Biocultural community protocols for livestock keepers
resources, priorities and with the aim of enabling communities to enter into beneficial
benefit-sharing agreements with outside stakeholders.
“The process of developing a biocultural community protocol involves reflection about
the inter-connectedness of various aspects of indigenous and local communities’ ways
of life (such as between culture, customary laws, practices relating to natural resources
management and traditional knowledge) and may involve resource mapping, evaluating
governance systems and reviewing community development plans. It also involves legal
empowerment” (Natural Justice, 2010a).
Although biocultural community protocols are a newly developed approach, indigenous
peoples and local communities have always had customary laws that establish clear rules
for how to manage and share their resources and knowledge. Biocultural community
protocols are an innovation only to the extent that they help communities articulate these
rules and values in the context of laws that are intended to support them. The concomitant
legal empowerment and focus on endogenous development helps communities advocate
for their formal recognition by national and international law and to secure their continued
management of natural resources in ways commensurate with their cultures and ways of life.
The first efforts to establish a biocultural community protocol were made in mid 2009 by
the traditional healers from Bushbuckridge in the Kruger to Canyons UNESCO Biosphere
Region in South Africa. However, the first complete biocultural community protocol was
developed by the Raika pastoralists of Rajasthan, which was then followed by the Gunis
(traditional healers) of the Mewar region in southern Rajasthan and the Samburu pastoralists of northern Kenya.
The protocols cover the following general issues (Natural Justice, 2009):
• A self-definition of the group and its leadership and decision-making processes
•
How the group promotes in-situ conservation of either indigenous plants or indigenous
breeds of livestock and/or wildlife, with details of these resource
• The links between their customary laws and biocultural ways of life
• Their spiritual understanding of nature
•
How knowledge and resources are shared
•
Definition of free, prior and informed consent to access their land and traditional
knowledge
•
Local challenges
•
Rights according to national and international law
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