Local environmental knowledge

18 LOCAL ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE Leah S. Horowitz

Knowing the local environment Over the past four decades, research has highlighted ways that local communities’, and particularly indigenous peoples’, close, historically deep relationships with their surroundings have often led to an intimate knowledge of ecosystem components and interactions. In the 1970s and 1980s, these understandings began to fall under the labels of “indigenous knowledge,” “indigenous technical knowledge,” “traditional ecological knowledge,” or, more broadly, “local environmental knowledge,” often abbreviated, respectively, IK, ITK, TEK, and LEK. (In the interest of inclusivity, this chapter will use LEK.) This has been defined as “a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment” (Berkes 2012: 7). Such knowledge encompasses awareness of locallyavailable natural resources such as foods, medicines, timber, and firewood – not only what is present, but how to harvest and prepare it, and equally importantly, how to avoid overharvesting. This knowledge often extends beyond the technical expertise appreciated by Western scientists, to encompass the location of taboo places and the spirits who reside there, and how these must be approached or placated (e.g. Scales 2012). Anthropologists and geographers have observed and documented such ecological understandings as exhibited by a wide range of communities around the world, describing customary marine resource management in Asia and the Pacific (Hviding 1996; Johannes 1981; Ruddle and Johannes 1985) and Central America (Nietschmann 1973), as well as land-based “ethnoecologies” of communities throughout South America (Posey 2002), Asia (Ellen et al. 2000), Australia (Rose 1992; Rumsey and Weiner 2001), Africa (Anderson and Grove 1987), North America (Gordon and Krech 2012; Menzies 2006), and even Europe (von Glasenapp and Thornton 2011). Researchers have also often borne witness to the gradual loss of this knowledge as it ceases being transmitted intergenerationally, or loses accuracy or relevance in the face of large-scale environmental change. Nonetheless, they note that despite serious threats to their existence, these systems are often highly resilient and adaptable (Gómez-Baggethun and Reyes-García 2013). It is well beyond the scope of this chapter to summarize, synthesize, or even provide an exhaustive list of the vast body of research on LEK, which has been thoroughly covered 235

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elsewhere (e.g. Berkes 2012; Ellen et al. 2000). Instead, I will examine how political ecology has gone beyond the cataloguing of indigenous or local environmental knowledges, to examine the reciprocal influence of broader politico-economic, socio-cultural, and biophysical forces on local people’s engagements with nearby ecosystems. I will focus on the following key contributions, all of which explicitly or implicitly examine the political uses of knowledge and/ or perceptions of knowledge. In the first section below, I briefly trace the history of political ecologists’ interest in LEK and outline some debates that arose early in this history but still resonate today. In particular, political ecologists began cautioning in the early 1990s against an overly-romanticized and ultimately constraining view of local, particularly indigenous, knowledge. These insights continue to inform contemporary debates about LEK, scholar-activism, and indigenous/nonindigenous alliances. Next, I discuss political ecology’s contributions to our understandings of ways that both the physical presence of outsiders and the influence of their belief systems have affected local people’s relationships to their natural resources and surroundings. More dramatically, an increasingly global economic system has opened remote areas to resource extraction on a large scale, vastly changing local environments. In the next section, therefore, I examine political ecology’s insights into tensions between large-scale development and LEK, and the micropolitical tensions that also arise as local knowledge systems articulate with global forces. However, political ecology does not simply analyze threats to LEK; from its inception, political ecology has had an explicitly emancipatory agenda, aimed at freeing Third World (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Bryant and Bailey 1997) and then also First World (McCarthy 2002, 2005) “land managers” from misplaced blame for environmental problems. In the subsequent section, I explore how research on LEK has helped to further that agenda by demonstrating that rather than causing environmental degradation through ignorance, poor rural people have often been forced into destructive practices through politico-economic marginalization. Political ecologists have also shown that in many other cases, rather than resulting in the overuse or degradation of natural resources, LEK has contributed to their longterm management. As I explain in the following section, this research has been instrumental in enabling and promoting co-management initiatives, in which local, experience-based knowledge is combined with information gathered through scientific methods. However, conservationist paradigms are beginning to swing back toward “fences and fines” approaches. In part, this is due to the failure of co-management efforts that were based on the flawed assumption that local communities shared conservationists’ conceptual framings of local environments, as I discuss next. Meanwhile, however, as I note in the final section before the conclusion, despite sometimes stark differences in local and outsider worldviews, many conservationists create simplistic portrayals of “traditional ecological wisdom,” which, as political ecology has shown, can be strategically useful in forging alliances but may also have negative repercussions for both conservationists and indigenous groups. I conclude with some suggestions for future research.

