| European
Tropical Forest Research Network |
Internet workshop
7 - 25 January 2002, and
policy seminar 21
May 2002
convened by the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford
| Izabella Koziell |
Karen Lawrence presented some extremely interesting perspectives from her work in the Philippines. I urge you to read the paper she posted on 'Participatory Biodiversity Conservation: A Philippines Experience' written in collaboration with Peter Walpole. This paper raises some critical points regarding the effects on biodiversity, and local people, of the hegemonies of decision-making within western biological science. They go as far to suggest that the soliciting and use of scientific information can sometimes serve to alienate people from biological diversity as information collection is being controlled from above. Local people then have to conform to the decisions arising from this information, which often leads, through a complex set of reactions, to the undermining of biodiversity itself. Probably because being controlled from above, it has not taken local realities into account, as it is driven by a different cultural perspective. An interesting paradox indeed, certainly worthy of further thought! That is, that biodiversity information can, under certain circumstances, serve to undermine the original purpose for which it is being sought.
They go on to highlight the fact that the way information has been classified has made it inaccessible to 'lay' communities and individuals. Undoubtedly complex knowledge does have its uses, especially in deeper scientific enquiry, such as for the development of pharmaceutical products, but how broadly useful can it be? They also raise concerns that new projects rarely learn the lessons of past information collection initiatives.
In her contribution to the workshop discussion, Karen Lawrence reflects on her experience from a four year participatory monitoring project in Mindanao, Philippines. She found that on training the villagers on how to do forest transects, the villagers had so much experience with logging that they could estimate the height and breadth of trees so accurately that they did not need any instruments. The exercise was useful for sharing experiences about the villagers' forest, logging and degradation and how it made them feel. She also describes the rattan survey activities, carried out primarily to enable villagers to gain a rattan license, i.e. with a very clear purpose. When classifying the different species they found that the villagers had used the same characters for classification as the professional botanists had! Furthermore they had documented 25, as compared to the 15 documented by botanists. It would be useful to have more information from Karen on how closely these characters correlated and how easy it was to cross-compare them. They had also wanted to link locally chosen hunting limits to faunal regeneration capacities, but ran out of time and money to conduct such a survey.
It is clear from Karen's description that the surveys that were carried out had a clear practical objective and benefit for the villagers. Interestingly she mentions that the donor was not keen to publish their experiences, and there seemed to be strong feelings of distrust within the donor institution for the reliability and quality of data coming from villagers and Filipino scientists. Such negative attitudes are obviously extremely detrimental to progress.
Douglas Sheil also provided some interesting additional perspectives on Theme 1 - values of biodiversity. He talks about species being valued for their role as consumable products, but also for their role as signifiers (e.g. certain species are indicators of fertile soil). There are also locational aspects and values associated with those - and the fact that some special sites can be linked with useful products, e.g. salt licks are good for hunting. Thus species and location values can be linked for extra added-value.
He also goes on to make a valid point about how access influences how people will value a resource. Access issues in East Kalimantan have caused much uncertainty and difficulty in interpreting values. People cannot say how important something is to them if they do not know whether or not they will be able to have access to it in a month or two. He suggests that statements of choices and preference should be built into a more complex view of 'real' choices, that can actually yield the desired benefits.
He also makes another interesting contribution based on his work in Kalimantan. They found that certain species that have use value will be assigned a high importance level, but if theses species are easily substitutable, then their importance might drop somewhat, as alternatives are available. Unique species, that are not substitutable, may then be given a higher importance level, even if they are not of direct use value, as there are no alternatives available. Within the Dayak communities this arises especially with ritual uses, where it is simply not possible to replace one species with another. What this implies is that certain taxa with relatively high importance may be found for different types of uses that may be considered both by us and communities as more marginal.