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Emerging theories of Indigenous environmental justice reframe environmental problems and solutions using Indigenous onto-epistemologies, emphasizing the agency of non-human relations and influence of colonialism. The California Indian Basketweavers’ Association (CIBA) embodies this paradigm in its work to expand access to gathering areas, revitalize cultural burning, and stop pesticide use. Through our different positionalities as CIBA members, California Indian basketweavers, and researchers, we construct a case study of Indigenous environmental justice that articulates environmental stewardship as intrinsically linked with cultural and spiritual practice. Through education, information sharing, relationship building, lobbying, and collective action among its membership and land management agencies, CIBA has expanded basketweavers’ access to safe and successful gathering. By sustaining millennia of tradition, CIBA builds Indigenous sovereignty and shifts California’s land management paradigm toward environmental justice and global survival.

This paper explores how indigenous people rely on traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as a means to adapt to climate change. We focus on the observation, interpretation, and adaptation of natural phenomena among farmers from Baojiatun in the karst depression of central Guizhou, where the Han people have settled for more than 600 yr. First, the farmers are culturally rooted in ethics of nature worship and ancestor reverence, forming a community that is sensitive to natural phenomena and governed by local rules and regulations. Second, TEK has a special use in that the indigenous people are not worried about climate change itself because they view their own knowledge system as sufficient to aid adaptation. Third, the properties of TEK are critical resources for socioecological resilience to the impacts of climate change, including a keen observation of phenological change, local indicators for recognizing these changes, and a willingness to abandon certain assumptions as needed in response to changes. This paper suggests that TEK plays an important role in socioecological resilience, because it encourages indigenous people's sensitivity to change and provides an adaptable knowledge system with a strong ecocentric view of nature that can support adjustments and that is flexible enough to accommodate the adjustments needed to respond to changes. The findings of this paper highlight the important role of TEK in fragile ecosystems under global climate change.

Shifting agriculture systems in the Colombian Amazon, locally known as chagras, have been traditionally managed by indigenous peoples following their traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). However, different socioeconomic drivers of change are affecting indigenous chagra TEK, resulting in changes in practices and land-use patterns. This study examines TEK transformations from 1970 to 2016 and their relation to rainforest management in the Ticuna indigenous resguardo of El Vergel (Leticia Municipality, Amazonas Department). It employs an ethnographic case study design that articulates quantitative data on land-use variables related to chagras and qualitative ethnographic data describing dimensions of TEK and its perceived transformations, including knowledge of the environment, practices and management systems, social institutions, and worldviews. Our findings reveal that TEK transformations entail changes in land-use, including size of production area, temporality of land-use, and cultivated diversity. This study contributes to a reinterpretation of TEK transformations and emphasizes the importance of the chagra as an adaptive system. The TEK transformations related to chagras imply a constant reattunement of relations that bind people and their environments. Rather than being frozen in an ethnographic past, people have responded to social and economic drivers to meet their current needs and aspirations. Likewise, understanding TEK transformations and their relation to changes in land-use practices provides relevant insights about social-ecological dynamics in the Amazon rainforest to navigate change and provide the basis for a discussion of how to enrich management decisions to move toward sustainability in tropical forests.

We chronicle a four-decades-long struggle that has been taking place in the Peruvian Amazon between indigenous groups, oil companies, and the state. We provide a broad overview of the strategies of the communities in the area, juxtaposing the outcomes of different negotiating strategies. In addition to documenting what is an especially important case of socio-environmental conflict in the Peruvian Amazon, we go beyond the dominant approach in the literature, which sees dialogue as inherently desirable and conflict as necessarily unwelcome, and describe the Achuar decision to engage in open conflict with the oil company as one that testifies to the existence of a conflict imperative. In other words, the overcoming of environmental injustice in certain circumstances requires various forms of direct action that take grievance and complaint to the level of open conflict. The corollary of this hypothesis is that dialogue is sometimes neither peaceful nor useful for affected communities. This calls for a rethinking of the boundaries between conflict and negotiation. In our chronicle, conflict itself was often the antecedent to a new round of dialogue and negotiation made possible by the presence of government officials purposively and urgently dispatched to the area. Echoing Clausewitz's famous dictum concerning the continuity between war and policy, indigenous decisions to occupy, blockade, and disrupt the working of oil operations might tentatively be understood as an attempt to continue negotiating with the state and corporations by using other tools they have at their disposal.

Recent studies have intended to quantify urban consumption and trade in Amazonian towns. However, little is still known about the different ways in which bushmeat is made available in urban areas, including commercial and noncommercial flows, and how those flows contribute to link forests to urban livelihoods. In this study we qualitatively describe the structure and functioning of bushmeat flows in terms of species, catchment area, stakeholders involved, and the motivations for their activity in the main towns of the Amazon trifrontier region between Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. We show that bushmeat trade to urban areas exists under an organized but invisible commodity chain providing a source of income to about 195 persons. Bushmeat is made available either directly from the hunter to the urban consumer, at the main market place, or in food stalls and restaurants. On the Colombian border, the trade is totally invisible, whereas in Peru and Brazil, bushmeat is sold in open markets despite regulations. The catchment area comprises the main rivers: up to Caballococha along the Amazon River, along the Atacuary River in Peru, along the Javari River between Peru and Brazil, and along the Loretoyacu and Amacayacu rivers in Colombia and in periurban forests. Although the trade is rather localized (no commercial flows to larger towns), international transborder trade is commonplace, disregarding Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora regulations. Bushmeat clients in urban areas are mainly nonindigenous or mestizos who can afford bushmeat as a luxury meal. Instead, indigenous people in urban areas do not access bushmeat through the market but rather through their social networks with whom they maintain noncommercial flows including immediate exchange and long-term exchange mechanisms. Although bushmeat is no longer consumed as a daily meal among urban and periurban indigenous families, it constitutes what could be called a “festival food,” referring to the use of food to express cultural values and origin. These results highlight the need to differentiate bushmeat trade and noncommercial flows of bushmeat in law enforcement activities. Indeed, although bushmeat trade is banned in all three countries, subsistence use is allowed. Bushmeat consumption contributes to urban subsistence when it is obtained as a gift, and this pattern is increasingly characteristic among mobile and multisited indigenous households in urban Amazon.

