Niching sustainability in an Indigenous community: protected areas, autonomous initiatives, and negotiating power in natural resource management

Although sustainability science has been developed within the Western knowledge system, and Indigenous science has been studied at the local level, these two streams of thought are premised on a common understanding of the relationship between humans and the environment. The practitioners of each, however, have not yet engaged in productive, practical dialog. This paper used cooperative game theory to better understand the choices and tradeoffs made by Indigenous Taiwanese villagers who were in a “competitive” situation with regard to Indigenous autonomy and government-led protected areas. The aim was to understand how interactions among different groups of local people could affect community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) processes that aim to balance environmental sustainability with Indigenous autonomy. Results show that the knowledge and rights of Indigenous people could be part of a compromising collaboration with legislation-supported protected areas, if this collaboration benefits Indigenous autonomy as well as sustainability of the local environment and livelihoods. Indigenous science can inform changing landscapes, while sustainability science can provide analytical approaches and planning schemes for resilience. We suggest, though, that the trade-off process should be open and include a well-communicated mechanism through which all parties can negotiate power in a mutually agreeable way, merging Indigenous and sustainability concerns into one actionable collaboration. The types of conflicts analyzed in this study are characteristic of the conflicts typically associated with sustainable development.