""This passionate, well-researched book makes a compelling case for a paradigm shift in conservation practice. It explores new policies and practices, which offer alternatives to exclusionary, uninhabited national parks and wilderness areas and make possible new kinds of protected areas that recognize Indigenous peoples' rights and benefit from their knowledge and conservation contributions"--Provided by publisher"--

Conventional approaches to managing protected areas have often seen people and nature as separate entities. They preclude human communities from using natural resources and assume that their concerns are incompatible with conservation. Protected area approaches and models that see conservation as compatible with human communities are explored. The main themes are co-managed protected areas and community conserved areas. Practical guidance is offered, drawing on recent experience, reflections and advice developed at the local, national, regional and international level.

A vast number of national parks and protected areas throughout the world have been established in the customary territories of Indigenous peoples. In many cases these conservation areas have displaced Indigenous peoples, undermining their cultures, livelihoods, and self-governance, while squandering opportunities to benefit from their knowledge, values, and practices. This book makes the case for a paradigm shift in conservation from exclusionary, uninhabited national parks and wilderness areas to new kinds of protected areas that recognize Indigenous peoples’ conservation contributions and rights. It documents the beginnings of such a paradigm shift and issues a clarion call for transforming conservation in ways that could enhance the effectiveness of protected areas and benefit Indigenous peoples in and near tens of thousands of protected areas worldwide. Indigenous Peoples, National Parks, and Protected Areas integrates wide-ranging, multidisciplinary intellectual perspectives with detailed analyses of new kinds of protected areas in diverse parts of the world. Eleven geographers and anthropologists contribute nine substantive fieldwork-based case studies. Their contributions offer insights into experience with new conservation approaches in an array of countries, including Australia, Canada, Guatemala, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Peru, South Africa, and the United States. This book breaks new ground with its in-depth exploration of changes in conservation policies and practices—and their profound ramifications for Indigenous peoples, protected areas, and social reconciliation.

How are biological diversity, protected areas, indigenous knowledge and religious worldviews related? From an anthropological perspective, this book provides an introduction into the complex subject of conservation policies that cannot be addressed without recognising the encompassing relationship between discursive, political, economic, social and ecological facets. By facing these interdependencies across global, national and local dynamics, it draws on an ethnographic case study among Maya-Q'eqchi' communities living in the margins of protected areas in Guatemala. In documenting the cultural aspects of landscape, the study explores the coherence of diverse expressions of indigenous knowledge. It intends to remind of cultural values and beliefs closely tied to subsistence activities and ritual practices that define local perceptions of the natural environment. The basic idea is to illustrate that there are different ways of knowing and reasoning, seeing and endowing the world with meaning, which include visible material and invisible interpretative understandings. These tend to be underestimated issues in international debates and may provide an alternative approach upon which conservation initiatives responsive to the needs of the humans involved should be based on.

National parks and other preserved spaces of nature have become iconic symbols of nature protection around the world. However, the worldviews of Indigenous peoples have been marginalized in discourses of nature preservation and conservation. As a result, for generations of Indigenous peoples, these protected spaces of nature have meant dispossession, treaty violations of hunting and fishing rights, and the loss of sacred places. Bridging Cultural Concepts of Nature brings together anthropologists and archaeologists, historians, linguists, policy experts, and communications scholars to discuss differing views and presents a compelling case for the possibility of more productive discussions on the environment, sustainability, and nature protection. Drawing on case studies from Scandinavia to Latin America and from North America to New Zealand, the volume challenges the old paradigm where Indigenous peoples are not included in the conservation and protection of natural areas and instead calls for the incorporation of Indigenous voices into this debate. This original and timely edited collection offers a global perspective on the social, cultural, economic, and environmental challenges facing Indigenous peoples and their governmental and NGO counterparts in the co-management of the planet’s vital and precious preserved spaces of nature.