ABSTRACT
A passing bow to indigenous knowledge (IK) is a common courtesy in conservation policy in India today. An instrumental concern about promoting and harnessing IK is expressed in most policy documents, including those of Ecodevelopment, a World-Bank funded project that seeks to remove human pressure on the natural resources inside selected national parks and sanctuaries by creating alternative economic opportunities. Ecodevelopment has been initiated in the villages around the Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP) in the state of Himachal Pradesh in north-west India. From its very inception, the project has provoked fierce controversy between the Forest Department (FD: the state agency implementing the project) and local villagers over the meanings and motives around Ecodevelopment. Claims about knowledge figure centrally in this conflict-how ‘ecological degradation’ is determined or which management practices are superior-and are closely linked to claims over natural resources. In this debate, the notion of IK is used politically by local villagers and a non-governmental organization (NGO) working with them to naturalize and legitimize their claims to graze livestock and collect medicinal plants inside the park. However, villagers’ actual practices do not necessarily conform to the idealized notion of IK that they project, but in fact creatively use the opportunities opened up by changing institutional structures such as the market. The FD, on the other hand, acknowledges the existence and importance of IK, but reduces it to a single component, viz. ethnobotany. At the same time, the FD also imports ‘scientific experts’ as Ecodevelopment advisors whose research borrows heavily from IK and yet plucks it out of its context. Villagers as well as the state employ the notion of IK to push their varied agenda and, in the process, raise related questions about the ways in which we understand ‘tradition,’ ‘locality’ and the ‘indigenous’.1
