Sustaining indigenous lifeways through collaborative and community-led wildlife conservation in the North Rupununi, Guyana

The purpose of this dissertation has been to analyze the culturally embedded conditions, and relational and institutional formations required for contemporary conservation and collaborative management arrangements to be beneficial for Indigenous communities. Within the context of a case study of the evolving conservation partnership between Guyana's North Rupununi District Development Board (NRDDB) and Indigenous communities, and the Iwokrama International Centre for Conservation and Development (IIC), the research critically examines the significance of local customary, governance institutions, and the agency of Indigenous communities within collaborative and community-led wildlife conservation and management. The key questions are: 1) How has the engagement between Indigenous and conservation systems contributed to: a) re-envisioning the notion of conservation through processes of negotiation and syncretism, and b) furthering Indigenous rights and priorities? 2) What has been the impact of the NRDDB-IIC partnership on the communities' capacity to develop local conservation leadership and governance? 3) How are culturally embedded Indigenous knowledges, customary practices of human animal relationships foundational to engaged and sustainable forms of community conservation and wildlife management?;While funding and leadership constraints to the NRDDB-IIC partnership have intensely impacted the communities, community actors have channeled the benefits of their partnership with IIC, alongside their local systems, into developing sustainable and syncretic forms of conservation leadership and socio-ecological governance. Evidence from my research shows that a distillation of the following elements within the NRDDB-IIC partnership facilitates the legitimacy of collaborative conservation practice for Indigenous communities: i) a higher level of community integration, leadership and decision-making; ii) a commitment by IIC to work with local governance and customary institutions; iii) a recognition of social justice principles and Indigenous rights; iv) the quality and reciprocal level of knowledge integration; vi) locally responsive capacity development opportunities; and vii) IIC's benefit-sharing mechanisms for communities. However exemplary, there is much space for IIC to improve in its collaborative management and conservation practices --- i.e., an expanded commitment to: community conservation leadership, social justice principles, and consistent engagement in community outreach, dialogue, and supporting capacity development.;The North Rupununi communities are empowering themselves to create change within their lives and to set a new vision for how they want to re-build and/or develop their communities, livelihoods, environments and cultural and political institutions. Key conservation processes involve navigating new relational spaces of: i) collaboration, ii) socio-ecological governance, iii) knowledge-sharing and knowledge-building, iv) ecological restoration and cultural revitalization, and v) animal interaction and harvesting. Despite complex and tenuous domains of power, the North Rupununi communities have not been passive victims or allowed themselves to be coerced, silenced or disempowered by the more inequitable and dissonant facets of global conservation and development. Moreover, this dissertation has illuminated the varied and innovative ways that community actors' self-consciously and self-determinedly engage with their conservation partners; articulate and mobilize their rights, customary institutions; and adapt and syncretize aspects of modern science, technology and management discourses that complement and augment revitalized Indigenous systems.;The North Rupununi villages of Fairview, Rewa, Surama and Wowetta were the chosen research sites. A critical ethnographic, collaborative, feminist and action-oriented methodological framework and qualitative multiple methods were mobilized for the empirical research. Findings from interviews, map biographies and observations with community participants indicated that culturally embedded customary norms (whether consciously acknowledged or not) inspire ethical and moral consciousness of responsibility and reciprocity in community members' relations toward animals and natural habitats. A combination of customary and regulatory norms, education, and the leadership of NRDDB-BHI, community researchers, village councils, and environmental youth leadership (i.e. Wildlife Clubs) have contributed to regenerating and restoring healthy population levels of threatened animal species. Community members in the North Rupununi regularly interact with over sixty local species of animals, and many more species of fish, according to their nutritional, cultural, spiritual and material significance.