Abstract
Efforts to resolve indigenous peoples' grievances about the negative impacts of protected areas established on their customary estates by governments are driving the development of shared governance and management. The Tϋhoe people have sought that the settlement of their grievances against the New Zealand government include unencumbered rights to manage Te Urewera, guided by scientific and traditional knowledge and practices, for conservation and social benefits for the Tϋhoe people and the broader public. We led a study tour to allow Tϋhoe and other Mβori representatives to gain first-hand experience of long-standing jointly managed protected areas in Australia that the New Zealand government had drawn on in proposing mechanisms to resolve the Tϋhoe claim. We found that these areas were a poor fit to the study tour participants' aspirations that indigenous world views would underpin governance and that indigenous people would be empowered. Our findings highlight that settlement must be transformational in terms of attitudes and relationships. Collaborative problem-solving processes that build trust can contribute. In areas like Te Urewera, where tenure boundaries fragment a landscape that is a coherent whole in indigenous world views, settlement processes can offer the prospect of landscape-scale outcomes for social justice and conservation.
Highlights
Indigenous peoples have a dialectic and evolving relationship with protected areas
The study tour, conducted over 12 days in mid-2010, was designed to provide Māori participants an opportunity to learn about joint management in the Australian national parks
While our research focus was on the Tūhoe claim, the other Māori representatives were invited to participate in the study tour because these joint management experiences were relevant to their own claim settlement processes as well
Summary
Indigenous peoples have a dialectic and evolving relationship with protected areas. On the one hand, protected areas can conflict with indigenous peoples’ identity and economy (e.g., Craig et al 2012), rights recognised in international instruments (United Nations 2008) and to varying degrees in national constitutions, statutes, common law or the terms of treaties made by colonising powers (Colchester 2004; West et al 2006). In ‘new settler’ states such as the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where indigenous people are culturally-distinctive minorities, power-sharing between governments and indigenous peoples has become increasingly prevalent as a way of accommodating indigenous rights and the conservation goals of governments for protected areas (Taiepa et al 1997; Beltran 2000; Borrini-Feyerabend et al 2004b; Dearden et al 2005; Timko and Satterfield 2008; Berkes 2009a; Ross et al 2009). The dynamics of collaboration—including the role of informal institutions, social networks, trust, communication, learning, and adaptive processes—are important determinants of the extent to which
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