Inclusive Protected Area Management in the Amazon: The Importance of Social Networks over Ecological Knowledge

Paula Ungar,Roger Strand

doi:10.3390/su4123260

Abstract

In the Amacayacu National Park in Colombia, which partially overlaps with Indigenous territories, several elements of an inclusive protected area management model have been implemented since the 1990s. In particular, a dialogue between scientific researchers, indigenous people and park staff has been promoted for the co-production of biological and cultural knowledge for decision-making. This paper, based on a four-year ethnographic study of the park, shows how knowledge products about different components of the socio-ecosystem neither were efficiently obtained nor were of much importance in park management activities. Rather, the knowledge pertinent to park staff in planning and management is the know-how required for the maintenance and mobilization of multi-scale social-ecological networks. We argue that the dominant models for protected area management—both top-down and inclusive models—underestimate the sociopolitical realm in which research is expected to take place, over-emphasize ecological knowledge as necessary for management and hold a too strong belief in decision-making as a rational, organized response to diagnosis of the PA, rather than acknowledging that thick complexity needs a different form of action. Co-production of knowledge is crucial for governance, but mainly not for the reasons for which it is promoted.

Highlights

Different academic discourses and technical guidelines on protected area (PA)management can be found today, both in academic literature and in normative guidelines, it can be said in general terms that there is a more or less widespread turn to acknowledging the social dimension of the territories and their ecological complexity
In the conventional PA management model, known as the ―Yellowstone model‖, knowledge for conservation decision-making is mainly expected to be produced by natural-scientific experts, based on what Holling called ―the analytic culture in ecology‖—characterized by simple causality, focused on a single scale, using classical statistics and searching for a precise truth [5]
In order to analyze how co-production of knowledge was carried out in Amacayacu National Park (ANP), we addressed three arenas in which it was promoted: local research projects, formulated and implemented jointly by Indigenous people and park staff; projects proposed by academic researchers, which were expected to be adjusted through deliberative processes with Indigenous people and carried out jointly; and the collective identification and prioritization of Conservation Objects for the management plan

Summary

Introduction

Different academic discourses and technical guidelines on protected area (PA)management can be found today, both in academic literature and in normative guidelines, it can be said in general terms that there is a more or less widespread turn to acknowledging the social dimension of the territories and their ecological complexity. In the conventional PA management model, known as the ―Yellowstone model‖, knowledge for conservation decision-making is mainly expected to be produced by natural-scientific experts, based on what Holling called ―the analytic culture in ecology‖—characterized by simple causality, focused on a single scale, using classical statistics and searching for a precise truth [5]. In this conventional model, expert knowledge is expected to flow uni-directionally to the decision- and policy-making arena, where it is implemented through command-and-control methods. This mechanism, identified as the ―transfer and translate model‖ [6] or as ―push-and-pull‖ interventions [7] is characterized basically by its one-directional flow between knowledge and action

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Conclusion