Mobile peoples and conservation

Guest editorial by Dawn Chatty

from Anthropology Today, Vol. 18, No. 4, June 2002, pp. 1-2
(c) Royal Anthropological Institute

In September, policy makers from around the world will gather at the United Nations Summit on Sustainable Development, bringing with them a huge amount of media attention to focus on what is seen by many as one of the most vital issues of our time. High on the agenda is concern about people’s impact on the natural environment. In the 20th century, most conservation efforts were based on romantic notions of pristine wilderness (Stevens 1997, Chatty and Colchester 2002). Hence people found in areas identified for protection were regularly removed, the assumption being that people destroy nature (Geisler 2002). For decades indigenous peoples have suffered land expropriation and outright expulsion at the hands of national and international agencies bent on establishing reserves and parklands to protect habitat and prevent species extinction. The failure of many of these conventional conservation approaches has led to a re-examination, in some quarters, of the forces which cause environmental damage (Brandon, Redford and Sanderson 1998). Questions have begun to be asked about some of the assumptions underlying the exclusion of people from protected areas (see, for example, Pimbert and Pretty 1995, Ghimire and Pimbert 1997, IIED 1994).

The Earth Summit of 1992 gave a prominent place to indigenous and traditional peoples and recognized their importance to any future strategies for safegaurding the environment. One need only look, for example, at Article 22 of the Rio Declaration, which explicitly notes that ‘indigenous peoples and their communities and other local communities have a vital role in environmental management and development because of their knowledge and traditional practices. States should recognize and duly support their identity, culture and interests and enable their effective participation in the achievement of sustainable development’ (International Alliance 1997). The Convention on Biological Diversity which was also finalized at the Earth Summit makes provisions relevant to indigenous peoples in its Articles 8j and 10c. More recently, in 1996, the Worldwide Fund for Nature International adopted a Statement of Principles on Indigenous Peoples and Conservation (WWF 1996), and in the same year the World Conservation Union (IUCN) adopted seven different resolutions on Indigenous Peoples (IUCN 1996). On paper, at least, conservationists are recognizing the important role of indigenous peoples in creating and maintaining many of the nature reserves which are now being ‘protected’. Their role in destroying these environments – long an argument for their dispossession – is now being challenged, with a call for empirical studies before drawing perhaps unfounded conclusions.

This enlightened focus, however, largely falls on settled peoples whose population density and accessibility makes advocacy and activism, on their behalf and often in collaboration with them, more feasible and media-friendly. For mobile people, things are different.

Throughout most of the 20th century, ‘nomadic peoples’ of the world faced enormous pressure to change their way of life and adapt to a more ‘modern’ and settled existence. During the first half of the 20th century an ambivalent attitude towards ‘nomads’ – based on suspicion and admiration – prevailed, and various efforts at private land registration and large-scale settlement schemes were instigated, with varying degrees of success. With the consolidation of state power and authority after the Second World War, however, many newly-created nations turned on their ‘nomadic’ peoples with the determined aim of settling them in one place.1 People who moved were regarded as a threat to the security of the settled. Their way of life was regarded as backward, a throwback to some imagined early evolutionary stage of human development. The international development efforts of more recent times which have been designed to force ‘nomadic’ peoples to modernize also largely failed, resulting in social dislocation, destroyed economies and political disempowerment. Indeed, the resulting disintegration of these once highly mobile communities has frequently created new problems for the nation-state. At best what emerged was a national policy of benign neglect.

Mobile people, inhabiting extensive and seasonal tracts of semi-arid savannah or tropical forests, largely continue to be ignored, or else find their traditional hunting, grazing or farming lands are still being confiscated, cordoned off and marked out as ‘nature reserves’ without consultation.2 It is the very fact of their mobility and need to move that acts against them on the national and international stage. In a world where land law is written by those of fixed abode and is defined by private property, not common property, it is difficult to make a case of land loss when the aggrieved party is not permanently situated on the contested site. Thus mobile peoples, be they hunters and gatherers, pastoralists or swidden farmers, have systematically been sidelined from the growing movement to recognize indigenous rights in conservation and biodiversity. Mobile peoples’ widespread distribution over vast tracts of land, their extremely low land-people ratios, and the distrust with which governments treat such groups have rendered them largely marginalized, if not invisible, and muted, if not disenfranchised and disempowered.

