From communities rooted in place to transnational coalitions, this special feature applies concepts of collaborative care rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems to the field of environmental ...governance. We highlight restorative, liberatory practices rooted in caretaking ethics and reciprocal human-nature relations. Our approach also centers decision making by those most connected to a given resource and the sustenance it provides. Despite global extraction, dispossession, and other colonial legacies, these efforts build toward collective action and community self-determination, both through formal policy change and informal practices. Three facets of collaborative care in environmental governance are threaded through the special feature: (1) care in place, (2) care in power, and (3) care in commoning. These themes connect both Indigenous-led and allied scholarship from the United States to the Netherlands, Japan to Madagascar, and Aotearoa to Canada. Though diverse in their interests and challenges, the authors and communities featured in this research build toward collective action and community self-determination in caring for the places that are the source of collective abundance.
Marine managers commonly use ecological indicators in planning and evaluations; however, few programs monitor social and cultural impacts of management. Practical approaches to identifying and ...monitoring social and cultural aspects of communities’ relationships with their environment could assist many agencies in understanding the impacts of their efforts to achieve conservation goals. The Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources, Division of Aquatic Resources (DAR) launched the Holomua Marine Initiative to collaborate and engage with communities to strengthen co-management efforts, which included integrating socio-cultural aspects into the planning and assessment of marine management. Our team, which included resource managers, Western and indigenous scientists, community leaders, students, agency, and university staff engaged in collaborative management efforts in Hawaiʻi, developed an approach to monitor the social and cultural impacts of DAR’s management actions. Through online collaborative workshops with community members and non-profit leaders engaged in marine conservation in Hawaiʻi, we co-developed socio-cultural principles and indicators based on their reciprocal relationships with the nearshore environment. During the workshops, we used small group activities, snow cards, sorting, and categorization to generate nine fundamental principles, with associated indicators, to guide marine management in Hawaiʻi. Many of the principles and indicators are comparable to those developed in other parts of the Pacific, revolving around themes including the perpetuation of local and indigenous knowledge across generations, and access to land and natural resources. Participants also suggested themes less prevalent in other research, such as the need to evaluate impacts of tourism on community relationships with coastal areas. We offer recommendations for the development of socio-cultural principles and indicators in other place-based contexts, and emphasize the importance of on-going community collaboration. Developing a socio-cultural monitoring framework with community members impacted by marine management decisions could enable others engaged in collaborative efforts, including government agencies, to holistically understand and address impacts of their policies and actions. Monitoring layered socio-cultural impacts of marine management on local and indigenous communities has the potential to shift management goals, and enhance long-term effectiveness and support for initiatives to protect coastal resources worldwide.
Differing values between communities and government resource managers may lead to conflict, particularly when community members are not involved in decision making. Increasingly, co-management ...arrangements have become an important tool to increase local capacity for resource management, increase trust between diverse community groups, and foster effective stewardship. However, co-management depends upon collaboration between users and managers and the ability to understand relationships between a given resource and those who use it, even when these communities are often viewed as contravening conservation efforts. Invasive species, such as feral pigs (Sus scrofa), present particular management challenges because they damage island ecosystems but are also integral to community life ways and food systems. Based on interviews with local pig hunters in the Hawaiian Islands, we explored the social-cultural values and practices of local pig hunters, their reasons for hunting, and possibilities for greater collaboration in feral pig management. Results highlight the importance of hunting for both food and other forms of well-being and cultural perpetuation, along with opportunities for (1) expanding mechanisms of access to improve hunting opportunities for invasive species; (2) integrating rights and responsibilities to meet management objectives; and (3) improving communication to enhance collaborative arrangements. Considering the context of managing community use of an ecologically detrimental invasive species, this study offers insights to guide co-management partnerships with community groups that are sometimes perceived as opposed to invasive species control efforts.
