This review examines the social, economic, and political effects of environmental conservation projects as they are manifested in protected areas. We pay special attention to people living in and displaced from protected areas, analyze the worldwide growth of protected areas over the past 20 years, and offer suggestions for future research trajectories in anthropology. We examine protected areas as a way of seeing, understanding, and producing nature (environment) and culture (society) and as a way of attempting to manage and control the relationship between the two. We focus on social, economic, scientific, and political changes in places where there are protected areas and in the urban centers that control these areas. We also examine violence, conflict, power relations, and governmentality as they are connected to the processes of protection. Finally, we examine discourse and its effects and argue that anthropology needs to move beyond the current examinations of language and power to attend to the ways in which protected areas produce space, place, and peoples.

/pdf/parks-and-peoples-the-social-impact-of-protected-areas-3d3id7yn6g.pdf

Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas

/pdf/new-perspectives-in-the-study-of-mesoamerican-primates-360cwdssue.pdf

New Perspectives in the Study of Mesoamerican Primates

The ongoing debate over indigenous claims to intellectual and cultural property reveals a series of indigenous strategies of mobilization that both appropriate from and work against the logic of the market. Of particular significance in this regard are the various indigenous strategies used in contemporary pharmaceutical bioprospecting activities to address claims to traditional medical knowledge as cultural property. This article presents field data on a controversial ethnopharmaceutical project among the Aguaruna of Perus high forest and offers a comparative analysis of the outcomes with attention to several other cases in and beyond South America. In particular, questions are raised about the forms of legitimating authority in the burgeoning international indigenous movement, the role of NGOs, researchers, bureaucracies, and corporations in this process, and the dilemmas that emerge from the politicization and privatization of indigenous culture and identity.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/381047

Indigenous People Incorporated

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) lies at the heart of biodiversity conservation initiatives. It offers opportunities to address global issues at the national level through locally grown solutions and measures. This article reviews the national challenges and opportunities in meeting requirements of the CBD by analysing twenty Third National Reports (TNRs), covering five different CBD regional clusters from the three global economic groups. While there is a plethora of challenges, the predominant ones discussed in this study include: institutional and capacity, knowledge and accessible information, economic policy and financial resources, cooperation and stakeholder involvement, and mainstreaming and integration of biodiversity. The underlying problem is that limited capacity in developing countries and transition economies undermines conservation initiatives. Lack of capacity in science, coordination, administration, legislation, and monitoring are barriers to on-ground implementation of biodiversity programmes. Opportunities to overcome these challenges embrace use of knowledge products, information-sharing mechanisms, participatory platforms, educational programmes, multi-level governance, and policy coherence. Innovative market-based instruments are also being trialled in various countries, which seek to offer incentives to local communities. The article concludes that conservation measures should be supported by multiple sectors and secure high level political support. Political, economical, and legislative sectors are more likely to show interest in CBD implementation and use it as a tool for managing biodiversity when they know the Convention processes and perceive it as a benefit. Modest investments in capacity building and training, and engaging different sectors in setting priorities would have a significant pay-off.

Convention on Biological Diversity: a review of national challenges and opportunities for implementation

Restoration ecology is a science focusing on using ecological principles to improve ecosystems degraded usually through habitat destruction (Bradshaw & Chadwik 1980, Handel et al. 1994). Successful ecological restoration depends on negotiation and understanding of different stakeholders, including the daily users of the resources, government institutions that will regulate resource use and the research community working in the area.

Integrative ecological restoration and the involvement of local communities in the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Valley, Mexico

Mesoamerica (Southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama) is a culturally diverse region considered a conservation priority due to its biotic richness and high endemism. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) sets out obligations and objectives for national parties to cope with biodiversity reduction, and encourages these national parties to develop measures to conserve and manage biodiversity. This paper presents trends in Mesoamerican countries in the implementation of the CBD, specifically in relation to the general measures for conservation and sustainable use (Article 6), identification and monitoring (Article 7), and in situ conservation (Article 8) derived from examination of reports from the CBD National Reports unit, questionnaires to national focal points, and interviews in the field. In general, there was increased effort toward CBD implementation and related issues. The scientific capacity, political stability, and accessibility to resources in each country, however, influenced the rate at which capacity was being built and the relative importance governments afforded to each of the CBD articles. Lack of resources or institutional limitations are identified as major impediments to fulfilling obligations. The CBD is also poorly known among actors in civil society and at several levels of administration. Overall, Costa Rica and Mexico are exceptions in the region with regard to inventory and monitoring, and the efforts to incorporate biodiversity into broader intersectoral policies. However, the measures required to ensure the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from biodiversity are poorly developed, or not developed at all, in the region. It is pivotal that, since Mesoamerica is one of the poorest regions in the world, any attempt to conserve biodiversity in the region must include sustainable use and equity.

/pdf/implementation-of-the-convention-on-biological-diversity-in-43jbtejq53.pdf

Mariel Aguilar-Støen

Papers

Implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Mesoamerica: environmental and developmental perspectives