Promoting Indigenous knowledge and values for more sustainable water resource management

The beliefs and values of Indigenous peoples can provide important insights into human relationships with nature. Indigenous worldviews can offer alternative solutions to restoring degraded ecosystems and suggest new frameworks for building a more sustainable, holistic and equitable approach to the management of natural resources. However, Indigenous knowledge and beliefs have, until recently, been largely ignored in formal resource management strategies, since they are perceived to conflict with established, science-based management methods. This is slowly changing, as the value of Indigenous resource management practices is becoming recognized.

This Knowledge Brief, published by the Transformations to Sustainability programme, is based on a peer-reviewed article in which the authors discuss the efforts of Indigenous peoples to contest freshwater management regimes that are based on Western concepts and ideologies.

It is part of a series of knowledge briefs which synthesize findings from recent research papers on transformations into an accessible format, with the aim of opening up the latest transformations research to a wider audience.

Promoting Indigenous knowledge and values for more sustainable water resource management

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Header photo: Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar / CC BY-SA 3.0