In April of 2018, the island of Kauaʻi broke national 24-hour rainfall records, experiencing several days of intense rain and flooding that destroyed property, threatened lives, and reshaped the ...land. However, out of the turmoil came stories of survival, resilience, community, and strength. We interviewed over 80 individuals and found that concepts of resilience are intimately linked to place and community. This research explains how connections to place underpin and contribute to long-term, community-level resilience. We illustrate the significance of place-based knowledge in preparing for floods and mitigating flood damage, as well as the crucial role of community in emergency response and long-term disaster recovery. We found that community organizations facilitated the transmission of supplies and support, underscoring the connections to people and environment that foster resilient outcomes. Interviews also highlighted threats to place-based community resilience, such as tourism and prioritizing infrastructure over human needs. Reframing resilience to be more inclusive of social factors that attend to place-based dynamics can give more agency to community members and strengthen the connections that support recovery and adaptation amid increasing frequency of unpredictable and hazardous weather patterns.
Indigenous stewardship of lands and waters has been suppressed around the world for centuries by colonization, but it has nonetheless persisted. Specific places that are cared for through such ...stewardship are known as Indigenous and community conserved areas (ICCAs). Some ICCAs are formally recognized in bureaucratic government systems, whereas others are not. In Hawaiʻi, communities have been reviving various aspects of Indigenous stewardship, which is Place-based and holistic in nature, extending from the mountains to the sea. However, these attempts to engage in Indigenous stewardship have confronted countless obstacles and hurdles within the American form of centralized governance in the process. Some communities have found novel ways to engage in Indigenous stewardship via formal recognition of ICCAs through collaborative management agreements with various governmental authorities, both state and federal, as well as with large landowners. As scholars and knowledge keepers of Place, we have synthesized our intergenerational knowledge of the communities we have lived and/or worked in within the context of other studies that we have led or otherwise collaborated on spanning the past 30+ years. We focus on exploring how three Hawaiʻi communities (Hāʻena, Kauaʻi; Heʻeia, Oʻahu; and Kaʻūpūlehu, Hawaiʻi Island) have navigated bureaucracy to get formal recognition of their ICCAs in ways that have garnered governmental support for community-based revival of Indigenous stewardship practices. These three communities have all achieved biocultural resource management successes using a compartmented approach to stitch together various ICCAs as a means to holistically work across contemporary land-ownership boundaries, with one of these communities forming a “collaboratively managed meta-ICCA” to increase synergistic effects. These communities are the first in Hawaiʻi in the modern era to be engaging in Indigenous stewardship via a patchwork of ICCAs from the mountains to the sea, and, therefore, demonstrate that this is a viable, albeit arduous, avenue for communities to holistically engage in Indigenous stewardship within an American system of governance.
Rights-based management approaches are being increasingly applied to global fisheries as an alternative to deficiencies associated with centralized or top-down management. In fisheries, these ...approaches may include a diversity of methods such as catch shares, territorial user rights for fishing, individual transferable quotas, fisheries concessions, cooperatives, and comanagement. Many of these approaches are being implemented in small-scale fisheries contexts, without full consideration of how the legacy of previous governing institutions or tenure arrangements may affect implementation. Likewise, few case studies examine whether rights-based management approaches are appropriate for given contexts, examine how they fit within a nested administrative hierarchy, or describe their shared property rights components in practice. These knowledge gaps may obscure key stewardship incentives, veil existing power relations, and constrain opportunities for different management models while also prolonging or preventing governance transformations. We illustrate the importance of these factors through a case study of institutional change in coral reef fisheries in Hawaiʻi. We use institutional analysis to examine coral reef fisheries management across two time periods: historical marine tenure in the Hawaiian Kingdom (1810–1893) and under contemporary centralized management (1982–2018). We then compared these management regimes to emerging comanagement in Hawaiʻi (1994–2018). Our analysis reveals that few rights are actually devolved to communities seeking to implement comanagement. We also highlight considerable administrative complexity and variability within historical marine tenure regimes. We conclude by considering several issues relevant to the performance of rights-based approaches such as comanagement, including devolution of property rights to the local level, matching administrative and social-ecological complexity, the importance of historical context and narratives in shaping solutions, and the perceived legitimacy of governance arrangements.