Early debates about the value of LEK Political ecologists have long been interested in communities’ understandings and management of their natural resources and environments. Indeed, political ecology itself emerged from a critique of earlier theories of “cultural ecology,” which had developed rich insights into the role of culture in local resource management but had viewed indigenous societies as closed systems in which cultural practices served as homeostatic mechanisms, maintaining stable human– environment relationships (e.g. Rappaport 1984 [1968]). In contrast, political ecologists 236

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recognized the need to examine the ever-tightening linkages between small-scale land-use practices, inevitably steeped in local knowledge, and an increasingly global political economy. For instance, Michael Watts’s classic tome, Silent Violence (1983), showed that famines in Nigeria did not result simply from climatic abnormalities or growing populations but were sociopolitically created as capitalist modes of commodity production disrupted villagers’ longstanding land management practices. A few years later, Piers Blaikie made a related argument in his pioneering book, The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries (1985; see also Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Blaikie et al. 1980). Drawing upon fieldwork in Morocco, Zambia, and India, but mainly Nepal, he showed that small farmers did not undermine their natural resource base through destructive farming techniques due to ignorance, or even by choice, but because they were marginalized by national- and global-scale politico-economic forces. Although highly politicized and controversial, these insights became extremely influential within policy-making circles in Nepal and elsewhere, ultimately changing how decision-makers approached resource conservation (Walker 2006). If peasant farmers were not destructive through ignorance, a logical corollary was that they might in fact possess useful information about local conditions, and viable strategies for coping with them. Drawing upon his studies of West African agricultural systems, Paul Richards (1985) argued that local farmers possessed valuable knowledge that Western scientists needed to incorporate, not dismiss as backward, within rural development projects. Along similar lines, Susanna Hecht (1990) argued that Kayapó farmers in the Amazon demonstrated soil management practices much better suited to local ecological conditions than techniques imported from temperate regions. Further studies revealed that women, previously dismissed within development projects as ignorant, actually possessed crucial farming knowledge not shared by men (Gururani 2002; Momsen 2007). However, the purported superiority of LEK soon became a subject of debate within political ecology. Blaikie now pointed to the pitfalls of a “neo-populist developmentalism” that “reifies and idealizes indigenous knowledge” (1996: 84). He argued for a return to “basic and simple” research (1996: 85) that focused on ways that environmental knowledge and agendas at an international level could be, rather than dismissed, instead translated into greater human rights and environmental justice at the local scale. A few years earlier, Tony Bebbington (1990) had argued that the marginalization that indigenous Latin American farmers faced had resulted in levels of ecological degradation with which their knowledge could no longer cope, and they welcomed technical assistance. Indeed, contrary to academics’ framings, Andean federations viewed “Green Revolution” technologies not as antithetical to traditional practices but rather as part of an “indigenous” strategy that helped farmers remain in their communities, thereby allowing for the maintenance of cultural practices and identities that were otherwise threatened with loss (Bebbington 1993). LEK did not, therefore, need to be conceptualized as fundamentally distinct from “Western” knowledge systems. Rather than touting LEK as an inherently virtuous, static body of knowledge, researchers might more constructively work toward enabling local resource users to play a role in deciding what forms of knowledge were most useful to them, and how.

