Abstract
Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) around the world are increasingly asserting ‘Indigenous agency’ to engage with government institutions and other partners to collaboratively steward ancestral Places. Case studies in Hawai‘i suggest that ‘community-driven collaborative management’ is a viable and robust pathway for IPLCs to lead in the design of a shared vision, achieve conservation targets, and engage government institutions and other organisations in caring for and governing biocultural resources and associated habitats. This paper articulates key forms of Indigenous agency embodied within Native Hawaiian culture, such as kua‘āina, hoa‘āina, and the interrelated values of aloha ‘āina, mālama ‘āina, and kia‘i ‘āina. We also examine how Hawai‘i might streamline the pathways to equitable and productive collaborative partnerships through: (1) a better understanding of laws protecting Indigenous rights and practices; (2) recognition of varied forms of Indigenous agency; and (3) more deliberate engagement in the meaningful sharing of power. We contend that these partnerships can directly achieve conservation and sustainability goals while transforming scientific fields such as conservation biology by redefining research practices and underlying norms and beliefs in Places stewarded by IPLCs. Further, collaborative management can de-escalate conflicts over access to, and stewardship of, resources by providing IPLCs avenues to address broader historical legacies of environmental and social injustice while restoring elements of self-governance. To these ends, we propose that government agencies proactively engage with IPLCs to expand the building of comprehensive collaborative management arrangements. Hawai‘i provides an example for how this can be achieved.
Highlights
Conservation organisations have long held that humans are separate from and inherently destructive to nature (Mace 2014)
From an Indigenous perspective, ‘conservation’ is not about preservation of nature within rapidly degrading protected areas that exclude people; rather, it is about a Place-based stewardship where Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) are empowered to conserve biodiversity along with cultural diversity, and habitats within the context of social– ecological systems
‘Community-driven collaborative management’ fueled by Indigenous agency empowers IPLCs to engage in stewardship over their places and fulfill this vision of conservation and associated goals
Summary
Conservation organisations have long held that humans are separate from and inherently destructive to nature (Mace 2014). Efforts by Indigenous peoples to assert their rights to access and care for ancestral Places can result in conflicts with government agencies These struggles have paved the way for more integrated forms of conservation – including ecosystem-based management and various forms of comanagement between government agencies and communities. Current efforts to procedurally enact comanagement arrangements in Hawai‘i are stymied by administrative concerns that become barriers to progress These concerns relate to questions about who counts as ‘community’, what are the cultural mechanisms to engage in resource management, how can community management rules be adapted to changing resource abundance once they are formalised into state law, and how are Indigenous rights balanced with those of an undifferentiated public, including all recreational users.
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