Editors --- "Sustaining Eden: Indigenous Community Wildlife Management in Australia - Digest" [1999] AUIndigLawRpr 52; (1999) 4(4) Australian Indigenous Law Reporter 132

Sustaining Eden: Indigenous Community Wildlife Management in Australia

International Institute for Environment and Development

London, 1999

The International Institute for Environment and Development is conducting an international study of key issues in community wildlife management. The Evaluating Eden project extends work commenced in a previous study, Whose Eden? to a wide range of countries in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Australia.

Australia’s national overview, by Jocelyn Davies, Karen Higginbottom, Denise Noack, Helen Ross and Elspeth Young, has just been released under the title Sustaining Eden: Indigenous Community Wildlife Management in Australia. It is based on a thorough literature review and 26 case studies including commercial uses of species, management of subsistence harvesting, community-based research and monitoring, a re-introduction project, planning and management, and feral animal control. It also describes the institutional arrangements supporting much of the indigenous wildlife management in Australia, reviewing examples of funding programs, joint-managed national parks, indigenous protected areas, land councils and community-based land management organisations, and community rangers.^[1]

The report provides an overview of the ecological, social and legal context for indigenous wildlife management, and of the types of activity taking place – from high to limited degrees of indigenous control. The key issues reviewed canvas culture, community development and country; the role and contributions of government; collaboration between scientists and indigenous managers; protecting intellectual property; and commercial use of wildlife. The authors argue that indigenous wildlife management needs to be considered from two sustainability perspectives: the ecological aspect of survival of species, and the indigenous cultural, social and economic interests in wildlife. The report recommends that Australian governments embrace a holistic concept of wildlife management, incorporating it is part of general environmental management and at the same time linking it closely with indigenous culture.

IIED hopes that a second stage of the international project will include field case studies, and that indigenous Australian community projects can be included.^[2] Excerpts on co-management National Parks and Indigenous Protected Areas are reproduced here.^[3]

3.4 Co-management of national parks

In Australia co-managed national parks, which Aboriginal people manage with conservation agencies as equal partners, are almost always referred to under the term ‘joint management’. Here we adopt the internationally accepted term of co-management. In general, although co-management has been widely discussed and negotiations have been in place, it has only been practically implemented in a few places. Uluru-Kata Tjuta and Kakadu National Parks, both in the Northern Territory, are the most widely cited Australian ‘models’. In these parks Aboriginal people own the land in freehold title and have leased the land to the Commonwealth government conservation agency for 99 years for management as a national park. The Aboriginal landowners are in a majority on the Board of Management that is responsible for care, control and management of the park. In both parks, policy and planning are the responsibility of the Board of Management while day to day management is undertaken by conservation agency staff and contractors who include some local indigenous people.

Co-management arrangements have been agreed or are said to be under negotiation in approximately 30 other protected areas (see Box 3.7 for summary) (De Lacy 1994). However, outside the Northern Territory, progress in concluding agreements has been very limited. Aboriginal freehold ownership of national parks, a key element in the agreements in Uluru and Kakadu, is not provided for in the legislation of most other States/Territories. This absence of enabling legislation, both for recognition of indigenous land ownership and also for co-management, shows a lack of commitment on the part of State/Territory governments. This barrier can, with goodwill on both sides, be at least partially overcome. Witjira National Park, South Australia, for example, lacks enabling legislation but is pursing co-management through an arrangement which leases the park to an indigenous organisation representing traditional owners. Traditional owners aim to undertake day to day management of the park themselves under the terms of the lease and from bases at homelands that are being established in the park. While this contrasts with Uluru and Kakadu, where day to day management is undertaken by the government conservation agency, overall management is still under the direction of a Board of Management on which traditional owners have majority representation. These arrangements show how lateral thinking and negotiation can lead to co-management structures which are potentially strong for Aboriginal people without specific enabling legislation (Davies and Young 1996; Woenne-Green et al 1994). In the future it is possible that recognition of native title over some national parks will provide a new basis for co-management negotiations elsewhere.

Co-management, with Aboriginal and government laws running side by side, represents a reconciliation of indigenous and mainstream conservation aspirations for sustainable management of country. It can forge a new and distinctive type of land use – a cultural national park that is appropriate to the spiritual connections of indigenous people to the land and to the development of a distinctively Australian conservation ethic (De Lacy 1992a). It can also, as in Uluru and Kakadu, return significant benefits to Aboriginal traditional owners. In these parks people have gained economically, through lease payments, employment and enterprise development; socially, in terms of empowerment through active participation in decision making; and culturally, through the education of park visitors in traditional cultural meanings and precepts. Indigenous people and scientists have also begun to collaborate effectively in wildlife research and management and in the re-establishment of traditional fire management practices (ANPWS 1991; Reid et al 1993).

