ABSTRACT
In Chapter 8, attention focused upon the concepts of partnerships and stakeholders. The main implication of that chapter was the advantages from a participatory approach in resource and environmental management. Such an approach recognizes that professionally trained experts can usually learn and benefit from the experiential knowledge of people who live and work in an area. Such knowledge has been called traditional, indigenous or local, to differentiate it from knowledge based upon science or formal study. In this chapter, some of the characteristics of what will be called local knowledge systems are reviewed. Then, consideration is given to the method of participatory local appraisal, a method increasingly being used to analyse local understanding. Section 9.2 focuses on co-management, an approach that explicitly seeks to incorporate local and scientific understanding, and that often results in a re-allocation of authority for management. Section 9.3 provides some examples of integration of local knowledge into resource and environmental management situations. Scientific and local knowledge
Modern scientific knowledge, with its accompanying world view of humans as being apart from and above the natural world has been extraordinarily successful in furthering human understanding and manipulation of simpler systems. However, neither this world view nor scientific knowledge have been particularly successful when confronted with complex ecological systems. These complex systems vary greatly on spatial and temporal scales rendering the generalizations that positivistic science has come up with of little value in furnishing practical prescriptions for sustainable resource use. Science-based societies have tended to overuse and simplify such complex ecological systems, resulting in a whole series of problems of resource exhaustion and environmental degradation.
It is in this context that the knowledge of indigenous societies accumulated over historical time, is of significance. The view of humans as a part of the natural world and a belief system stressing respect for the rest of the natural world is of value for evolving sustainable relations with the natural-resource base.
Source: Gadgil, Berkes and Folke, 1993: 151.