Intercultural contact Thus, a large part of political ecologists’ analysis of LEK was to dismantle unhelpful dichotomies between “local” and “scientific” knowledge, and to acknowledge LEK’s dynamism. Indeed, political ecologists showed that even “indigenous” knowledge systems have always already been evolving through intercultural communication, sometimes over centuries (Agrawal 1995; 237

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Berkes and Berkes 2009; Ellen 1999; Nygren 1999). For instance, Michael Dove (2002) examined how indigenous farmers in Borneo readily adopted the cultivation of rubber, transplanted from the Amazon by European colonists, and used their knowledge of local conditions to innovate appropriate cultivation techniques. Similarly, smallholder farmers in Ethiopia adapt their practices through experimentation, communication with or observations of other farmers, and acquisition of external knowledge via extension packages (Dixon 2005). While contact with members of other cultures clearly stimulates LEK’s evolution, it can also lead to its loss, yet also – paradoxically – provides opportunities for its maintenance. Greater intercultural contact, through globalization processes, is a double-edged sword for traditional knowledge systems, although mostly a negative influence. Because environmental knowledge is transmitted and maintained intraculturally (within a culturally-distinct group), the lifting of physical and politico-economic barriers to interactions between members of different cultures is reducing the transmission of locally-based ecological understandings. This decline is accentuated where a stigma is attached to the use of certain natural resources, such as “traditional” medicines. Conversely, however, cross-cultural exchange can instead help to preserve ecological knowledge. For instance, school garden programs in urban areas of South Africa have helped to maintain phytomedicinal knowledge (Philander et al. 2011). Ethnobotanical recordings, through bioprospecting projects, can also help to preserve and valorize knowledge of medically useful plants. However, these activities are highly controversial, often seen as “bioimperialism” (Moran et al. 2001). Indeed, the process of recording local knowledge for people outside the community, whether pharmaceutical companies or academic researchers, is infused with power relations. Providers of traditional ecological information may not always be adequately recognized or compensated, and may even be disempowered in the process, as has occurred in Madagascar where the international pharmaceutical industry has marginalized local scientists and resource users (Neimark 2012). However, local groups may be equally disempowered by outsiders’ attempts to protect them. Anthropologists Brent and Elois Ann Berlin describe an ethnobotanical research project in Chiapas, Mexico that obtained communities’ prior and informed consent and planned to distribute any benefits equally among communities, but that was shut down by NGOs categorically opposed to any form of bioprospecting (Berlin and Berlin 2004). Meanwhile, once these resources are discovered by outsiders, their commodification may result in overharvesting for urban markets and concomitant inaccessibility for those who have long relied upon them. This has been the case, for example, with herbal remedies that are essential for poor rural communities’ health care in India, now being depleted and overpriced as a fashionable commodity for wealthy urban consumers (Shiva 2007). LEK encompasses more than information about particular natural resources and their usefulness for humans. Spiritual ecological knowledge, such as the identities of taboo places, animals, and plants, is being eroded not only by increasing market accessibility but also by the spread of other belief systems such as Christianity. This has serious implications for resource management, as much of this knowledge refers to restrictions on harvesting resources or developing wild spaces (Anoliefo et al. 2003; Robbins 1995). Ultimately, the lifting of such restrictions has helped to facilitate the over-exploitation of natural resources, such as increased harvesting of wild animals and plants in Madagascar (Jones et al. 2008), and has limited resistance to the siting of industrial infrastructure in formerly off-limits areas, such as the construction of a nickel refinery on ancestral lands in New Caledonia (Horowitz 2008a). Intracommunity tensions may result as some community members seek to embrace economic development while others express concerns about angering ancestral spirits. Large-scale development projects in Australia, for example, often provoke arguments within Aboriginal 238