Indigenous ecologies have persisted through major social and ecological changes including settler colonialism. Adaptations have been a necessary part of this resilience, however little attention has ...been given to the consequences of these adaptations for Indigenous Peoples and ecologies. Without exploring these consequences, we are left with an incomplete understanding of adaptation that potentially obscures social and ecological costs associated with resilience. Here we describe the contemporary caretaking of a culturally-significant plant used in weaving traditions called beargrass ( Xerophyllum tenax Melanthiaceae), and discuss how adaptive practices to maintain biocultural connections to beargrass have influenced both socio-cultural and ecological systems. We ask: (1) How is beargrass stewarded and used today? (2) What are the adaptive practices that Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest have used to maintain cultural traditions through changing conditions? (3) What are some of the social and ecological consequences of these adaptations? Through semi-structured interviews with cultural practitioners we identified multiple reciprocal practices that form a basis of the caretaking relationship. In order to compensate for a lack of access to beargrass and lack of ability to exercise sovereignty in land management, practitioners described substituting other weaving materials for beargrass, as well as caretaking substitutions. These adaptations were not uniformly accepted and for some either represented significant cultural losses or placed additional burdens on communities. We also collected ecological field data on beargrass. Using structural equation modeling, we found that a key adaptive practice, the substitution of tree pruning for cultural fire, can replicate key short-term benefits of fire for beargrass populations, but does not appear to replicate longer term benefits. In sum, adaptive practices have allowed beargrass traditions to persist through colonialism, but cannot fully substitute for social and ecological benefits of pre-colonial caretaking, and also result in losses and/or additional burdens for communities. Investigating what adaptations to maintain resilience do in communities, and for whom, is necessary in order to fully appreciate the costs and benefits of adaptations that support resilience through various forms of perturbation.
Through research, restoration of agro-ecological sites, and a renaissance of cultural awareness in Hawaiʻi, there has been a growing recognition of the ingenuity of the Hawaiian biocultural resource ...management system. The contemporary term for this system, “the ahupuaʻa system”, does not accurately convey the nuances of system function, and it inhibits an understanding about the complexity of the system’s management. We examined six aspects of the Hawaiian biocultural resource management system to understand its framework for systematic management. Based on a more holistic understanding of this system’s structure and function, we introduce the term, “the moku system”, to describe the Hawaiian biocultural resource management system, which divided large islands into social-ecological regions and further into interrelated social-ecological communities. This system had several social-ecological zones running horizontally across each region, which divided individual communities vertically while connecting them to adjacent communities horizontally; and, thus, created a mosaic that contained forested landscapes, cultural landscapes, and seascapes, which synergistically harnessed a diversity of ecosystem services to facilitate an abundance of biocultural resources. “The moku system”, is a term that is more conducive to large-scale biocultural restoration in the contemporary period, while being inclusive of the smaller-scale divisions that allowed for a highly functional system.
This research note is part of the thematic section, Giving Back Through Collaboration in Practice, in the special issue titled “Giving Back in Field Research,” published as Volume 10, Issue 2 in the ...Journal of Research Practice.
Declining natural resources have contributed to a cultural renaissance across the Pacific that seeks to revive customary ridge-to-reef management approaches to protect freshwater and restore abundant ...coral reef fisheries. We applied a linked land–sea modeling framework based on remote sensing and empirical data, which couples groundwater nutrient export and coral reef models at fine spatial resolution. This spatially explicit (60 × 60 m) framework simultaneously tracks changes in multiple benthic and fish indicators as a function of community-led marine closures, land-use and climate change scenarios. We applied this framework in Hā‘ena and Ka‘ūpaūlehu, located at opposite ends of the Hawaiian Archipelago to investigate the effects of coastal development and marine closures on coral reefs in the face of climate change. Our results indicated that projected coastal development and bleaching can result in a significant decrease in benthic habitat quality and community-led marine closures can result in a significant increase in fish biomass. In general, Ka‘ūpaūlehu is more vulnerable to land-based nutrients and coral bleaching than Hā‘ena due to high coral cover and limited dilution and mixing from low rainfall and wave power, except for the shallow and wave-sheltered back-reef areas of Hā‘ena, which support high coral cover and act as nursery habitat for fishes. By coupling spatially explicit land–sea models with scenario planning, we identified priority areas on land where upgrading cesspools can reduce human impacts on coral reefs in the face of projected climate change impacts.
PDF
