A caution on ‘soft-eviction’ strategies toward indigenous peoples in protected areas

By Rebecca Adamson, International Funders for Indigenous Peoples

At the World Congress on Protected Areas in Durban, South Africa, September 8 through 17, Richard Leakey aggressively maintained that “the entire issue” of protected areas “has been politicized by a vociferous minority that refuses to join the mainstream.”

The legendary paleontologist turned ambassadorial game warden for Kenya sent his message loud and clear: park and wildlife conservation must come before the interests of indigenous peoples in occupying their own homelands “because these parks belong to the world.” It’s a theme that goes back to the beginnings of national parks––to protect special areas for the benefit of present and future generations, they must be placed off-limits to human exploitation.

The issue of displacing indigenous peoples from protected areas is under heavy debate within the contemporary international conservationist movement––not at all black and white as Leakey quite forcefully implied. Accordingly, as the conference went on, indigenous community representatives came forward to contest Leakey’s statements. To them, Leakey’s views are colonialist and serve to make enemies of indigenous communities; instead of regarding them as what they are––co-owners with a strong stake in coexistence between threatened plant and animal ecosystems and the threatened peoples who dwell among them.

As reflected in the accounts of Leakey’s speeches that made it into the international media stream, such coexistence strikes a chord with people. A chord some may dismiss as “politically correct,” but which in truth suggests that many people within the former colonista cultures have come to understand, along with indigenous communities; that taking land from people isn’t really much of an advance over taking people from the land, as the historical models had it.

Most of us won’t need to be convinced that conservation is a good and needed thing. But for it to succeed, local peoples must embrace it and work together with others to build solutions for our planet. On the contrary, to establish pristine unpeopled reserves where people once dwelt and had their being is an archetypal Western approach to problem-solving – isolate the problem in a laboratory setting.

Such an approach can yield solid positive results for conservation (though a minimum standard must be that if indigenous people are not directly and actively involved in the conservation effort, their names should not be in the literature and their pictures should not be on the brochures). But it’s an approach that also has inherent problems for the give-and-take of coexistence within complex ecosystems, as we’ve had occasion to discover many, many times over.

Yet at the plenary session where Leakey first made his remarks, his position met with far more than polite applause. It came from the representatives of many organizations within the international conservationist movement, where the issue is a familiar debate. The volume of applause for Leakey’s provocative remarks suggests at a minimum that grantmakers must monitor their awards to make sure they are not implicated in the “soft eviction” strategies that play out around indigenous communities in or near protected areas.

Most of the measures that can result in “soft eviction” of indigenous communities from intended protected areas take place in biodiversity “hot spots.” These in turn fall preponderantly within indigenous dominions, simply because indigenous resources tend not to have been intensively exploited.

To have a saving impact on biodiversity, international conservationist organizations must work within these biodiversity hot spots. For that they need partners within the countries that host these hot spots of unspoiled biodiversity. Occasionally they are willing to mix with some very dodgy national regimes to get them. Once they are in-country, so to speak, an organization can move with unsubtle ease from promoting one reality––of respect for indigenous homelands––to protecting another; that of their own institutional interests, of the allied national government’s non-indigenous agenda on tourism-as-conservation, of Leakey and like-minded agendas.

The strategies of “soft eviction” are no less hard to bear for indigenous victims than the armed force of ages past. Their homelands may be upgraded to park status, but services to their communities cut. Their communities may be rated, as in Thailand, for “removal-worthiness” (for lack of a better term). Their own “tenure-mapping” processes may be countered by a mapping project at cross-purposes with the community––instead of mapping those areas where community members go, the outside project maps those areas where they don’t go as a pretext for extending the boundaries of a nature reserve.

At the extremity of such soft-eviction stratagems, indigenous people are whisked away and their homelands become a national park, biosphere reserve or protected area. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, park personnel have replaced the indigenous pygmies.

To determine if there could be unintended consequences in your conservation funding that encourages or at best does not support indigenous peoples rights, International Funders for Indigenous Peoples can be contacted for advice. IFIP Coordinator Evelyn Arce White, can be reached at ifip@firstnations.org, or call 540-371-5615 ext. 14.

Rebecca Adamson is the Founder and Advisor of International Funders for Indigenous Peoples.