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communities about whether or not sites are sacred (Trigger and Robinson 2001). At a proposed mine site near a Jawoyn Aboriginal community, senior custodians of the area insisted that mining would risk angering a powerful ancestor while other community members, who hoped for local economic development through the mining project, claimed that they had been taught that the site in question held no spiritual danger (Ross 2001). Similarly, a proposal to build a bridge met with resistance from a group of Ngarrindjeri women who claimed that they possessed “secret and gender-restricted” knowledge that the bridge would destroy women’s reproductive powers (Merlan 2001: 255–256). They were opposed by other Ngarrindjeri women who claimed that they had never received such information. Such concerns may reflect micropolitical struggles. For instance, a shrimpfarming project in Madagascar failed when the local ruler, fearing a loss of his personal influence, claimed that local spirits opposed the project and then banished the aquaculture company after a series of bizarre accidents (Gezon 1999).

Environmental change Meanwhile, ecologically-based cultural knowledge, such as ancestral myths inscribed in the landscape, may form a crucial component of indigenous groups’ cultural heritage and identity (e.g. Graham et al. 2000; Horowitz 2001; Moore 1996, 1998; Rumsey and Weiner 2001). It is also a key element of the “lifeworld,” a shared “stock of knowledge” that gives meaning to daily existence (Habermas 1987: 125). However, this cultural knowledge is challenged, and lifeworlds may be “colonized” (Habermas 1987; see also Crossley 2002), when large-scale development projects threaten to destroy landscape features and archaeological sites. A desire to protect their cultural heritage may play a role in motivating indigenous groups to resist this development, from South America (Bebbington et al. 2008) to Australia (O’Faircheallaigh 2008). Development projects also conflict with LEK when scientists and local residents make very different predictions of environmental impacts. Each group’s evaluations are based on their own “criteria of credibility” (Cash et al. 2003: 8088; see also Garvin 2001): While scientific “experts” collect data within a restricted timeframe, constructing “order” through normative methods (see Latour and Woolgar 1986), local residents may rely on observations collected incidentally to other activities, over several generations, that have been transmitted orally by respected elders (e.g. Birkenholtz 2008). This can lead citizens to predict, for example, the devastation of marine ecosystems from industrial pollution, contradicting industry scientists’ assurance that currents will carry it away (Horowitz 2010). When scientists choose to ignore knowledge based in local experience, residents may feel that their identity is threatened by “ignorant but arrogant experts” (Wynne 1992: 295). At a global scale, industry – at every stage along the commodity chain, from natural resource extraction to the consumption of manufactured products – is transforming the planet in startling ways. A dramatic example is climate change, which is resulting in significant alterations to local ecological conditions, forcing communities to adapt their long-standing knowledge systems and resource management practices. Arctic residents have experienced particularly rapid and drastic change. While these groups are known for their resilience and adaptive capacity, the plethora of extreme events in recent times has reduced opportunities for young people to safely go out and learn from their elders. It has also resulted in possibly “maladaptive” strategies which may function in the short term but may not be appropriate responses to ongoing and unpredictable environmental changes, and could potentially increase communities’ vulnerability over the longer term (Ford et al. 2013). 239

