Paper Addresses Management Policies for Natural Areas

Professor Ben Orlove of SIPA recently joined Aaron M. Petty and Vanessa deKoninck in writing a paper for the Journal of Ethnobiology, entitled “Cleaning, Protecting, or Abating? Making Indigenous Fire Management ‘Work’ in Northern Australia.” Thanks to Professor Orlove, who prepared the following summary with SIPA News.

Recent research shows that some promising innovations in environmental management face greater obstacles than has generally been acknowledged. Australia is recognized as a world leader in a specific area of environmental policy: the management of natural areas for biodiversity protection and carbon sequestration. It has supported “joint management” of national parks, bringing together government agencies and indigenous communities to participate in the development and implementation of management plans. And within Australia, Kakadu National Park in the semi-tropical savannahs of northern Australia is seen as a great success.  It is one of the first jointly managed parks in the world, and offers an important case study of how public institutions and indigenous communities interact in the management of landscapes.

The research shows the challenges to participation, because some partners in the joint management, particularly government agencies, make only small steps in sharing decision-making authority with others. In the 1990s, an extensive fire management program was instituted in Kakadu, in ways that seemed to favor coordination between indigenous communities and government land managers.  The aim of this program was to promote controlled burns—more frequent small, cool fires—which had seemed like a win-win situation: they have lower impact on biodiversity, and they resemble the traditional aboriginal cultural practices. However, Aboriginal communities found that the national park staff insisted on retaining decision-making authority over all fires close to park boundaries and over fires in dry years. National park staff, in turn, commented that aboriginal communities were unwilling to engage fully with planning on the longer time horizons that central administrative authorities required. Indigenous management—with extensive consultation between the individuals who conduct the burns and the full community, and with fine-grained knowledge of local landscapes—does not match well the long-terms projections of the government managers.  Little progress has been made in bridging these gaps.

These issues have surfaced again in the last ten years, as funds have come available from energy firms to protect the carbon which is stored in trees and in soils.  Once again, the controlled burns, with small, cool burns, seem positive. This renewed attention to Australia’s semitropical savannahs offers the chance to promote fuller coordination. The reseachers argue, however, that these new emissions-reducing programs run the risk of following the same fraught path of dissatisfaction and disassociation as Kakadu, because it is inherent in the nature of institutionalized management programs to replace the complexity and contingency of indigenous fire management with standardized goals. In so doing, such programs treat indigenous people as workers executing plans developed by others rather than as genuine partners in the design and implementation of management programs.

Photograph courtesy RachTHeH, via Flicker (view original, rights info)