One step in the direction of specific recognition of the rights and contributions of mobile peoples in conservation and biodiversity was taken in Jordan this past April. A group of concerned professionals, including social and natural scientists from all regions of the world, met in the Wadi Dana Nature Reserve on 3-7 April 2002 to consider a comprehensive approach to mobile peoples and conservation. The conference participants, recognizing the imprecise character of the phrase ‘mobile peoples’ and its exclusionary nature, accepted the term as a starting point for discussion. Towards the close of the meeting they had agreed to clarify the term ‘mobile peoples’ to mean a subset of indigenous and traditional peoples whose livelihoods depend on extensive common property use of natural resources over an area, who use mobility as a management strategy for sustainable use and conservation, and who possess a distinctive cultural identity and natural resource management system. At the end of this five-day meeting, the conference agreed the following declaration:

The world faces unprecedented threats to the conservation and sustainable use of its biodiversity. At the same time, its cultural and linguistic diversity, which includes an immeasurable and irreplaceable range of knowledge and skills, is being lost at an alarming rate.
The linked pressures of human population dynamics, unsustainable consumption patterns, climate change and global and national economic forces threaten both the conservation of biological resources and the livelihoods of many indigenous and traditional peoples. In particular, mobile peoples now find themselves constrained by forces beyond their control, which put them at a special disadvantage.
Mobile peoples are discriminated against. Their rights, including rights of access to natural resources, are often denied and conventional conservation practices do not address their concerns adequately. These factors, together with the pace of global change, undermine their lifestyles, reduce their ability to live in balance with nature and threaten their very existence as distinct peoples.
Nonetheless, through their traditional resource use practices and culture-based respect for nature, many mobile peoples are still making a significant contribution to the maintenance of the earth’s ecosystems, species and genetic diversity – even though this often goes unrecognized. Thus the interests of mobile peoples and conservation converge, especially as they face a number of common challenges. There is therefore an urgent need to create a mutually reinforcing partnership between mobile peoples and those involved with conservation.

The participants at the Wadi Dana Conference have committed themselves to promoting conservation practices for mobile peoples based on the set of principles which has come to be known as the Dana Declaration (for the full text of the declaration see www.danadeclaration.org). As we approach the Rio plus 10 conference in Johannesburg and as the conservation world prepares for the World Parks Congress in Durban in 2003, it is timely that the Dana Declaration is taken on board. It serves to remind us that protecting the full cultural diversity of our planet, the settled and the mobile, in its continuous adaptation to its environment, is also part of safeguarding the broader biodiversity that we all seek to preserve.

Dawn Chatty is Senior Dulverton Fellow and Deputy Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford. Her research interests include pastoral nomadism and conservation, gender and development, health, illness and culture, and coping strategies of the young in prolonged conflict situations. Her email is dawn.chatty@qeh.ox.ac.uk.

1. For example, first Saudi Arabia and then its neighbours have attempted to settle their pastoral populations. Settlement schemes in Saudi Arabia date back to the 1920s (Chatty 1996). The Al-Artawiya settlement, for example, achieved a population of over 35,000 but was destroyed after the 1929 revolt of the Ikhwan. Later schemes financed by oil revenues and built at tremendous expense also failed (e.g. the Wadi al-Sarhan project, the King Faysal Settlement Project).
2. In parts of North and South America and in Southeast Asia, partnerships between conservationists and indigenous peoples’ NGOs are common. These challenge national and international perceptions of indigenous and traditional peoples’ roles in sustainable biodiversity and conservation. In other parts of the world, such as the Middle East and large parts of Africa, such partnerships do not exist and conservationists largely plan, and implement, conservation projects with little more than the passive participation of local peoples (see Chatty and Colchester 2002).

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