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Exculpating the victim Political ecologists have also examined ways that scientists’ and local residents’ different environmental understandings inform conflicts over not only development, as discussed above, but also the conservation of natural resources and ecosystems. From colonial times to the present, official discourses have blamed local people for ecological degradation, attributing this degradation to allegedly harmful local practices based in ignorance or attachment to irrational traditions (Adams 1990; Coombes et al. 2012; Fairhead and Leach 1996; Scales 2012). These accusations have been used to justify harsh conservation measures: Following a conservation strategy based on models developed in Europe and America, authorities set aside large areas as national parks or forest reserves, making them off-limits to local people who had depended on them for subsistence (Brockington 2002; West et al. 2006). This has led to various forms of community-led resistance to the officially protected areas (e.g. Brenner and Job 2012; Orlove 2002), including illegal activities such as grazing cattle within reserve boundaries in Burma (Bryant 1996) or burning grasslands and woodlands in Madagascar (Kull 2002). Following on Blaikie’s ground-breaking work (discussed above), other researchers have shown that not only could many environmentally-degrading activities ultimately be traced back to political and economic marginalization, as he and his colleagues had demonstrated; conversely, under the right conditions, local residents could rely upon their ecological knowledge to manage resources for long-term viability. In some cases, they had done so for millennia. This flew in the face of previous assumptions – popularized in the 1960s by the term “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968), but expounded since the 1830s (Lloyd 1832) – that resources held in common would inevitably be overexploited unless they were either privatized or placed under state control. In contrast, political ecologists showed that close-knit communities with intimate understandings of local ecosystems could devise rules for resource use and informally, but highly effectively, monitor each other’s behavior (e.g. McCay and Acheson 1987). Elinor Ostrom and colleagues identified several “design principles” for successful community-based management of “common pool resources” (Ostrom 1990; Ostrom et al. 1994, 2002). In documenting such management strategies based in local knowledge and customary rights, researchers offered an alternative to state control or privatization. They argued that where traditional resource management systems existed, there was potential for external institutions to help strengthen these systems, rather than weaken them through authoritarian control. This research coincided with growing disapproval of the human rights implications of coercive conservation measures, along with calls for “participatory” conservation that would benefit local communities (Adams and Hulme 2001).

Co-management In light of these analyses and concerns, protected area management paradigms began, in the 1980s and 1990s, to move away from a “fences and fines” approach and toward co-management, also called community-based conservation (CBC) or community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), which entails the integration of local knowledge and practices with scientific data (see Agrawal and Gibson 1999). Co-management initiatives may be run by governments or non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and political ecologists have examined many such projects (e.g. Evans et al. 2011; Horowitz 1998, 2008b; Maliao et al. 2009; Stocks et al. 2007; Turner 1999; Worboys et al. 2001). In some cases, co-management processes have resulted in greater community empowerment and the strengthening of local rights to land or sea and natural resources, in conjunction with meaningful community 240

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participation in management decisions. In Maine, for instance, lobster fishermen have long managed their fishery through informal rules involving territorial boundaries and trap limits (Acheson 1988). Despite deep-seated disagreements over data quality and management strategies, these fishermen have been able to work with scientists and government regulators to create a successful co-management system (Acheson 2003). In other cases, however, official recognition of traditional resource management may actually be used as a means of increasing state control, disempowering local users. In Peru, for example, legislators formally recognized customary water use-rights in an attempt to boost the legitimacy of legal frameworks. However, this resulted in an over-simplified, rigid regulatory structure that in fact excluded many traditional practices, creating friction with local communities (Boelens and Seemann 2014). Meanwhile, co-management paradigms have been challenged in recent times as conservationists have been disillusioned by the disappointing results of many well-intentioned projects (Brosius and Russell 2003; Hutton et al. 2005). Often, these results have been due to inadequate legislative frameworks and/or poor planning on the part of conservation practitioners (Mayaka 2002). In some cases, conservationists have misunderstood local people’s aspirations, which may involve strong desires for autonomous resource control and/or empowerment (Campbell and Vainio-Mattila 2003). In other cases, conservationists have relied overly on market incentives for conservation, which may backfire dramatically. In The Gambia, for instance, a WWF project designed to encourage the conservation of local mangroves by commercializing women’s traditional oyster gathering has resulted in a need for cooking fuel to preserve the oysters for sale, which in turn has placed severe pressure on mangrove forests (Crow and Carney 2013). Nonetheless, the perceived failures of co-management projects have resulted not in more careful and appropriate project design but rather in an ideological shift back toward a protectionist, “fortress” conservation model, despite the objections of many social scientists (Dressler et al. 2010).

