Environmental Assessments and Traditional Knowledge: Prototype Guidelines


Fijian Bure, Viti Levu, Fiji (photo Emery)	The Prototype Guidelines The Need For Guidelines Modern development and progress are important to indigenous people. They understand that development projects may improve their standard of living, but may also degrade their environment by removing natural resources or polluting the land on which they live. But these people also need to continue to live and develop according to their own decisions and traditions on the same land in the face of projects that routinely alter their fundamental conditions of life. A means is urgently needed to ensure that mutual benefit to all parties results from projects involving the extraction of natural resources from areas inhabited by indigenous people. Many other people are currently working on this subject, and their personal experiences range from uplifting, to terribly dispiriting.
The Guidelines The Guidelines for Environmental Assessments and Traditional Knowledge were prepared as a preliminary step to help address this need. The Guidelines were very much a prototype at this stage of their development. They were based on a broad search of the literature and the Internet, on discussions with aboriginal leaders in the field, and on responses from over fifty reviewers of the first draft. The final form of the Guidelines will undoubtedly need to be quite different from this document, not least because nearly 200 million indigenous people would not be able to make effective use of a text-based document as the only source of advice on how to ensure a mutually beneficial result from interaction with development projects. The Guidelines were subsequently tested during a series of international workshops. The result of these workshops and the comments of several hundred people and agencies was to enlarge the work to include all aspects of development projects, not just environmental assessments. See Integrating Indigenous Knowledge in Project Planning and Implementation. In the future, we hope to able to prepare a series of Guidelines using different media, including text, video, audio tapes, and possibly a theatre piece. Alan R. Emery
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