On the other hand, while co-management has been beneficial, it is not necessarily, in indigenous eyes, the preferred approach. It essentially represents the imposition of a ‘top-down’ preservationist framework for natural resource management on the rights and aspirations of indigenous people. There should be 'no illusion that Aboriginal people sought co-management or had any alternative' (Aurukun Community and CYLC 1992: 22). For indigenous people it is invariably a political relationship adopted as a necessary strategy to increase their control over those parts of their traditional country where unencumbered ownership, and the opportunity to implement community based management, cannot now be realised because of the existence of national parks. Under co-management, indigenous people’s rights and aspirations for future management of their country is constrained by the existence of established uses and management practices which can be contrary to their interests. For example, while heavy tourist use of both Uluru and Kakadu, and mining in the Kakadu region, return an income to indigenous people, they also inhibit privacy and the protection of significant places. The existence of Aboriginal land and communities in the parks can also inhibit conservation agencies from carrying out effective programs in areas such as feral animal control. Thus, far from being a natural alliance of stakeholders based on common goals, co-management is far better characterised as an arena of ‘competing interests’ (Ketley 1994; Woenne-Green et al 1994).

Indigenous people’s hunting practices and the protection of wildlife in a park exemplify one of these ‘competing interests’. Even if government regulation condones indigenous hunting, the activity may have to be conducted in secrecy because of fears of adverse reactions from park visitors and public safety concerns. This detracts from the openly expressed enjoyment which indigenous people gain from hunting in their own country. Similar constraints apply to indigenous people’s living areas in parks, ownership of livestock and domestic animals, and other aspects of everyday resource use, such as collection of firewood and materials for arts and crafts production. In practice co-management requires continual attention to maintaining and enhancing cross cultural communication, and patience and time for shared decision making on these kinds of contentious issues. These requirements can be difficult to achieve where political pressures or ecologically threatening processes require quick decisions to be made. In arenas such as fire management, indigenous practices may be adopted by conservation agencies in ways that differ from their cultural basis, risking both inappropriate application and the disempowerment of traditional knowledge holders. Similarly in the area of visitor interpretation, appropriation of cultural knowledge to satisfy the curiosity of tourists is a real risk unless conservation agencies are fully committed to this approach. Further grounds for conflict include competition between conservation agencies and indigenous landowners for income from tourists; and the high proportion of management budgets that are commonly allocated to management of park visitors compared to those available for wildlife research and management, or indigenous community development.

Imbalance in power relations between conservation agencies and indigenous traditional owners means that achieving an equal co-management partnership is very difficult. It relies on an on-going process of consultation and negotiation between Aboriginal people and conservation agency senior staff (Lawrence 1996). Committed, sensitive and culturally aware players in the conservation agencies (Weaver 1984; De Lacy 1994) are needed if the institutions, goals and assumptions imposed by the top-down preservationist framework for park management are to be reshaped. Dispute resolution mechanisms and realistic and imaginative budgetary strategies are also normally required.

In some countries, where protected areas have relatively large resident populations who depend solely on these resources for their livelihood, it has been suggested that co-management can save the government money (see for example Kothari et al 1997). This argument has also been put forward by Australian government agencies who assume that employing local people will save costs for travel and relocation of agency staff and hence help to stretch tight conservation budgets (Davies 1991b). This view is somewhat naive. In reality co-managed parks are expensive, even simply for the routine processes of consultation and negotiation between the co-managers. Indigenous community development costs, although rarely funded from government conservation budgets, can add considerably to this because indigenous people may have to be resettled in country where they have not lived for some time. Indigenous co-managers have high wage employment expectations but, in contrast to government conservation managers, their capacity for and/or interest in working alone and unsupervised in remote locations may be limited. Even before co-management is established, 'substantial investments of time, financial resources and human resources' are always needed to develop co-management agreements (Borrini-Feyerabend 1996; 27). Since the current budgets of most state/territory government managed parks are considerably less than those of Uluru and Kakadu, these factors mean that the prospects for successful establishment of further joint managed parks in Australia are uncertain. For example, the total budget for Witjira National Park is approximately equal to that available for running Uluru Board of Management meetings alone (Woenne-Green et al 1994; Davies 1995). Not surprisingly these budgetary constraints undermine the effectiveness of putting equitable decision making into practice.

