Inclusion Of Traditional Knowledge Research Articles

Ecological Legacies and Ethnotourism: Bridging Science and Community in Ecuador’s Amazonia

This paper offers paradigmatic insights from an international workshop on Ecological Legacies: Bridge Between Science and Community, in Ecuador, in the summer of 2023. The conference brought together foreign and local scholars, tour operators, village community, and Indigenous leaders in the upper Amazonia region of Ecuador with the goal of developing a vision for a sustainable and regenerative future of the upper Amazon. The conference offered three epistemological contributions to the existing literature in the emergent field of Montology, including addressing issues of (a) understanding the existing linguistic hegemony in describing tropical environments, (b) the redress of mistaken notions on pristine jungle environments, and (c) the inclusion of traditional knowledge and transdisciplinary approaches to understand the junglescape from different perspectives and scientific traditions. Methodologically, the conference bridged the fields of palaeoecological and ethnobotanical knowledge (as part of a wider conversation between science and local communities). Results show that local knowledge should be incorporated into the study of the junglescape and its conservation, with decolonial approaches for tourism, sharing language, methodology, tradition, and dissemination of the forest’s attributes. Our research helped co-create and formulate the “Coca Declaration” calling for a philosophical turn in research, bridging science and ethnotourism in ways that are local, emancipatory, and transdisciplinary. We conclude that facilitating new vocabulary by decolonial heightening of Indigenous perspectives of the junglescape helps to incorporate the notion of different Amazons, including the mountainscape of the Andean–Amazonian flanks. We also conclude that we can no consider Ecuador the country of “pure nature” since we helped demystify pristine nature for foreign tourists and highlighted local views with ancestral practices. Finally, we conclude that ethnotourism is a viable alternative to manage heritagization of the junglescape as a hybrid territory with the ecological legacies of the past and present inhabitants of upper Amazonia.

Capacity Development and Cultural Heritage: Toward a New “Culture of Water”

In 2020 UN Water, the entity coordinating the United Nations’ work on water and sanitation, identified capacity development as one of the five accelerators required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal on Clean Water and Sanitation (SDG 6). In today’s practical application, capacity development is mostly financed to deliver a product specified in advance, not to arrange a longer time frame and process to structurally learn from various activities and discover sustainable development paths (Alaerts and Zevenbergen 2022). The inclusion of traditional knowledge and cultural heritage in our joint-learning efforts will help us enlarge capacity for a more sustainable culture of water.

Educação escolar indígena e saberes tradicionais: A percepção dos professores Pipipã de Kambixuru

Este artigo é parte de uma investigação de doutoramento, que versa sobre a educação escolar e os saberes tradicionais dos Pipipã de Kambixuru, situados no município de Floresta, Pernambuco, Brasil. Serão apresentados os relatos dos professores indígenas sobre a importância da educação escolar e a inclusão dos saberes tradicionais, nomeadamente a medicina, o Toré e a Jurema Sagrada no currículo diferenciado da Escola Estadual Indígena Joaquim Roseno, na Aldeia Travessão do Ouro. Foi seguida uma abordagem etnográfica, concretizada numa observação participante no território indígena, onde foram feitas entrevistas com os docentes, dando-se ênfase ao processo intercultural da construção do currículo e metodologias utilizadas nas aulas. Os saberes tradicionais são apresentados à comunidade na escola e através da oralidade e, apesar dos processos de aculturação existentes, é perceptível a perseverança da comunidade indígena em manter o seu legado. O discurso intercultural contribui para a permanência e resistência deste povo, pois a diversidade cultural em seus conceitos epistemológicos e em sua prática é de suma relevância tanto para a construção acadêmica quanto para uma pedagogia da vida.

Knowledge Co-production in Contested Spaces: An Evaluation of the North Slope Borough – Shell Baseline Studies Program

Supporting the development of trusted and usable science remains a key challenge in contested spaces. This paper evaluates a collaborative research agreement between the North Slope Borough of Alaska and Shell Exploration and Production Company—an agreement that was designed to improve collection of information and management of issues associated with the potential impacts of oil and gas development in the Arctic. The evaluation is based on six categories of knowledge co-production indicators: external factors, inputs, processes, outputs, outcomes, and impacts. Two sources of data were used to assess the indicators: interviews with steering committee members and external science managers (n = 16) and a review of steering committee minutes. Interpretation of the output and outcome indicators suggests that the Baseline Studies Program supported a broad range of research, though there were differences in how groups perceived the relevance and legitimacy of project outcomes. Several input, process, and external variables enabled the co-production of trusted science in an emergent boundary organization and contested space; these variables included governance arrangements, leveraged capacities, and the inclusion of traditional knowledge. Challenges to knowledge co-production on the North Slope include logistics, differences in cultures and decision contexts, and balancing trade-offs among perceived credibility, legitimacy, and relevance. Reinforced lessons learned included providing time to foster trust, developing adaptive governance approaches, and building capacity among scientists to translate community concerns into research questions.

Decolonizing Approaches to Inuit Community Wellness: Conversations with Elders in a Nunavut Community

Nunavut communities struggle with numerous challenges related to social distress. It is important to specify that these struggles represent a rupture with traditional Inuit society. Most research to date has linked colonization and ongoing social inequity to these distresses. This community-based, participatory research project elicits traditional knowledge from Elders living in Cape Dorset, Nunavut. The aim is to identify Inuit values, beliefs, and actions with the potential to improve community wellness. The themes that emerge include respect, leadership, family connection, inclusion of traditional knowledge, working together, and resiliency. Results resonate with other community wellness research projects in Nunavut.

