Abstract
International environmental organizations have an increasing commitment to the development of conservation programs in high-diversity regions where indigenous communities maintain customary rights to their lands and seas. A major challenge that these programs face is the alignment of international conservation values with those of the indigenous communities whose cooperation and support are vital. International environmental organizations are focused on biodiversity conservation, but local communities often have a different range of concerns and interests, only some of which relate to biodiversity. One solution to this problem involves adoption of a cultural landscape approach as the ethical and organizational foundation of the conservation program. In our conservation work in coastal Melanesia, we have developed a cultural landscape approach that involves the construction of a conceptual model of environment that reflects the indigenous perceptions of landscape. This model incorporates cultural, ideational, and spiritual values alongside other ecosystem services and underpins the conservation activities, priorities, and organizational structure of our programs. This cultural landscape model was a reaction to a survey of environmental values conducted by our team in which Solomon Islanders reported far greater interest in conserving cultural heritage sites than any other ecosystem resources. This caused a radical rethinking of community-based conservation programs. The methodologies we adopted are derived from the fields of archaeology and historical anthropology, in which there is an established practice of working through research problems within the framework of indigenous concepts of, and relationship to, landscape. In our work in Isabel Province, Solomon Islands, coastal communities have enthusiastically adopted conservation programs that are based on cultural landscape models that recognize indigenous values. A particularly useful tool is the Cultural Heritage Module, which identifies cultural heritage sites that become targets of conservation management and that are used as part of a holistic framework for thinking about broader conservation values.
Highlights
Over the last few decades there has been an increasing conservation investment in high-biodiversity regions where indigenous communities retain customary tenure over the conservation resource (Klein et al 2010, Bowler et al 2012)
Stage 1: developing the cultural landscape framework Table 1 lists the various roles played by cultural heritage sites as reported in the Cultural Heritage Module (CHM)
It expands the scope of conservation initiatives to include cultural heritage along with biodiversity targets
Summary
Over the last few decades there has been an increasing conservation investment in high-biodiversity regions where indigenous communities retain customary tenure over the conservation resource (Klein et al 2010, Bowler et al 2012) In these situations it is not uncommon for international environmental agencies to find themselves in partnership with communities who do not necessarily share the same conservation values, which can affect the long-term viability of their programs. One such location is Solomon Islands, where biodiversity-focused nongovernment organizations (NGOs) such as The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Word Wildlife Fund (WWF) have operated for more than 20 years. Some individuals perceive international conservation NGOs as primarily being the distributers of short-term funds that can be engaged with opportunistically to bring immediate benefits to their community (Hviding 2003)
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