Wildlife conservation could be achieved far more cheaply without co-management. However co-management also overtly supports indigenous empowerment, equity and social justice (Lawrence 1996), goals which are essential to sustainable development. Unfortunately government conservation agencies engaged in co-management negotiations rarely see these goals as part of their responsibility and hence consign them to the margins of the process.

3.5 Indigenous protected areas

The newly established Indigenous Protected Areas (IPA) program, an initiative of the Commonwealth Government, provides further support for indigenous community wildlife management (CWM) and co-management of national parks. This program stemmed from recognition that if Australia were to implement its National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia’s Biological Diversity (Australia 1996), through establishing a national reserve system that comprehensively and adequately represents Australia’s biodiversity, indigenous landowners would have to be fully involved. Because of the extent of indigenous land holdings, protected areas in some biogeographical regions of Australia will have to be on indigenous owned land (Smyth et al 1996; Thackway et al 1996; Thackway and Brunckhurst 1998). Box 3.8 outlines characteristics of the IPA program.

The IPA program marks a breakthrough in Australian indigenous affairs policy. For the first time government funding targets participatory processes of conservation planning managed by indigenous organisations. Some indigenous organisations have previously used their imagination in marking funds from other government programs for these purposes. But they have faced problems in matching program guidelines and their own objectives. Indigenous people find the IPA program attractive because, by formally designating their land as a protected area, they may be able to attract secure on-going budgets for sustainable land management (Smyth and Sutherland 1996).

Box 3.8 The Indigenous Protected Areas Program

The Indigenous Protected Areas (IPA) program has two aims:

1. To encourage indigenous people to designate portions of their land that have significant conservation values as protected areas and manage those areas in accordance with IUCN guidelines.

Potential protected areas on indigenous land are generally expected to match IUCN criteria for Category IV protected areas - Managed Resource Protection Area (Smyth and Sutherland 1996). As indigenous people have recognised this linkage to international standards is an advantage compared to State/Territory national park legislation which has previously often been a mechanism of their dispossession from land.

2. To encourage State/Territory governments to give better consideration to indigenous rights and interests in existing national parks and nature reserves.

This objective, included at the request of indigenous people involved in the program’s development, raises the issue of reciprocity – indigenous people who lack recognised land rights should still have the right to use the IPA program to help them to plan and negotiate co-management of existing national parks. Indigenous people’s priorities for the IPA program primarily stress self determination in decisions about conservation management on their country. A national workshop in April 1997 defined an IPA as follows:

An Indigenous Protected Area is governed by the continuing responsibilities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to care for and protect lands and waters for present and future generations. (Environment Australia 1997; 47)

According to this definition IPAs should be managed for 'cultural biodiversity and conservation', permitting customary sustainable use and sharing of benefits; and they may include existing government managed protected areas for which co-management arrangements are concluded.

In 1996 the IPA program funded 12 pilot projects promoted by indigenous organisations. These assessed IPA feasibility in different regions of Australia. Although people involved in the pilot projects report very positive outcomes, few indigenous groups fully accepted that establishment of an IPA would be appropriate for environmental management on their country. However, in several projects the IPA concept was enthusiastically accepted by local people because they felt it would help to protect culturally significant places (Environment Australia 1997). This shows the prime importance of cultural values in indigenous perspectives on the environment. Indigenous empowerment through participation in negotiations about co-management for national parks was another positive outcome. The first IPA, in semi-arid South Australia, was formally added to the national register of Australia's protected areas in 1998 following agreement by indigenous landowners and governments about an initial five year management program. These initial achievements need to be built upon and granted, as Gillespie et al (1998) have recently stressed, more secure long term funding.

Through the IPA program indigenous people are being encouraged to contribute to conservation at a national and international scale. IPA consultations have drawn together indigenous people who have had land returned to them (and are thus in a position to manage some land for conservation) and landless people (who must necessarily negotiate with government about co-management of national parks) in an atmosphere of solidarity. However these broad objectives of the IPA program are hard to realise given that indigenous people’s interests in country are focused at local and regional scales. Initial consultations on applying the IPA concept to dugong conservation in the Torres Strait, for example, suggest that people who do not see that their activities pose any local threat to sustainability are unlikely to agree to restrict those activities in the interests of regional, national or international conservation goals. This attitude would almost certainly be paralleled by non-indigenous private landowners.

