2.3 Sustainability Science
2.3.3 Indigenous people and indigenous knowledge in environmental planning
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Figure 2.3: The sustainable livelihood framework (Glavovic and Boonzaier, 2007: 3).
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their legal status, retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions.
(Dove, 2006: 191).
Indigenous cultures and knowledge systems have been virtually ignored by planning theory and practice, in spite of the increasing willingness of indigenous peoples to engage in the holistic and integrative research and planning (Hardy and Patterson, 2012: 75). Locals want to know what scientific advances are being made in all spheres of science, including environmental, and furthermore, they want to heard, to undertand and to be understood, however their avenues are limited (IDS, 2006: 1). Indigenous peoples live in challenging environments and engage in complex negotiations to access their rights, yet research on their social mobilization often stereotypes them as victims of environmental management (Coombes et al., 2011: 810). The use of indigenous knowledge has been seen by many as an alternative way of promoting development in poor rural communities in many parts of the world (Briggs, 2005: 2). In an explicit effort to counter the dominant development discourse, indigenous knowledge scholars argued that indigenous peoples possess unique systems of knowledge that can serve as the basis for more successful development interventions (Dove, 2006: 191). Further interest by scholars into indigenous knowledge centres on the purpose of improving the scientific contributions to earth’s sustainable future.
In this regard, there is the desire to avoid, for example, government officials making science-based decisions over resource management while ignoring highly relevant indigenous knowledge as such decisions can have devastating consequences (Aikenhead and Ogawa, 2007: 541). Interest in this concept gained momentum so fast that in 1996 the World Bank declared its own commitment to indigenous knowledge by committing itself to becoming the knowledge bank (Dove, 2006: 195). The IDS argues that science, policy and technology developments prove culturally unacceptable, or tend to miss key opportunities that emerge from the local, context-specific conditions in which people live. A focus on the overall growth or health of a society may also miss the particular vulnerabilities of its very poorest or most marginalised members and their particular technology needs (IDS, 2006: 2). Similar to the concept of indignity, indigenous knowledge soon became the subject of a wide range of critique (Dove, 2006: 195). Dove (2006: 195) states that when the origins of knowledge can be revealed, the label of indigenous knowledge often becomes more questionable. Dove (2006: 196) goes on to explain that much of the interest in indigenous knowledge has been focused on natural resources and the environment, which was reflected in the emergence of the concept of indigenous environmental
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knowledge. This concept to a great extent question the historical blame placed on indigenous peoples for the degradation of their environments (Dove, 2006: 194). Aikenhead and Ogawa, (2007: 552) state that:
Indigenous scholars discovered that Indigenous knowledge is far more than the binary opposite of western knowledge. As a concept, Indigenous knowledge benchmarks the limitations of Eurocentric theory, its methodology, evidence, and conclusions, reconceptualises the resilience and self-reliance of Indigenous peoples, and underscores the importance of their own philosophies, heritages, and educational processes.
Indigenous knowledge fills the ethical and knowledge gaps in Eurocentric education, research, and scholarship.
(Aikenhead and Ogawa, 2007: 552).
To understand and appreciate indigenous knowledge systems, Aikenhead and Ogawa (2007: 552) urge that one views the system with heightened sensitivity, uncluttered by previous notions of the empirical thinking applied with Eurocentric worldviews. The ‘‘depth of indigenous knowledge systems’’ is testament to its content validity. Any knowledge system that has succeeded for such a long time must have content validity and the evidence lies in time plus survival (Aikenhead and Ogawa, 2007: 563).
Battiste and Henderson, 2000 (cited in Aikenhead and Ogawa, 2007: 565) summarise indigenous knowledge systems as such:
Indigenous peoples regard all products of the human mind and heart as interrelated within Indigenous knowledge. They assert that all knowledge flows from the same source:
the relationships between a global flux that needs to be renewed, the people’s kinship with other living creatures that share the land, and the people’s kinship with the spirit world.
(Aikenhead and Ogawa, 2007: 565).
In the Australian case, indigenous societies suffered massive depopulation through frontier violence as well as widespread territorial dispossession and dislocation, however, this is also true, for indigenous societies in other parts of the “new world,” where colonial and state formation have had profound consequences for first peoples (Lane, 2003: 364) – such as in the case of South Africa. The concept of indigenous knowledge is faulted in favour of the mixed products of modernity, and the idea of indigenous environmental knowledge and conservation is intensely disputed (Dove, 2006: 191).
Indigenous Australians are now said to represent a “fourth world,” which refers to an indigenous cultural
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minority in a state over which they exercise little political control (Lane, 2003: 364). Lane (2003: 364) states that in recent decades, the postcolonial period, indigenous peoples residing in post settler societies such as Australia have made consistently powerful claims for natural resource control. These issues took centre stage in Australian politics in the early 2000s (Lane, 2003: 364). The participation of civil society, according to Lane (2003: 360) is said to act as check on state power, ensure the utilization of indigenous knowledge, and ensure that planning processes are more responsive and democratic. It is argued that the direct engagement of citizens and non-governmental associations enables the incorporation of indigenous knowledge which in turn can be considered a central determinant of successful project planning (Lane, 2003: 62). However, Dove (2006: 194) argues that one of the risks that stems from the attention given to indigenous people is that some areas and situations in the rural areas are privileged while others are overlooked, thereby limiting the field within which coalitions could be formed and local agendas identified and supported. These risks are particularly great for people who move about, which reflects the importance of place in conceptions of indigenous knowledge (Dove, 2006: 196).
Similar to the South African case, the often violent history of contact between blacks and whites in Australia helped cement a distinctive indigenous geography in which multiracial populations are concentrated on reserves in remote areas and in landscapes that were unpalatable for European consumption (Lane, 2003: 62). Subordination of indigenous land rights took place in two main ways.
Firstly, African ‘reserves’ were created, at first as a way of containing resistance to dispossession, and later as reservoirs of cheap labour for the emerging (Saruchera, 2004: 140). (Lane (2003: 369) goes on to elucidate that the exclusion of indigenous peoples from a national community based environmental management program demonstrates the malevolent effect of differential power relations within civil society at the local and regional levels and the potential for decentralized planning to exacerbate rather than alleviate inequity. The South African case is depicted in Figure 2.4. Spatial fragmentation is still perpetuated 17 years into democracy (Osman et al., undated: 2). The figure shows that areas designated for white citizens of South Africa surrounded the Central Business District (CBD) buffered by empty space or highways. Outside of these buffers were location townships and then on the outskirts were self- governing homelands, completely isolated from urbanisation.
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Figure 2.4: Apartheid legacy: spatial engineering through policy (Osman et al., undated: 2).