ABSTRACT
There has been a remarkable growth of international interest in traditional ecological knowledge, and more broadly in indigenous knowledge since the early 1990s. This trend is reflected in the growth and diversification of the scholarly literature. Indigenous knowledge has been transformed from an esoteric idea in WCED (1987) into a concept taken seriously enough to be mainstreamed in two large international initiatives that ended in 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA 2005; Capistrano et al. 2005; Reid et al. 2006) and the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA 2005). It is significant that the predecessors of these two projects, both products of the 1990s, did not have an indigenous knowledge component (Miller and Erickson 2006). The growth of the indigenous knowledge literature has been accompanied by the differentiation of indigenous knowledge into a range of areas, from ethnobotany (an already established field) to, for example, indigenous land use studies that in turn shows its own diversified literature from Central America, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Canada (Chapter 2).
