chapter 1

Until quite recently, the intellectual capacities and achievements of the people in pre-industrial, nonliterate, small-scale societies were frequently denigrated in mainstream Euroamerican punditry and public opinion as primitive, arcane, irrational, and inferior in comparison to western science and technology. As a result, there was little interest outside of academic circles given to the study and application of aboriginal cultural knowledges. However, this negative perception has undergone a remarkable revision in the past few decades, especially in regards to TEK -- that portion of cultural knowledge most directly associated with the apprehension, exploitation and management of the natural environment. The contemporary discourse of TEK, as expressed in the collective rhetoric and writing of a growing legion of scientists, humanists, activists, policymakers, and indigenous organizations, highlights the practical value and significance of these local knowledge systems for the modern world and hence the need to preserve them for present and future generations. The recent call for development of cultural-based indicators that are relevant for a better understanding of the state and trends of biocultural diversity represents a new phase in the valuation of TEK.

1.1. The Value(s) of TEK

The actual and potential applications of TEK range across several different fields and endeavors, including science, medicine, agriculture, rural development, environmental protection, political empowerment, cultural identity, and defense of human rights. Local groups sometimes possess more detailed, empirical information and understanding of their surrounding habitat, such as plants, animals, soils, water bodies, weather and the interrelationships of these, than do academy-trained environmental scientists. Scientists conducting botanical and zoological surveys or inventories in the field have often made use of local naturalists to locate, collect and identify new species . The folk knowledge and use of plants, animals and fungi is also recognized as a valuable source of information for the discovery and development of new medicines, foods, condiments, cosmetics, pesticides, fibers, and crop germplasm. Under participatory approaches to rural development, TEK is seen as a key resource for facilitating appropriate agricultural innovation, health-care, and commercial enterprise among impoverished groups. The principles of natural resource management embodied in many local production systems are lauded as making a substantial contribution to environmental conservation and sustainable use. A number of biodiversity-sustaining or augmenting practices directly associated with TEK have been identified, including: diversified agroecosystems; selection and propagation of crop varieties or animal breeds; social or religious regulation of exploitation pressure on certain species; the increase of small-scale patchiness; fallow management, forest restoration strategies; refugia protection (e.g. sacred sites, tabooed areas, buffer zones); rotation of hunting-fishing-farming-grazing lands; water management techniques; communal property arrangements. Where viable and vigorous systems of TEK are maintained one tends to find stronger indicators of ecosystem health and biodiversity conservation projects have generally been more successful when local knowledge was incorporated.

The casting of indigenous and local groups and their knowledge systems in the role of repositories of valuable ecological information and as human resources for biotechnological development and biodiversity protection has been instrumental in garnering support for indigenous causes but this viewpoint is not without controversy and criticism. It has been severely questioned as exploitative and discriminatory and failing to take into account the interests, rights, priorities and worldviews of the local communities themselves. For this reason more attention has recently been placed on the significance of TEK from an insider's perspective. For many local communities, it is the time-tested basis for decision-making in many areas of daily living, including natural resource management, nutrition, food preparation, health, hygiene, housing, toolmaking, education, community law, and social relations. The protection and continued access to such knowledge is looked upon as a necessary condition for guaranteeing resource rights, which in turn is seen as a fundamental pillar of human rights. By maintaining their traditional knowledges and technologies, people give themselves more options, greater control over their lives, and greater leverage with which to negotiate the process of development and change more on their own terms. Furthermore, local knowledge serves as a bridge for absorbing new knowledge elements, such as useful techniques and technologies stemming from global science. In this sense, it may be argued that TEK constitutes a powerful tool for self-determination and political empowerment. The statements of indigenous organizations and representatives recognize the deep integration of TEK with their total way of life and consider their right to keep it to be essential for the maintenance of their culture, language, social organization, economy, spirituality, identity, sovereignty, land, and ultimately their very existence.