Biological resource monitoring systems are implemented in many countries and often depend on the participation of local people. It has been suggested that these systems empower local participants while promoting conservation. We reviewed three wildlife monitoring systems in indigenous lands and sustainable development reserves in Brazilian Amazonia and one in Namibian Caprivi conservancies, analyzing the strategies adopted and conditions that facilitated local empowerment, as well as potential impacts on conservation. This provided insights into potential avenues to strengthen empowerment outcomes of monitoring systems in Latin America and Africa. We assessed four dimensions of empowerment at individual and community scales: psychological, social, economic, and political. The conditions that facilitated local empowerment included the value of natural resources, rights to trade and manage resources, political organization of communities, and collaboration by stakeholders. The wide range of strategies to empower local people included intensifying local participation, linking them to local education, feeding information back to communities, purposefully selecting participants, paying for monitoring services, marketing monitored resources, and inserting local people into broader politics. Although communities were socially and politically empowered, the monitoring systems more often promoted individual empowerment. Marketing of natural resources promoted higher economic empowerment in conservancies in Namibia, whereas information dissemination was better in Brazil because of integrated education programs. We suggest that practitioners take advantage of local facilitating conditions to enhance the empowerment of communities, bearing in mind that increasing autonomy to make management decisions may not agree with international conservation goals. Our comparative analysis of cases in Latin America and Africa allows for a greater understanding of the relationships between resource monitoring systems, local empowerment, and conservation.

Joint management of protected areas is promoted in many countries around the world. It is considered a means to provide local communities, including indigenous people, with recognition of their cultural practices in the use and management of the natural resources within a protected area, while working together with governments to achieve conservation goals. However, implementation of effective joint management has often been difficult because capacities and expectations among partners differ. Here we explore the potential of using a participatory monitoring and evaluation approach as a means of not only agreeing among partners on the objectives of joint management but also of measuring progress toward those objectives. In particular, we first describe the process used to develop criteria and indicators for measuring joint management effectiveness of a protected area in the Northern Territory, Australia, involving the park's Aboriginal Traditional Owners, their legal representatives, government, and researchers. We then analyze the process of applying a participatory approach to developing indicators and its contribution to improving equity among the partners. We consider the effectiveness of a participatory process within the context of the relationships, capacities, skills, communication, and cross-cultural information sharing. We found that at the early stages of joint management, the partners mostly identify process indicators related to human and social capital assets. Cross-cultural engagement in the early stages of the monitoring and evaluation cycle is challenged by issues relating to communication, institutional and community capacities, representation, and flexibility in ways of working together while learning by doing. We conclude, however, that a participatory monitoring and evaluation approach in which partners agree equally on the identification of criteria and indicators to measure agreed management outcomes has the potential of improving equitable participation, decision making and working relationships, which in turn will lead to improved park management effectiveness and community outcomes.

Using a combination of traditional ecological knowledge and science to monitor populations can greatly assist co-management for sustainable customary wildlife harvests by indigenous peoples. Case studies from Canada and New Zealand emphasize that, although traditional monitoring methods may often be imprecise and qualitative, they are nevertheless valuable because they are based on observations over long time periods, incorporate large sample sizes, are inexpensive, invite the participation of harvesters as researchers, and sometimes incorporate subtle multivariate cross checks for environmental change. A few simple rules suggested by traditional knowledge may produce good management outcomes consistent with fuzzy logic thinking. Science can sometimes offer better tests of potential causes of population change by research on larger spatial scales, precise quantification, and evaluation of population change where no harvest occurs. However, science is expensive and may not always be trusted or welcomed by customary users of wildlife. Short scientific studies in which traditional monitoring methods are calibrated against population abundance could make it possible to mesh traditional ecological knowledge with scientific inferences of prey population dynamics. This paper analyzes the traditional monitoring techniques of catch per unit effort and body condition. Combining scientific and traditional monitoring methods can not only build partnership and community consensus, but also, and more importantly, allow indigenous wildlife users to critically evaluate scientific predictions on their own terms and test sustainability using their own forms of adaptive management.

The methods used to value tropical forests have the potential to influence how policy makers and others perceive forest lands. A small number of valuation studies achieve real impact. These are generally succinct accounts supporting a specific perception. However, such reports risk being used to justify inappropriate actions. The end users of such results are rarely those who produced them, and misunderstanding of key details is a concern. One defense is to ensure that shortcomings and common pitfalls are better appreciated by the ultimate users. In this article, we aim to reduce such risks by discussing how valuation studies should be assessed and challenged by users. We consider two concise, high-profile valuation papers here, by Peters and colleagues and by Godoy and colleagues. We illustrate a series of questions that should be asked, not only about the two papers, but also about any landscape valuation study. We highlight the many challenges faced in valuing tropical forest lands and in presenting and using the results sensibly, and we offer some suggestions for improvement. Attention to complexities and clarity about uncertainties are required. Forest valuation must be pursued and promoted with caution.