these can be identified;
• that access agreements define terms for the three main circumstances in which access to indigenous knowledge might be sought, these being:
  • (a) where the aim is to manage a forest by partnership between the people who live there and the government;
  • (b) where the aim is to invent patentable products for commercial use; and
  • (c) where the aim is to share knowledge freely with others.

However, in many countries there is still reluctance to recognise the ownership of indigenous knowledge.

TBI sources

Further reading: