Abstract
The conflicts that thrive around the designation of protected areas and the rights of indigenous peoples in many regions around the world give rise to various issues that need to be addressed in research. Especially since the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), different groups, including indigenous communities, nations, and people, struggle to control the designation, management, and use of protected areas. Due to a very significant growth of protected areas, conservation professionals, governments, and international organizations face criticism from indigenous peoples as a result of the violation of their rights. Focusing on two cases from Africa on the designation of UNESCO World Heritage sites, this paper asks why international conservation frameworks are still primarily concerned with nature and wildlife protection. Despite some improvements in international conservation policies, exclusionary practices of conservation still continue to affect indigenous peoples’ livelihoods. Therefore, this paper seeks to analyze to which extent indigenous peoples have been able to transform the legacies of exclusionary practices of conservation. Regarding the very different findings of the two case studies, it becomes clear that research on these types of conflicts needs to foreground more theoretically oriented approaches. Rather than considering indigenous rights as a merely technical matter to be included in conservation policies, research on the sustainability of protected areas has to understand how global inequalities are reproduced at the local level and, furthermore, how indigenous peoples have been able to transform this local vulnerability.
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- 1.
“To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion” (UN 1945, Art. 1(3)).
- 2.
“The purpose of the Organization is to contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms which are affirmed for the peoples of the world, without distinction of race, sex, language or religion, by the Charter of the United Nations” (UNESCO 1945, Art. 1).
- 3.
According to Stevens, the old paradigm of international conservation comprises four main features: “(1) protected areas should be created and governed by states; (2) the goal of protected areas should be strict nature preservation and particularly biodiversity conservation; (3) effective protected area management requires protected areas to be uninhabited and without any human use of natural resources, … (4) coercive force is legally and morally justified to remove resident peoples and protect biodiversity” (2014b, p. 36).
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Rode, R. (2017). The Past and Future of Indigenous Peoples’ Heritage: Transforming the Legacies of Non-sustainability of Protected Areas. In: Albert, MT., Bandarin, F., Pereira Roders, A. (eds) Going Beyond. Heritage Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57165-2_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57165-2_18
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