NGO Personnel Research Articles

A participatory approach to ecosystem conservation: fuzzy cognitive maps and stakeholder group analysis in Uluabat Lake, Turkey.

Fuzzy cognitive mapping was used to develop a participatory ecosystem management plan for Uluabat Lake, Turkey. Interviews were conducted with stakeholders belonging to six different groups. Lake pollution was the most central and most mentioned variable for stakeholders. Stakeholder groups agree that lake pollution is negatively affecting ecosystem health and thereby local economies. Thus, reducing lake pollution was chosen as the overall goal for the management plan. Possible ways to reduce lake pollution and increase ecosystem health were seen differently by the different groups. Hunters, factory managers, NGO personnel, and local people thought industry was the main cause of lake pollution, while officials from the government and local municipalities thought roads and urban development contributed the most to lake pollution. Generally the stakeholder groups did not perceive their own actions as affecting the lake as strongly as other groups thought. For example, factory managers viewed factory pollution as negatively affecting the lake but less strongly than the other groups did. According to policy option simulations, reducing lake pollution had positive effects on all variables, especially fish, birds, animal husbandry, irrigation, agriculture, and the ecological balance of the lake. Results of this analysis were used to facilitate meetings among stakeholder groups and to develop a participatory ecosystem management plan. The analysis was useful for pointing out the similarities as well as the differences among the groups. It also helped the facilitators understand the focus of each stakeholder group and enabled them to suggest activities in which each group would want to participate.

Imagining Authenticity in the Local Medicines of Chiapas, Mexico

This paper describes and discusses the existing gap between local medicines as practiced by healers in the Highlands of Chiapas and the way in which NGO personnel and other foreigners imagine them. It is argued that non-indigenous people in the region possess a tourist gaze that creates a distance (spatial and temporal) between cosmopolitan and local practices that lead them to view local medicines as exotic knowledge. The Museum of Maya Medicine described in this article demonstrates how, through this same tourist gaze, local medicines are confined into a secure space and tied to another time. I discuss how, while cosmopolitan medicine’s practitioners and ‘tourists’ recreate local medicines in the museum as something culturally authentic, local medicines are, in contrast, characterized by their hybridity.