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 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.

Download Promoting Indigenous knowledge and values for more sustainable water resource management

This knowledge brief is based on Parsons, M. and Fisher, K. (2020). Indigenous peoples and transformations in freshwater governance and management. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, in press. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2020.03.006