The positive valuation of TEK has gained added force in the last couple of decades as it becomes more apparent that biodiversity and cultural diversity are rapidly declining on a global scale. Studies showing a high degree of spatial correlation between indicators of biodiversity (mainly species richness) and indicators of cultural diversity (mainly numbers of endemic languages) have led to formulation of the concept of biocultural diversity, which sees the two kinds of diversity as interdependent and possibly co-evolved manifestations of the total diversity of life. From a biocultural perspective, the twin losses of biodiversity and cultural diversity are considered to reflect not merely parallel trends but rather interlocking processes. To the extent that TEK shapes and informs people's cognition of the organic world as well as their actions upon it, and is the evolving outcome of the accumulated experiences gained from living in a particular habitat, it may be considered one of the core linkages between biodiversity and cultural diversity. Seen in this light, the continued maintenance and vitality of TEK forms the centerpiece of integrated biocultural approaches to environmental conservation.

1.2. TEK Indicators

In view of the many virtues and benefits of TEK, there is growing concern that it is being lost or eroded in many places due to modernization influences. The impending loss of a valuable resource has stimulated the search for policies aimed at preserving, reinforcing, recording or adapting unique cultural knowledges. These have included a number of general policy statements recognizing the importance of this intellectual heritage, laws established to safeguard the rights of indigenous peoples to their native language and culture, and special programs designed to encourage the continued maintenance or revitalization of traditional knowledge and practices. The development of indicators of traditional knowledge, which may be considered a subset of cultural indicators, represents a relatively new policy direction for conservation science. The concept of indicators is understood here as referring to certain signals or measures that are taken to represent larger and more complex dynamic realities. The general function of an indicator is to simplify information about multiple components in order to facilitate communication about states at one point in time and trends over time. Indices are the most highly-aggregated type of indicator and invariably take a quantitative form based on a fixed procedure of measurement. The most common types of indicators are social, economic, and environmental. Cultural indicators represent a recent addition to the field of indicators, but these usually define "culture" in terms of the cultural products of modern global society, such as the arts, literature, and education. It is only in the last few years that there have been attempts to define cultural indicators which refer specifically to indigenous or folk cultures.

Much of the impetus for developing traditional knowledge indicators has come during the last few years following the commitment made by 190 countries at the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, to achieve, by 2010, a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national levels. In order to evaluate in an objective way whether this goal is being met, an integrated strategy was adopted which defined a variegated series of environmental targets and proposed that relevant indicators be developed to measure progress toward each target. The call for indicators included cultural indicators as part of the package based on the consensus opinion that ecosystem assessment needs to be connected directly to human welfare and decision-making. It was felt that these connections need to be explicitly drawn in order to reveal more clearly the long-term human costs of biodiversity loss and habitat destruction and to engage the interest of governments, businesses, and the public. This framework of targets and indicators was later endorsed formally by the 7th Conference of Parties (COP7) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2004. The COP-CBD has officially adopted the immediate testing of a limited set of indicators and recommended the study and development of others in seven focal areas. Focal area 5 refers to the protection of traditional knowledge, practices and innovations and is based on article 8j of the convention (Balmford et al. 2005b). Another important initiative is being spearheaded by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) to develop cultural indicators of indigenous peoples' food and agroecological systems. Under these proposals, two general purposes of TEK indicators can be identified: (1) to measure and monitor the states and processes of local cultures and knowledges and (2) to evaluate the results of policies (i.e. whether targets are being achieved). More specifically, we consider that reliable and standardized quantitative measurements of TEK trends can provide crucial information for answering the following key questions:

(a) Is knowledge really being eroded, retained or increased?
(a) How fast is loss/change occurring?
(b) What areas or groups are most affected?
(c) What domains of knowledge are most vulnerable?
(d) What are the causal or conditioning factors?
(e) Are trends of TEK erosion/change related to trends of biodiversity loss?
(f) Are TEK preservation/protection policies producing measureable results?
(g) Which specific policies are working and which are not?