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3.7 Education and training

Like many other rural landowners indigenous people learn best through practical experience (Coombs et al 1983; Liddle 1996), as this allows them to understand how useful new ideas are for solving immediate problems. Community development approaches, such as the Central Land Council’s land assessment program, are most appropriate. However it is hard for indigenous people to obtain funding for such programs through government departments which support indigenous community management or wildlife and environmental management. This is partly because indigenous education and training policy focuses strongly on accredited individual courses rather than community based efforts, a result of indigenous demand for skills training to be formally recognised and therefore more useful for obtaining employment.

Curriculum development for accredited training courses can face problems. Because it is linked to national competency standards the significance of local knowledge and custom can be overlooked. As De Lacy (1992b) points out, questions such as ‘who teaches traditional indigenous knowledge’ and ‘is the same course appropriate for men and women, young people and mature age students’ are vital for indigenous peoples’ education about country and its management. Such questions can only be properly answered at the local scale. Further issues confronting curriculum developers are protection of intellectual property rights in indigenous knowledge; and recognition of the prior learning of indigenous people through the teachings of their elders.

The focus on accredited training has nevertheless succeeded in making formal tertiary courses in wildlife and resource management more accessible to indigenous people. Important examples include, at a community level, training courses for people employed as ‘community rangers’; and, at more formal tertiary level, the development of new courses targeted to the needs of indigenous land and resource managers.

Kowanyama’s model for self-management of land and natural resources led to the first community ranger course developed through Cairns College of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in north Queensland. This course aimed to develop skills both in traditional Aboriginal cultural and natural resource management and in scientifically based management processes (Hill 1992). Similar courses have subsequently been developed elsewhere (eg Batchelor College and South Australia TAFE) and planning to develop nationally accredited curriculum began in 1995. Community rangers play major roles in many of the wildlife management activities described in this report. State government agencies have also supported indigenous training in specific wildlife management techniques, such as feral animal control.

Few indigenous students attend conventional university courses in scientific approaches to wildlife management. This reflects the low numbers of indigenous people completing secondary school, and consequent lack of grounding in maths and science. Universities are responding to this situation by offering foundation courses in science for indigenous students (eg University of Adelaide) and by offering new courses targeted to Aboriginal needs for understanding both traditional and scientific approaches. For example both Charles Sturt University in rural New South Wales (De Lacy 1992b) and Northern Territory University (NTU) offer courses in environmental management which provide several entry and exit points depending on students’ prior learning and individual needs. The new NTU Resource Management Program focuses particularly on the requirements of indigenous resource managers in northern Australia. The course aims to equip indigenous people to play a leadership role in sustainable long term management of land and sea resources, at both community and regional scales (Langton 1997).

Non-indigenous lack of understanding of the significance of wildlife and wildlife management to indigenous people hinders public support for indigenous CWM. The process of reconciliation between non-indigenous and indigenous Australians, which commenced in 1991 as a bi-partisan initiative of the Commonwealth government, has made non-indigenous people more aware of and sensitive to indigenous cultural issues, including relationships to country. However issues concerning wildlife use and management have had no specific attention in the reconciliation process.

References

Aurukun Community and Cape York Land Council 1992. Aboriginal land and natural resource management on Cape York peninsula., Submission to the Resource Assessment Commission Coastal Zone Inquiry, Submission no 292, microfiche, unpublished.

Australia 1996. National Strategy for the Conservation of Austalia's Biodiversity. Canberra, Commonwealth Department of Environment, Sport and Territories.
Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service 1991. Uluru (Ayers Rock-Mount Olga) National Park Plan of Management. Canberra, Australian Government Publishing Service.

Borrini-Feyerabend, G. 1996. Collaborative Management of protected areas: Tailoring the approach to the context. Gland (Switzerland), International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN).

Coombs, H. C., M. M. Brandl and W. E. Snowdon 1983. A certain heritage: programs for and by Aboriginal families in Australia. Canberra., Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University.

Davies, J. 1991b. Guidelines for joint management: Report to the South Australian Parks and Wildlife Service (SANPWS). Adelaide, SANPWS.

Davies, J. 1995. Appropriate Planning for Aboriginal Self Determination. PhD Thesis. Department of Geography and Oceanography. Canberra, University College, University of New South Wales.