Indigenous traditional knowledge for sustainable development: the biodiversity convention and plant treaty regimes

Sustainable development requires establishing a functional balance between socioeconomic development and environmental protection, with traditional knowledge (TK) held by indigenous and local communities (ILCs), including traditional practices of conservation and sustainable use of natural resources, playing an integral role in achieving global sustainable development goals. This paper looks at the inclusion of TK in two principle regimes: the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA). It explains TK within this context, summarizes key elements of applicable legal frameworks, and analyzes certain legal measures from domestic implementation of the treaties. It suggests that traditional knowledge of ILCs provides a channel for sustainable development which has been nurtured for centuries and should be more effectively integrated into decision-making procedures through greater protections for TK and local empowerment of ILCs for governance and equitable benefit sharing.

Challenges of climate change in tropical basins: vulnerability of eco-agrosystems and human populations

Climate change impacts are already happening through the world, and it is now clear that there is the need for an adaptive response from global institutions down to the local level. Reducing vulnerability to cope with climate variability might be more challenging in tropical countries than in North America or Europe. The ten papers of this special issue were presented during the Adaptclim conference that was held by the Sinergia Project, the CLARIS LPB project, and the GeoData Institute in Asuncion, Paraguay, in 2010. All papers, except one regarding the Brahmaputra Basin in South Asia, present studies from South America. These studies are first contextualized geographically and then are related one to another by a simplified vulnerability concept linking climate stress to sensitivity and adaptive capacity of natural and human systems. One half of the papers focus on actual or future climate change and the present-day causes of the vulnerability of natural and agrosystems. Droughts are and will be the main source of stress for agriculture in South America. Increasing fragmentation of forest of the center of this continent is aggravating their vulnerability to dry spells. Another half of the studies of this special issue deal with the adaptive capacity human populations to system perturbations produced or enhanced by climate change. The studies point out inclusion of traditional knowledge and involvement of local actors in their own vulnerability assessment to increase adaptive capacity. These elements of climate justice, giving voice to those less responsible for carbon emissions but bearing their most severe consequences, allow the particular needs of a community to be considered and can direct adaptation policy toward preserving or rebuilding their specific capabilities under threat from climate change. The special issue also made clear that a basin analysis of the climate change problem could provide information, results, and methods more readily of use for the local population and decision makers.

Pipelines, permits, and protests: Carrier Sekani encounters with the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project

This paper examines the ontological politics of an encounter between proposed energy pipelines and Indigenous peoples. The Enbridge Corporation has applied to construct a pipeline system to deliver diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to the Pacific coast of British Columbia, but the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council and their member communities have asserted the authority to prevent this project from passing through their unceded territories. Studying Carrier Sekani contestation of Canadian regulatory assessment of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, we examine how the processes of Indigenous becoming exceed notions of Indigenous being that are included in the permitting process as traditional knowledge. We focus both on the performance of legal obligations to consider Aboriginal traditional knowledge and the emerging politics of Carrier Sekani resistance. Our intention is not to question the integrity of traditional knowledge that the regulatory process incorporates, but to highlight how traditional knowledge functions as an anchor for a field of governmental inquiry and action. Providing a historical and geographical context of Carrier Sekani relations with development and the state, we argue that the coding of Indigenous being as traditional works to disavow contemporary processes of Indigenous becoming that are surplus to the spatial ontology of capitalist energy development for global markets. Against efforts to sanction development on disputed territory through formal recognition of a constrained Indigeneity, Carrier Sekani people assert the sovereign authority to prevent or permit development on their lands and waterways using traditional governance systems. Broadly, this paper suggests that recognizing the ontological politics at stake in this permitting process provides a useful opening to understand continued colonial captures at work in the inclusion of traditional knowledge in environmental governance. But it also demonstrates the capacity of Indigenous resistance to these enclosures to challenge and reshape global geographies of energy, capitalism, and climate.

Traditional Knowledge: A New Challenge in Patents

Traditional knowledge has always been an easily available treasure and thus has been subjected to misappropriation. Intellectual Property Rights are one of the sites which represent the encounter between indigenous knowledge and modern scientific knowledge. The researchers in this paper try to highlight that TRIPS does not acknowledge traditional knowledge and neither has it made reference to the protection. TRIPS agreement provides for sui generis system and the part of the rationale behind the sui generis provision is that the claims of indigenous knowledge holders are based on completely different socio cultural norms, therefore, a system that is unique and rooted in local specificities should be used for the protection of indigenous knowledge. The problem of sui generis model is lack of proper system of benefit sharing and inclusion of traditional knowledge as in IP instruments of TRIPS. Possession is the most important basis to claim for IPR protection, thus the paper tries to portray that Traditional Knowledge is common knowledge and a product of collective experience without an individual act of creation; therefore it gets precluded from getting protection under IPR regimes. This paper brings to light the grant of patents on non-original innovations, which are based on what is already a part of the traditional knowledge of the developing world have been causing a great concern to the developing world. It further talks about the real challenge to Patent by Traditional knowledge are lack of complete data bases and availability to all the patent offices in the world. Another prime reason which the researchers think why Traditional knowledge is facing challenges in the patent as the locus of ownership cannot be clearly identified for knowledge systems that are essentially inter generational and products of communal endeavor. Traditional knowledge often falls short of requirement of non obvious or novel as it is often orally transmitted evolves gradually the prime ambit on being to respond to changing ecology and needs. These barriers have kept the traditional societies outside the ‘loop’ of the Patent protection. The researchers further in this paper intend to highlight the steps taken by Indian Government to curb the menace of biopiracy and biomedicines.