Riley and her group of expert contributors supply a unique set of worldwide case studies and policy analyses as guidance for indigenous communities and their partners, in attempting to protect their intellectual property. Much of the existing literature already addresses the poor fit between western regimes of intellectual property rights and the requirements for safeguarding indigenous cultural resources. The manuscript gets beyond these negative claims in depicting positive efforts at protecting indigenous knowledge and cultures, notwithstanding these legal limitations. The reader is exposed to a wide array of legal, political, organizational, and contractual strategies deployed by indigenous groups to protect their intellectual property interests.

This book addresses the right of indigenous peoples to live, own and use their traditional territories. A profound relationship with land and territories characterizes indigenous groups, but indigenous peoples have been and are repeatedly deprived of their lands. This book analyzes whether the international legal regime provides indigenous peoples with the collective right to live on their traditional territories. Through its meticulous and wide-ranging examination of the interaction between international law and indigenous peoples’ land rights, the work explores several burning issues such as collective rights, self-determination, autonomy, property rights, and restitution of land. In assessing the human rights approach to land rights the book delves into the notion of past violations and the role of human rights law in providing for remedies, reparation and restitution. It also argues that there is a new phase in the relationship between States and indigenous peoples in the making of territorial agreements. Based on its analysis of indigenous peoples’ land rights under international law, this book proposes an original theory as regards the legal status of indigenous peoples. It explores how indigenous peoples have been the victims of the rules governing title to territory since the inception of international law, and how under the current human rights regime, indigenous peoples have now gained the status of actors of international law. Published under the Transnational Publishers imprint.

A group of distinguished environmentalists analyze and advocate for community-based natural resource management (CBNRM). They offer an overview of this transnational movement and its links between environmental management and social justice agendas. This book will be valuable to instructors, practitioners, and activists in environmental anthropology, justice, and policy, in cultural geography, political ecology, indigenous rights, conservation biology, and community-based cultural resource management.

Based on an ethnographic account of subsistence use of Amazonian forests by Wapishana people in Guyana, Edges, Frontiers, Fringes examines the social, cultural and behavioral bases for sustainability and resilience in indigenous resource use. Developing an original framework for holistic analysis, it demonstrates that flexible interplay among multiple modes of environmental understanding and decision-making allows the Wapishana to navigate socio-ecological complexity successfully in ways that reconcile short-term material needs with long-term maintenance and enhancement of the resource base.