1.3. Uniqueness of the VITEK

The VITEK is specifically designed to fill the need for indicators of traditional knowledge, practices and innovations that contribute to biodiversity conservation and sustainable use and to abide by the criteria for indicator development established by the CBD framework. Although our intention is to define one possible indicator that ideally would be used alongside other indicators to provide a more complete picture of the status and trends of traditional knowledge, we also argue that the VITEK is also unique and different from other such indicators that have been developed or proposed up until now. It is unique in at least three ways: (1) it involves the direct measurement of key domains of TEK itself, rather than relying on measures of proxy variables, (2) it is based on a standardized method for data collection and measurement that is both locally appropriate for diverse cultural and environmental contexts and broadly applicable for global coverage, thus permitting the direct comparison of states and trends across different sites and the aggregation of measures at different spatial scales, and (3) it specifies a precise methodological protocol to follow that is standardized in terms of its basic structural design yet flexible in terms of the specific contents and procedures used in its application (sections 6.0, 6.2).

The direct measurement of TEK is clearly preferable over proxy measures because the relationships of the proxy variables to traditional knowledge, practices and innovations has not been determined with confidence. Under Focal Area 5 of the CBD's 2010 Targets, the only headline indicator which has been formally adopted by the COP-CBD for immediate testing is "Status and trends of linguistic diversity and numbers of speakers of indigenous languages" (decision 30, paragraph 27). Although languages may constitute a useful proxy measure of cultural diversity, the CBD recognizes that this indicator does not amount to a direct measure of traditional knowledge and therefore that more direct measures need to be developed. Accordingly, the Ad-Hoc Open-Ended Inter-Sessional Working Group on Article 8(j) and Related Provisions of the Convention on Biological Diversity proposed several possible options for covering this need, which are classed under four categories: (a) Land-based indicators, (b) People-based indicators, (c) Program- and policy-based indicators, and (d) Culture-based indicators (document UNEP/CBD/WG8J/4/10, 24 November 2005). None of these proposed indicators, however, will provide a direct measure of the status and trends of indigenous and local knowledge. The first two classes, while considered to offer quantifiable indicators, are still proxy measures, and it may be argued that by themselves they do not come any closer to reflecting actual knowledge trends than do changes in linguistic diversity and the numbers of speakers of indigenous languages. The last two classes include a number of potential qualitative-based indicators for which no clear methodologies have yet been developed and that will make comparisons difficult if not impossible. By contrast, the VITEK assessment method elaborated in this report is aimed at developing an index that directly measures key components of TEK. The index design satisfies the criteria established by the CBD for selection of additional indicators, namely the inclusion of reliable and comparable time-series data, the quantitative measurement of trends, and the aggregation of measures from more than one locality.

The VITEK method that is developed here places considerable emphasis on balancing local appropriateness with global applicability. By this we mean that, on one hand, the specific design of the test instrument used in a particular place is based on local categories and criteria, while on the other hand, the same general framework and procedure for knowledge assessment is applied in multiple settings. The indicator must incorporate both of these (seemingly contradictory) qualities if it is to achieve representative measurement of the statuses and trends of locally-situated, culturally-specific knowledges as well as widespread acceptance and use all over the world. No indicator currently exists, nor has a method been previously designed, that is capable of both providing an appropriate measure of the vitality of TEK in diverse cultural and environmental contexts and of allowing for systematic comparison across local communities, ethnocultural groups, nations, and regions. Although an abundant number of different measures of TEK phenomena have been developed and used previously, these have mostly been realized in single-culture or micro-regional contexts and neither the methods used nor types of measures calculated are automatically applicable to other cultural or environmental situations. For this reason, the few comparative quantitative investigations that have been carried out suffer from lack of direct and systematic comparability (see sections 4 and 5). As well, the attempts to develop entirely self-administered and community-based indicators of traditional and local knowledge also face the same obstacle of incomparability (UICN-CBD-FIIB 2007). Intercultural, inter-environmental comparability is considered a necessary property if the indicator is to achieve global status, capture a broad-based audience, and have policy relevance beyond the local level.

