Conservation and the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities: looking forwards
S TEPHANIE B RITT AIN,HELEN TUGE NDHAT HELEN NEWIN G and E . J . MILNER-GULLAND
As the world looks forwards to a vision of living in harmony with nature by 2050 (CBD, 2019), we can learn much by tra- cing the path that conservation science and practice have taken as we grapple with how the ownership, use and access rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities inter- sect with conservation. Oryx is a treasure trove in this re- spect, with a history of discourse on this topic. Its archives reveal pivotal moments that have contributed to an over- arching move within conservation policy towards more sustained attention to human rights. Here we look back through the Oryx archives, to stimulate reflection on how conservation has engaged with human rights, how that has intersected with evolving global policy, and what we can learn from this history to ensure that human rights are better understood and placed at the centre of conser- vation policy and practice. The pages of Oryx during the 1960s and 1970s reveal a
strong focus on a purely environmental imperative for con- servation, with little tolerance of the presence of local people in protected areas. For example, Curry-Lindahl (1975,p. 82) stated explicitly ‘that National Parks and equivalent reserves must be protected against all human exploitation’. Other articles fromthis period note population growth as a key driv- er of the need for strictly protected areas to safeguard against human-causeddegradation(Bertram,1963;Worthington,1965). However, articles from the 1990s and 2000s illustrate a
shift towards community-based approaches and considera- tion of human well-being. Horwich (1990) and Adams & Thomas (1996) documented early examples of community- based approaches, and Stearman &Redford (1995,p. 29) de- scribed how land was returned to, and successfully protected by, Indigenous peoples in Bolivia, although they present the recognition of land rights as instrumental (‘to enable the Yuqui [people] to exploit game animals sustainably and to defend their lands’) rather than as a legal and moral obliga- tion. Hutton & Leader-Williams (2003,p. 215) argued that ‘sustainable use and incentive-driven conservation should both be at the centre of the conservation agenda this
STEPHANIE BRITTAIN ( (
orcid.org/0000-0002-4710-1824) and E.J. MILNER-GULLAND (
0000-0003-0324-2710) The University of Oxford, Oxford, UK E-mail
stephanie.brittain@
zoo.ox.ac.uk
HELEN TUGENDHAT Forest Peoples Programme, Moreton-in-Marsh, UK *Also at: Forest Peoples Programme, Moreton-in-Marsh, UK
orcid.org/0000-0002-7865-0391), HELEN NEWING*
orcid.org/
century’.Western (2001,p. 202) supported this view, point- ing out that ‘these are not the views of weak-kneed conser- vationists, but of experienced protectionists too.. .Where once parks were planned against people, the World Commission on Protected Areas now advocates they be planned with local people’. However, there was by no means a consensus on community-based approaches to conservation: there was also a pushback, which became known as the back to bar- riers movement (Hutton et al., 2005). For example, Oates (1995) called for increased funding for protection of wildlife through enforcement, using a case of the unintended con- sequences of an integrated conservation and development project as supporting evidence. In a wider debate about the traditional vs new conservation approaches, and about who has legitimate rights, Spinage (1998,p. 273) provided the memorable line: ‘claims that denial of indigenous peoples’ land rights is contrary to both customary and in- ternational law may conform to present-day western eth- ics of Homo sapiens, but in nature there is only one law of possession and that is the law of occupation by force’. In his response Colchester (1998) questioned the morality of this approach and asked how long protected areas managed in such a way could survive. In the following 10 years there was a substantial shift
in international policy towards more inclusive approaches (Newing & Perram, 2019), but more recently there has been an increasing polarization of positions, resulting in a marked divergence within the conservation community between a protectionist wing and those who argue that engaging with people is not only effective, but both morally right and legally obligatory. The Half-Earth debate in Oryx and elsewhere is an example of such a polarization. Half-Earth is a call for 50% of the planet to be protected by 2050, especially areas of high biodiversity value, which in many cases are where Indigenous peoples and local com- munities live. Büscher et al. (2017a,b) questioned whether the idea of turning half the Earth into a network of protected areas is feasible or just, and the condescending nature of the statement that ‘local communities should be actively involved in conservation efforts’ (Cafaro et al., 2017,p. 400). Following a series of articles debating the implications of the Half-Earth proposal for the rights of Indigenous peo- ples and local communities, the Half-Earth project has moved towards greater recognition of the contributions of Indigenous peoples and local communities to conservation.
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Oryx, 2021, 55(5), 641–642 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605321000946
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