De Lacy, T. 1992a. The evolution of a truly Australian national park. in Aboriginal Involvement in Parks and Protected Areas: Papers presented to a conference organised by the Johnston Centre of Parks, Recreation and Heritage at Charles Sturt University, Albury, New South Wales 22-24 July 1991. J. Birckhead, T. De Lacy and L. Smith, Eds. Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press: 283.

De Lacy 1992b. Towards an Aboriginal land management curriculum. in Aboriginal involvement in parks and protected areas. J. Birckhead, T. De Lacy and L. and Smith, Eds. Canberra, Panther Publishing and Printing: 287-295.

De Lacy, T. 1994. The Uluru/Kakadu Model - Anangu Tjukurrpa. 50,000 years of Aboriginal law and land management changing the concept of national parks in Australia. Society and Natural Resources 7: 479-498.

Environment Australia 1997. Draft record of the 2nd meeting of the working group on Indigenosu Protected Areas, Alice Springs, 21-24 April 1997. Canberra, Environment Australia.

Gillespie, D., P. Cooke and J. Taylor. 1998. Improving the capacity of indigenous people to contribute to the conservation of biodiversity in Australia. Canberra, Report commissioned by Environment Australia for the Biological Diversity Advisory Council.

Hill, R. 1992. Models for Aboriginal involvement in resource management on Cape York. in Aboriginal Involvement in Parks and Protected Areas. J. Birckhead, T. De Lacy and L. Smith, Eds. Canberra, Aboriginal Studies Press: 267-274.

Ketley, H. 1994. Cultural diversity versus biodiversity. Adelaide Law Review 16: 99-160.
Kothari, A., R. V. Anuradha and N. Pathak 1997. Community based conservation: Issues and prospects. Regional Workshop on Community Based Conservation: Policy and Practice, New Delhi, India, 9-11 February, Indian Institute of Public Administration New Delhi India.

Langton, M. 1997. Estate of Mind. N. I. W. G. o. N. Title. Online, accessed 9 Jul. 1997: http://www.faira.org.au/niwg/estate.html.

Lawrence, D. 1996. Managing parks / managing country: joint management of Aboriginal owned protected areas in Australia. Canberra, Parliamentary Research Service, Research Paper No 2 1996/7.

Liddle, L. 1996. Communicating scientific information to Aboriginal land managers. Masters thesis. National Centre for Development Studies. Canberra, Australian National University.

Reid, J. R., J. A. Kerle and S. R. Morton 1993. Uluru Fauna - The Distribution and Abundance of Vertebrate Fauna of Uluru (Ayers Rock-Mount Olga) National Park, N.T. Canberra, Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service.

Smyth, D. and J. Sutherland 1996. Indigenous Protected Areas: conservation partnerships with indigenous landholders. Canberra, Indigenous Protected Areas Unit, Biodiversity Group, Environment Australia, Department of Environment, Sports and Territories.

Thackway, R., S. Szabo and D. Smyth 1996. Indigenous Protected Areas: a new concept in biodiversity conservation. in Biodiversity: Broadening the Debate 4. R. Longmore, Ed. Canberra, Australian Nature Conservation Agency: 18-34.

Thackway, R. and D. Brunckhorst. 1998. Alternative futures for indingeous cultural and natural areas in Australia's rangelands. Australian Journal of Environmental Management 5: 169-181.
Weaver, S. M. 1984. The role of Aboriginals in the management of Cobourg and Kakadu National Parks, Northern Territory, Australia. Darwin, Unpublished progress report given at the North Australia Research Unit, July 30, 1984.

Woenne-Green, S., R. Johnston, R. Sultan and A. Wallis 1994. Competing Interests: Aboriginal Participation in National Parks and Conservation Reserves in Australia - A review, Australian Conservation Foundation: 408.

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^[1] The full details of these case studies, too detailed for inclusion in the report, are available at http://www.waite.adelaide.edu.au/AME/jdavies/studies.html.

^[2] For further information, contact Jocelyn Davies, Faculty of Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, Roseworthy Campus, University of Adelaide, Roseworthy SA 5371. Phone [phone], fax [phone], email [e-mail].

^[3] The report is available by mail order from IIED, for 12 pounds fifty pence plus post and packing of 40% (airmail) or 25% (surface). Contact: The Bookshop Manager, IIED, 3, Endsleigh Street, London, WC1H 0DD Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail]