title: Improving conservation outcomes with insights from local experts and bureaucracies.
abstract: We describe conservation built on local expertise such that it constitutes a hybrid form of traditional and bureaucratic knowledge. Researchers regularly ask how local knowledge might be applied to programs linked to protected areas. By examining the production of conservation knowledge in southern Mexico, we assert local expertise is already central to conservation. However, bureaucratic norms and social identity differences between lay experts and conservation practitioners prevent the public valuing of traditional knowledge. We make this point by contrasting 2 examples. The first is a master's thesis survey of local experts regarding the biology of the King Vulture (Sarcoramphus papa) in which data collection took place in communities adjacent to the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. The second is a workshop sponsored by the same reserve that instructed farmers on how to monitor endangered species, including the King Vulture. In both examples, conservation knowledge would not have existed without traditional knowledge. In both examples, this traditional knowledge is absent from scientific reporting. On the basis of these findings, we suggest conservation outcomes may be improved by recognizing the knowledge contributions local experts already make to conservation programming.
authors.affiliation: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, North Carolina State University, 4700 Hillsborough Street, Raleigh, NC 27606, U.S.A.
authors.forename: Nora
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Haenn
authors.forename: Birgit
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Schmook
authors.forename: Yol
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Reyes
authors.forename: Sophie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Calmé
mesh_terms: D001290:Attitude; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends; D056727:Endangered Species; D006801:Humans; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors
keywords: Autoridad ambiental; King Vulture; Latin America; Latinoamérica; Sarcoramphus papa; borrar del conocimiento; conocimiento ecológico local; environmental governance; erasure of knowledge; ethnoecology; etnoecología; local ecological knowledge; zopilote rey