Abstract
Previous research has shown that social organization may affect the distribution of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) within local communities of natural resource users in multiple ways. However, in this line of research the potential role of informal relationships has mostly been overlooked. In this article, we contribute toward filling this research gap by studying how two types of informal relationships, namely migration partnership and friendship, affect the distribution of TEK within a community of seminomadic pastoralists from the Kutch area, Gujarat, India. Using social network analysis, we map three networks, migration, men friendship, and women friendship, and compare with similarity-based quantitative approaches the clusters extracted from these networks in relation to four domains of TEK: knowledge about soils, about ethnoveterinary practices, about sheep breeds, and in ethnobotany. Our results show that (1) migration clusters are associated to significant variations in three TEK domains, while (2) friendship clusters are associated to minor variations. We relate these results to the importance of common practical experiences involved by joint migration. Moreover, kin relations are shown to strongly underlie friendship and migration relations, and as such appear as a potential driver of the dynamics of the local TEK system. We conclude by advocating for a better inclusion of such informal relationships in future research on local TEK dynamics, following recent developments in studies on natural resource governance.
Highlights
The implication of multiple stakeholders, from local users to institutional bodies, in landscape and natural resources management is increasingly being recognized as needful for successful governance, as illustrated by the fast spread and adoption of the concept of adaptive comanagement (Armitage et al 2008)
Previous research has shown that informal networks of actors are likely to play a key role in natural resource governance schemes through easing trust-building or information transmission across a set of diverse actors, institutional and noninstitutional (Bodin et al 2011)
We show that informal networks, or, said differently, informal social structures, are likely to shape in a significant way the transmission and distribution of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) among local actors
Summary
The implication of multiple stakeholders, from local users to institutional bodies, in landscape and natural resources management is increasingly being recognized as needful for successful governance, as illustrated by the fast spread and adoption of the concept of adaptive comanagement (Armitage et al 2008). The adaptive comanagement approach explicitly takes into account the dynamic state of ecosystems (Holling 1973), which implies some degree of unpredictability in management (Berkes et al 2000) and, as such, requires constant input from multiple sources about the state of the natural resources In this perspective, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), defined here as “a cumulative body of knowledge, practice and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relation of living beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment” (Berkes et al 2000:1252), has been shown to be critically important for adaptive comanagement because it provides a different and complementary understanding of ecosystems to Western science (Gadgil et al 1993, Berkes and Turner 2006). Recent research has demonstrated the relevance of pastoralists’ knowledge to assess the local ecological impacts of climate change (Marin 2010, Joshi et al 2013) Such information becomes critical when local ecological data are not available or not precise enough to interpret global climatological models.
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