Further Supplementary memorandum submitted
by the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford
MOBILE INDIGENOUS
PEOPLES AND
CONSERVATION: MIGRATION,
FORCED SETTLEMENT
AND DEVELOPMENT
A memoranda from the Refugee Studies Centre,
Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford addressing to the
International Development Committee's Inquiry into Migration and
Development.
Addressing:
Issue 5—Conflict, Refugees and Migration
and Issues
Issue 7—Development Coherence and Policy
on Migration.
The Refugee Studies Centre would like to provide
the International Development Committee with an example of development
and environmental protection policies and practices which lead
to increased marginalisation and forced migration of generally
marginal and impoverished communities. Details of a new collaborative
approach to conservation are outlined.
In recent years environmental and biodiversity
protection have risen in importance on the international agenda.
The linked pressures of human population dynamics, unsustainable
consumption patterns, climate change and global and national economic
forces threaten both the conservation of biological resources
and the livelihoods of many mobile indigenous and traditional
peoples.[124]
Reacting to these pressures many governmental
development programmes and international organisation have provided
significant funding for the establishment of protected areas and
national parks. Many of which are linked to plans to expand tourism
industries. Often conceptualisations of biodiversity prioritise
plants and animals to cultures. Mobile indigenous peoples are
discriminated against. Their rights, including rights of access
to natural resources, are often denied and conventional conservation
practices insufficiently address their concerns.
Mobile Indigenous Peoples, a subset of indigenous
and traditional peoples, face particular discrimination. Their
livelihoods depend on extensive common property use of natural
resources over an area, they use mobility as a management strategy
for dealing with sustainable use and conservation. Today, there
is increasing evidence that their natural resource management
systems are sustaining biodiversity and not undermining it as
previously assumed.
At the same time there is a historical and still
prevailing sentiment that mobile indigenous people constitute
a threat to settled communities and centralized political governments.
Many are pushed into permanent settlements with wildlife conservation
and environmental protection needs being used as a justification.
The Refugee Studies Centre encourages donors
governments to adopt Vth IUCN World Parks Congress Recommendation
5.27. Largely based on the Dana Declaration of Mobile Peoples
and Conservation (www.danadeclaration.org) this recommendation
outlines a new approach to sustainable land use with the aim of
preventing displacement and forced resettlement of mobile indigenous
peoples whilst simultaneously improving conservation outcomes.
VTH IUCN WORLD
PARKS CONGRESS
RECOMMENDATION 5.27
The Mobile Indigenous Peoples' Recommendation
5.27 urges governments, NGOs, local communities, civil society,
international organizations and inter-governmental bodies to give
due recognition to mobile peoples special needs and to:
1. ENSURE that Mobile Indigenous Peoples
have secure and full rights to co-manage and self-manage their
lands, that they can derive equitable benefits from the use of
natural resources, including eco-tourism, and that their customary
law is respected and recognized in national law;
2. RECOGNIZE collective and customary rights
of mobile communities and respect the integrity of the Mobile
Indigenous Peoples' resource management systems;
3. ESTABLISH Mobile Indigenous Peoples' community
conserved areas recognising traditional and evolving institutions
and customary norms as a protected area governance type;
4. PROMOTE policies to facilitate cross-border
mobility and trade in transboundary protected areas by Mobile
Indigenous Peoples who have traditionally lived in and used those
areas;
5. ADOPT and promote adaptive management
approaches that recognize the dependence of Mobile Indigenous
Peoples on common property resources and build on their mobility
and different lifestyles, livelihoods, resource rights and tenure,
customary laws, and dynamic scales of land use;
6. ADAPT protected area and community conserved
area management to the special needs of mobile communities, including
their use rights, resource management practices, seasonal and
temporal rights, corridors for movement, and targeting mobile
use to achieve conservation objectives;
7. RESPECT, promote and integrate the use
of traditional knowledge, institutions and customary laws and
resource management practices of Mobile Indigenous Peoples alongside
mainstream science on a complimentary basis. Develop common conservation
objectives. Ensure that development of protected areas and related
interventions are evaluated on the basis of local knowledge and
are implemented through Mobile Indigenous peoples' institutions;
8. RECOGNIZE and guarantee the rights of
Mobile Indigenous peoples to the restitution of their lands, territories
and resources, conserved and traditionally occupied and used sustainably
by them, that have been incorporated within protected areas without
their free, prior and informed consent; mobility should be restored
where appropriate;
9. PROMOTE cross-cultural dialogue and conflict
resolution within and between mobile and sedentary people around
and in protected areas;
10. ADOPT and promote the Action Plan that
has been developed at the World Parks Congress, and implement
the Dana Declaration; and
11. APPROVE the UN Draft Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples as adopted in 1994 by the now UN
Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights,
and for those peoples who want it, to ratify and effectively implement
ILO Convention 169 concerning Indigenous and tribal peoples in
Independent Countries.
November 2003
124 By mobile peoples, we mean a subset of indigenous
and traditional peoples whose livelihoods depend on extensive
common property use of natural resources over an area, who use
mobility as a management strategy for dealing with sustainable
use and conservation, and who possess a distinctive cultural identity
and natural resource management system. Back
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