Different ecological ontologies As political ecologists have shown, the success of co-management projects relies on the preexistence of strong local institutions with rules for resource use that coincide, or at least overlap, with the project organizers’ conservation objectives, even if the reasons behind the restrictions are based in different worldviews (Berkes 2004). Often, however, local residents have ecological ontologies that differ so greatly from those of conservationists as to proscribe effective collaboration. Community members may not view ecosystems and their components as possessing intrinsic, aesthetic, and/or recreational values that must be protected from any exploitation, as conservationists may insist, but rather as resources “to be respected and used responsibly” in accordance with locally-developed management practices and/or ancestral taboos (Scales 2012: 74; see also Campbell and Vainio-Mattila 2003). When resources are abundant, local residents may not see any reason to conserve them; even when resources grow scarce, however, ecological knowledge has sometimes led to overexploitation rather than conservation (Alvard 1993; Dore 1997; Headland 1997). This has particularly been the case where markets for these natural resources exist and are rapidly expanding (Cinner et al. 2012; Godoy et al. 2005). Meanwhile, in adapting their knowledge systems to changing environments, local people may grow to depend upon the altered conditions that conservationists view as environmental hazards. For instance, the Jawoyn, an Australian Aboriginal group, have come to view Kakadu National Park’s water buffalo as an important food source and the horses living there as pets, in contrast to government officials’ views of these animal populations as comprised of feral species that need to be reduced (Robinson et al. 2004). 241

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Alternatively, local communities may share conservationists’ visions of wild species and spaces as valuable and vulnerable, yet may have more pressing concerns about the direct or indirect threats that this very wildlife poses to themselves, their neighbors, and their children. These concerns can lead community members to oppose conservation efforts that they perceive as creating dangers for humans. Local residents may perceive these threats as stemming directly from protected wildlife, as reflected in a fear of large carnivores expressed by neighbors of Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park (Kaltenborn et al. 2006). Alternatively, community members may view the conservation efforts themselves as constituting a major threat to human well-being, as exemplified by New Jersey residents’ opposition to environmentalists’ attempts to preserve an urban wetland, which would prevent construction of a truck bypass that townspeople saw as the only way to protect themselves from the pollution and risk of accidents that the trucks represented (Horowitz 2013).

Strategic alliances As discussed above, local (particularly indigenous) communities’ understandings of the value of natural spaces and resources, and how they should be managed, often differ greatly from those of Northern conservationists. Nonetheless, non-indigenous activists may feel powerless to combat environmentally destructive development without an alliance with indigenous groups, which confers the legitimacy that these groups represent. In some cases, this strategy may work to mutual advantage. In Montana and South Dakota, for instance, Native Americans and white ranchers were able to overcome long-standing quarrels over grazing lands and water rights in order to band together in opposition to exogenous threats including coal and uranium mines and bombing ranges (Grossman 2003). The success of these struggles was partly attributable to the Native Americans’ treaty rights but also to public sympathy for their arguments that these lands were sacred to them. In Cochabamaba, Bolivia, too, indigenous farmers were able to draw upon perceptions of their legitimacy, based in customary water management systems, in joining with urban activists to force the government to reverse its decision to privatize drinking water and sewerage services (Perreault 2008). In other cases, however, environmentalists may be deeply disappointed to discover that their indigenous allies have more multifaceted concerns, including community members’ material well-being, which can ultimately work against environmentalist efforts. In New Caledonia, for example, urban grassroots environmentalists tried to “translate” an indigenous protest group as being, like the environmentalists, completely opposed to a multinational mining project, and were stunned when the group’s leaders secretly signed a “pact” with the mining company that allowed the project to proceed in exchange for benefits for the community (Horowitz 2012b). In their efforts at forging such strategic alliances, environmentalists often portray indigenous people as exhibiting a conservation ethic that corresponds to Euro-American sensibilities. Simplifying, exotifying, and misinterpreting ethnographic accounts, environmentalists attempt to transform indigenous ecological “‘knowledge’ into wisdom, spiritual insight, or some other such quality” (Brosius 1997: 54). As “indigeneity” has become an internationally-recognized source of political and moral legitimacy (Merlan 2009), these discourses have gained traction with international institutions, civil society, and the popular press. Political ecologists have discussed the deceptive nature of such Western environmentalist depictions of “traditional ecological wisdom” (e.g. Baviskar 1995; Krech 1999). They have also recognized the need to be careful with what they write, however, as indigenous groups themselves have often adopted academic, activist, or official interpretations of their own knowledge systems and have reflected these interpretations back, in support of political aims such as greater autonomy, authority, 242

