ABSTRACT
Despite the increasing enfranchisement of indigenous groups and local people, in general, in environmental conservation, their traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and local ecological knowledge (LEK) are very rarely incorporated within the management and protection of avifauna (Gilchrist et al, 2005) (promising examples from New Zealand and the Arctic are discussed later in this chapter, but they do not constitute a trend or movement; see also Hunn et al, 2003). The reason for this appears to lie in Western science’s failure to accept the parallel authority of non-Western knowledge systems within conservation, even while conservation itself is increasingly becoming an endeavour favoured and even controlled by local people rather than something only imposed from the top down. The hypothetico-deductive model that is employed in the ecological and biological studies that inform wildlife management and other types of environmental conservation involves rigorous gathering and testing of data and is designed to be replicable. Traditional and local knowledge ‘systems’ are often not ‘systematic’ in the modern Western sense, and frequently involve unprovable assertions, anecdotal information and other ‘unscientific’ components that may or may not be correct. Uncertainty about how to deal with non-scientific data pervades academic discussions (e.g. Brook and McLachlan, 2005; Gilchrist and Mallory, 2007). In sum, there exists great sensitivity to the need for the recording and analysing of traditional and local ecological knowledge, but just as great uncertainty about what to do with it. In addition, the issue of knowledge ownership is centrally important to the debates on how to incorporate non-scientific knowledge into conservation.