Another shortcoming of alternative proposals for traditional knowledge indicators is the lack of methodological definition for putting them into practice. In the documents that we have reviewed in which prospective indicators are identified and defined, scant attention, if any, is given to explaining the methods and procedures that should be used to produce the measurements. Unless this deficiency is overcome, it is doubtful that they will ever be operable, reliable, or comparable. In section 7, a detailed methodological protocol for collecting data at the local level and calculating the measures comprising the VITEK is elaborated. The overall design of the method consists of two basic phases: 1) data collection, comprising a standardized set of operations for collecting primary data in the field and assigning quantitative values to the field data results, and 2) data analysis, including formulas for calculating the vitality statistics at different scales (local, national, regional, global). The data collection phase is intended for application at the local level and therefore is sensitive to local distinctiveness, while the analytical component is designed for making quantitative comparisons across local groups (as well as larger-scale, aggregated units) and therefore entails common denominator forms of measurement. The feature of comparability allows for the progressive aggregation of vitality trends according to different scales of spatial inclusiveness, such that the index can be computed by sector, country, region, and so on up to a global measure. The assessment method also has a modular design in order to facilitate the disaggregation of measures for specific domains or subsets (e.g. ethnobotanical knowledge, agroecological knowledge, ethnomedicinal knowledge) of TEK. This feature will permit more focused assessments of which types of traditional knowledge are most vulnerable/resistant to change.

As mentioned above, the indicator method will be potentially applicable for groups characterized by different cultural and environmental situations. We should stress, however, that this includes indigenous as well as nonindigenous groups. Most of the proposed cultural-based indicators for environmental assessment that we have seen are focused on indigenous peoples. Without questioning the extraordinary richness, adaptiveness, and importance value of the native lores held by such groups, we should nevertheless point out that many, if not all, communities which identify themselves as nonindigenous also possess their own folk traditions of understanding and practice which may contribute significantly to biodiversity and ecosystem management. Moreover, nonindigenous people make up a majority of the world's population and occupy a greater portion of the global land surface Therefore a global indicator that is truly global should not exclude these latter groups. Following this same logic, the indicator should be relevant and equally applicable for vernacular as well as non-vernacular language speakers, native and immigrant, rural and urban, literate and illiterate, stratified and egalitarian, market-integrated and subsistence-oriented, groups. The VITEK fulfills this criterion of global applicability without discrimination.

We should point out that according to the pressure-state-response model of indicator classification, the VITEK would be categorized as a "state" type of indicator, which refers to the quality or state of the environment. We argue that baseline information about the current and changing state of TEK is needed in the first place before it is possible to identify the causes (i.e. pressures) of such states, whether these may be considered negative or positive reinforcements, or to judge the effectiveness of policy actions (i.e. responses). The VITEK measures dynamic states, which is to say trends, through analysis of time-series data. In an initial application, the time-series is accomplished by way of inference based on the recorded knowledge differentials for tested age-groups (see sections 6.3.2, 6.4.1) . However, the indicator is easily adaptable for true time-series data collection through the repeated application of the assessment method in the same places at different time periods and comparison of the changes in the trends over time. This in fact would be the best way to use it: as a monitoring device at regular intervals. Furthermore, the optimal use of the VITEK would be as one member of an integrated set of indicators on the environment. As an indicator of TEK vitality, we consider that it provides information about a crucially important domain for ecosystem assessment. Used in conjunction with other environmental, social, and cultural indicators, it can be used not only to track changes in ecosystem health but also to investigate the causal linkages between different variables making up biodiversity and cultural diversity. For example, examination of the changes in the covariation between the VITEK and ecological indicators of biodiversity over time would provide insight into the significance of TEK preservation and loss for biodiversity conservation. In the same vein, the covariation between the VITEK and language-based indicators (e.g., the Index of Linguistic Diversity) would be revealing of the closeness of the relationship between local language and local knowledge and therefore provide a test of the appropriateness of linguistic trends as a proxy indicator of traditional knowledge, innovations, and practices.