Transforming Conservation: A briefing series from FPP and partners
“If you want to work with us to protect our forests and lands you must understand us and adapt yourself to our ways of working and living.” - Tim Emini, Baka activist from Cameroon.
Tim Emini’s comment sums up what needs to change in the world of biodiversity conservation. For far too long the dominant voice in conservation has tended to be European or North American and the product of formal education and a culture that is to a large extent in denial about the damage it has done to the planet.
Tim is putting the case for turning conservation on its head – for starting from the place of knowledge occupied by the indigenous peoples and communities who have a deep connection with the lands and living things that they have cohabited with for many generations.
Many of our partners and the communities we work with are suffering from the consequences of – and, in most cases, still battling against – being forced out of their homes to make way for “conservation” while simultaneously asserting their own roles and contributions to the protection and sustainable use of biodiversity.
Batwa people from the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, (who are long-term partners of FPP), were kicked off their lands more than 40 years ago without any say in what happened to the land, and without any form of compensation. Today, they are forced to live in awful conditions away from their ancestral lands and have experienced terrible human rights abuses.
On a visit by an FPP staff member last year, a group of women described the abuse they had received from official park guards, including rape, and another woman explained, “What makes us angry is the injustice at the base of this conflict. The politicians are not showing good faith”.
The experience of the Batwa is mirrored all over the tropical forest regions, including the ongoing impacts of historic land injustices in Kenya faced by the Ogiek and Sengwer; the creation of new Parks that threaten to exclude people in Liberia, and; the Kichwa people’s struggle to regain control of their lands in Peru, among many others. As a Kichwa leader, Isidro, from Peru, explains: “The State has created the Park, so that we can be dispossessed, and now we are suffering the consequences all around the Park”.
In response to this and many other cases, FPP has launched a series of briefings titled “Transforming Conservation: from conflict to justice”, that challenge this exclusionary model of conservation and offer ways that indigenous peoples and other communities with strong ties to their lands can lead on caring for those lands. These briefings call attention to both the damage caused by inappropriate policy and to progressive opportunities to restore and support alternatives.
We hope that they will contribute to the debate around rights-based, community and people-centred conservation and will offer practical ways forward.
Transforming Conservation briefing series
- Issue 1: Transforming Conservation.
- Issue 2: Using ‘security issues’ to seize community lands for ‘conservation’.
- Issue 3: Critical Next Step in the Decolonisation of Land Relations: Restitution of Protected Areas to Indigenous Communities.
- Issue 4: Understanding gender-based violence in the context of conservation
- Issue 5: The legal basis for rights-based conservation in Liberia
Over the coming months, we are launching several others in this series, and we welcome other contributions to the series, either from communities who are working to protect their lands, from people working in conservation organisations and campaigners who are trying to make changes, and from researchers in this field.
To suggest an issue for future briefings, or contact us about any aspect of this series, do get in touch with us at: info@forestpeoples.org
Overview
- Resource Type:
- News
- Publication date:
- 21 March 2023
- Programmes:
- Conservation and human rights Territorial Governance Culture and Knowledge