CAUSE NO HARM
Decision-Making

In the best development projects, objectives and subsequent indicators of success are shared and agreed amongst all project participants and stakeholders.

When the environment of indigenous peoples or their normal way of life is radically changed, the potential to do great good or great harm weighs in the balance. Inviting the community to be a part of the final decision-making process allows traditional wisdom to come into play. The degree to which the community, or its representatives, is to have a decision-making role needs to be balanced with the risk to the community. The most difficult decisions are when the project benefit to the non-indigenous community rises and simultaneously escalates the risk to the indigenous community. In the best situations, of course, the use of all knowledge bases should be used to reduce the risk to anyone or any community. This is not always possible. Projects should build in safeguards that provide increasingly important decision-making capacity for indigenous peoples as the risk increases to their communities. This will ensure that deep-seated or implicit understandings get used directly in the decisions.

Many indigenous peoples prefer to remain in a subsistence or near-subsistence relationship with the land. Others might like a mixture of a traditional relationship with the land augmented significantly by technological advances. How will the project resolve these differences within the community?

Build in mechanisms that provide increasingly important decision-making capacity for indigenous peoples as the risk increases to their communities.

Legislation and Policy
In planning any project, it is important to assess the likelihood of the project reaching a successful conclusion. If indigenous peoples are directly or indirectly influenced by a project, and if the project’s objectives requires these indigenous peoples to benefit, or at least not harmed by the project, then the host governmental context is important.

National policies of the host country should:

1. encourage sustainability policies for indigenous culture and traditional rights to resources,
2. fund capacity-building amongst their indigenous peoples, and
3. separate government agencies that exploit from those that regulate to avoid inherent conflicts of interest.

Cause no harm to indigenous peoples because of working within another government’s priorities.

Project planners have come to understand that the most likely way of reaching a consensus is to establish multi-stakeholder processes. Not all countries or indigenous groups participate in these arrangements easily. Sometimes this is because indigenous groups have different constitutional rights, operate under separate legislation, or are governed by different polices and practices than members of the dominant culture. Failure to understand these specific differences can undermine the best intentions to include indigenous peoples in multi-stakeholder processes.

Understand the host jurisdiction's laws and regulations regarding indigenous peoples including constitutional rights, relevant legislation, policy statements, and recent practices.

Bridging the Gap

Acceptance of Traditional Knowledge
The unique challenge that accompanies the inclusion of indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems is the inclusion of indigenous stakeholders in project design and decision-making that ensures appropriate access to information, representation, and meaningful consultation. One of the main reasons why indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems have not yet figured prominently in development projects is that they are not understood well enough to know how to include them. Indigenous traditional knowledge is an important part of everyday life in traditional communities. It is expressed in the language, in the practices, and in the actual transmission of information. Indigenous traditional knowledge is also a way of looking at life and the world around us, hence the concept of a knowledge system.

When science is used to predict future events, the system has an array of important procedures, checks of accuracy, and demands for logical consistency. A clear statement of assumptions must accompany any methodology used, whether it is a statistical treatment or a sampling procedure. Only after all this is understood, can a prediction be made with any confidence. To reach the stage where this can be done well, a scientist spends many years of study and refinement.

The same is true of indigenous traditional knowledge. When it is to be used to predict the effects of some actions, or to assess the impact of a project, there are inherently important means by which the traditional knowledge practitioner understands the confidence with which he or she can make a prediction. The novice or uninformed can not use indigenous traditional knowledge any more effectively than a novice could use scientific knowledge. In both cases, facts and information can be assembled, but the wisdom and understanding that both systems allow are found only after years of study. Engage traditional knowledge practitioners the same way western knowledge engages scientists and other professionals, to make full use of traditional knowledge and its multi-generational wisdom.

Decision-making is the key ingredient in controlling the destiny of a project. The final decisions in any project are usually made by the person who has the largest financial stake in the project. Technical information is assembled, analysed and synthesized. Recommendations and conclusions are formed and sent to the final decision-makers. Indigenous traditional knowledge can be similarly treated. If the acquisition and interpretation has been done well, the decision-makers will have a much stronger resource of information on which to make decisions than if it had been omitted.

While facts and data can be gleaned from traditional knowledge, its true power is the capacity to reach into the unknown and make predictions. Assessing the acceptability of predictions made by indigenous knowledge holders to decision-makers is an important facet of risk assessment.

Cultural Insensitivity
There are a number of potential pitfalls in using traditional knowledge. One of the most common is cultural insensitivity. This may be expressed by inappropriately taking a posture of cultural superiority, or simply considering the cultural differences as unimportant. Avoid a strategy of including indigenous peoples too late or in a trivial manner. By including them before the critically important decisions have been taken, possible resentment or hostility is avoided. Another bad mistake is to include aboriginal people and their knowledge as a token gesture, their advice being largely ignored. Compounding this strategy with a patronizing attitude ("Everything will be all right.") can lead to unnecessary misunderstandings.

Avoid a strategy of including indigenous peoples too late or in a trivial manner; it places both the indigenous peoples and the project at risk.

The basic assumptions of traditional knowledge are quite different from those of science-based or technology-based approaches, so the results may be different. Compared to scientific knowledge, for instance, traditional knowledge tends to be more powerful for its local accuracy and its long term insights. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand tends to be more capable of interpreting the influences of external and widespread factors that transcend the ken of local communities. Thus, instead of pitting the two knowledge bases against each other, it is more advantageous to use their complementary strengths to bolster the weaker aspects of the other knowledge base. Together the two form a very powerful knowledge system.

Social Responsibility and Economy

Care must be taken when designing projects that depend on monetary commerce (a normal concept) for their long-term sustainability (a desirable outcome) in areas where there are indigenous communities that do not have a market economy or that have little familiarity with commercial ventures. Most people who have lived or worked in the tropics are familiar with 'haggling' or 'negotiable price.' In many cultures, the activity of coming to an agreement over what is a fair price for an object is an important and integral part of the social aspect of doing business. To omit this process can be disappointing or even insulting.

Yet for many indigenous communities, especially those in island areas, or in remote jungles, or in the far north, resources are viewed as shared as soon as they are acquired. There is no haggling, and no money is exchanged in sharing a fresh-caught fish or whale. It is a part of the tradition that when someone else makes a similar catch, it will also be shared in a similar manner. (Usually there is a traditional definition of what portion goes to the hunter or gatherer.)

A person from a community that is based on resource-sharing is a very poor negotiator in a project with people accustomed to negotiating with money. In fact, they will use usually acquiesce immediately to the first offer in a haggling session.

Thus, some indigenous communities are extremely vulnerable to unfair exploitation, especially those living close to the land and primarily on a subsistence base. Safeguards should be built in to minimize risk of unfair exploitation.

Build in safeguards to protect indigenous communities that are extremely vulnerable to unfair exploitation because of lack of experience with, or non-acceptance of, monetary-based systems of resource sharing.