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rights, or territorial claims (Berkes 2004). In Guinea, for instance, hunter “brotherhoods” have been able to mobilize conservation organizations’ and the government’s simplistic definitions of “indigenous” hunters’ knowledge and social position, in order to secure greater control over “outside” gun hunters (Leach and Fairhead 2002). An excess of “ethnographic scrutiny” could, then, become “reactionary,” contrary to “emancipatory” goals (Brosius 1999: 288). Nonetheless, valorizing their own indigenous ecological knowledge through a Western lens can also involve pitfalls for indigenous groups. Communities seeking to improve their living standards through economic development may cease to be considered “indigenous,” and may thereby lose the popular support associated with this concept (Conklin and Graham 1995; Li 2002; Neumann 1997). An example of this risk comes from Papua New Guinea, where indigenous communities sought not to close down the highly polluting Ok Tedi mine but rather to claim compensation for its damages and to ensure its continued operation, albeit with additional environmental safeguards, as the mine provided them with economic benefits. This led to accusations that community members were “greedy rather than green” (Kirsch 2007: 314).

Conclusions and agendas for future research In summary, political ecology has expanded our understandings of LEK systems by analyzing them not as localized, isolated, fixed sets of knowledge but as components of wider networks, both influenced by, and influencing, broader political, economic, and social forces such as the global spread of market economies, industrial development, and Euro-American belief systems. For instance, political ecologists have examined how politico-economic circumstances can marginalize small farmers and force them into unsustainable practices, but researchers have also uncovered ways that, under the right conditions, local knowledge has contributed to natural resource management. Such work has helped pave the way for co-management paradigms; however, scholars have also analyzed the often contentious relationships between conservationists’ and local residents’ environmental understandings when these paradigms are put into action. Political ecologists have also examined how “traditional ecological knowledge” has been used strategically, by both community members and environmentalists, to counter industrial development projects – or has been turned on its head through assertions that communities seeking higher living standards are no longer “indigenous.” Much scope remains ahead for political ecology to contribute to our understandings of LEK systems and their evolutions in contemporary politico-economic contexts. For example, more relevant than ever is the question of whether and how, despite differences with Western environmentalist views and accepted scientific methodologies, LEK can be mobilized in support of goals that benefit both ecosystems (at a global and/or local scale) and human societies. Efforts to set aside and protect areas of forest, particularly tropical, have been given a boost in recent times by UN- and World Bank-backed initiatives to “Reduce [carbon] Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation” (REDD+). These projects have sometimes involved the forcible displacement of communities and other abuses by corrupt governments eager for financial compensation (e.g. Beymer-Farris and Bassett 2012). Further research could help expose the broader politico-economic context of such human rights violations, but could also bring international attention to traditional resource management systems and explore the possibility of strengthening rather than weakening these. Another avenue for further research is the question of whether and how indigenous groups can still mobilize LEK, and their relationships to local ecosystems, as a source of legitimacy in the eyes of an increasingly cynical international community. On a related note, scholars could explore the ways LEK (both indigenous and non-indigenous) may become both an asset and a liability within environmental 243

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protest movements (see Horowitz 2011, 2012a). They might also examine ways that LEK, as a knowledge system but also as a component of cultural identity, informs relationships between stakeholder groups with different backgrounds and aims who are nonetheless collaborating toward overlapping environmental goals. Clearly, LEK continues to play an important role in contemporary environmental debates, and further research could productively elucidate its many dimensions, contexts, and relationships.

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