The Global Studies Journal
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VOLUME 8 ISSUE 3
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Key Issues in Management of Indigenous
Protected AreasA Perspective from Northern Australia
BENXIANG ZENG AND ROLF GERRITSEN
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Key Issues in Management of Indigenous
Protected Areas: A Perspective from Northern
Australia
Benxiang Zeng, Charles Darwin University, Australia
Rolf Gerritsen, Charles Darwin University, Australia
Abstract: An Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) is an area of land that the Indigenous traditional owners have entered into
a voluntary agreement with the Australian Government. This arrangement is to promote biodiversity and conserve cultural resources in line with international standards. A successful IPA supposedly brings together traditional
Indigenous knowledge and modern science for effective land management and environmental conservation. At present
this idea is covertly contested. This paper reviews existing practice and research to identify the key issues in IPA
management and to provide insights into future effective management.
Keywords: Effectiveness, Indigenous Protected Area, Traditional Knowledge
Introduction
n Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) is an area of land over which the traditional
Indigenous owners have entered into a voluntary agreement with the Australian
Government to promote biodiversity and conserve cultural resources in line with
international standards. In return, the Government agrees to provide some financial support – via
the “Caring for Country” Program – to the traditional owners to carry out the land management
work required to conserve its ecological and cultural value. An IPA supposedly brings together
traditional Indigenous knowledge and modern science for effective land management
(Department of the Environment 2012a). Australia’s traditional lands’ owners want to manage
their country, and pass on their knowledge to succeeding generations. They are extremely
concerned about protecting sites of cultural significance and the maintenance of important
resources, such as water sources in remote central desert country. Therefore, Indigenous people
consider an IPA as both a recognition of their customary rights and usage and a valuable
investment by the Australian Government in the future.
In 1998 the first Indigenous Protected Area – Nantawarrina, was declared in South Australia
(Department of the Environment 2012a). Since then, all Australian states and territories have
declared IPAs. By August 2013, there were 60 declared Indigenous Protected Areas covering just
over 48 million hectares (i.e. 0.48 million square kilometres) across Australia, with 27 IPA
Consultation Projects (Figure 1). IPAs range in size from one square kilometre (i.e Putalina in
Tasmania) to almost 100,000 square kilometres (i.e. the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in Western
Australia). Indigenous Protected Areas now cover an area that equates to around 36% of
Australia’s National Reserve System (NRS) (Department of the Environment 2013). Most IPAs
were born out of the desire of Indigenous people to protect the land through their management.
This management includes traditional practices that demonstrate the value of the land.
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Figure 1: Distribution of IPAs in Australia (by August 2013)
“Northern Australia is broadly defined as the parts of Australia north of the Tropic of
Capricorn, spanning northern Western Australia, the Northern Territory and northern
Queensland. Areas south of the Tropic that are integral to the North’s development will be
viewed within the context of ‘northern Australia’, where relevant. Alice Springs, for example, is
an important regional centre servicing a number of surrounding communities and industries in
northern Australia.” (Commonwealth of Australia 2014, p. 2). Of the total of 60 IPAs, there are
23 in northern Australia, totalling around 85% of the total IPA areas. Of a total of 27 IPA
consultation projects, there are 20 in northern Australia, making it the largest proportion in
regard to project numbers and areas of coverage. Many IPAs surround and/or adjoin other
protected areas, such as national parks and reserves. This positioning potentially enhances
regional conservation efforts, and thus creates possibilities for significant biodiversity and
cultural management outcomes on a broad scale. The IPA system has increased quickly in last 15
years, albeit from a small base. We believe that more IPAs will be declared in near future as
outcomes of the IPA consultation projects become evident.
The establishment of an IPA has two significant implications. On the one hand, the IPA
creates a mechanism to include Indigenous lands into the NRS and so to contribute to significant
bioregional conservation. On the other hand, utilising the IPA mechanism significantly increases
the difficulties in assessing ecological management performance and effectiveness, particularly
when given that IPAs are virtually independent from the currently existing institutional
arrangements that include the direct government departmental control of official NRS parks.
IPAs are more informally organized and have various forms of self-management without a
uniform reporting mechanism on outcomes.
The IPA programme was evaluated in 2006 by Brian Gilligan (Gilligan 2006). It was
regarded as “Australia’s most successful innovation in protected area management and in
Indigenous engagement in environmental management” (Gilligan 2006, P.2). However, the
review did not provide hard evidence demonstrating the IPA’s contribution to environmental
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conservation. There were noted deficits in learning from Biosphere Reserve practices over the
world; combating poverty and inequity vs. environmental damage; real employment in natural
resource management (NRM) and protected area management; tourism vs. educational activities;
transferring traditional knowledge to management activities; and does it respond to large scale
conservation and/or to regional development? All these issues are important for an effective
IPA, and worth further discussion. Therefore, this paper considers some of these conundrums by
reviewing current IPA practices and related research literature, to provide some insights into the
effective management of IPAs. In particular this work focuses on: the contribution of IPAs to the
NRS; regional development and IPAs; the assessment of IPAs, and the role of traditional
ecological knowledge in IPA management.
Some Key Issues in IPA Management
The Contribution of IPAs to the NRS
Whether or not an IPA contributes to the NRS, and whether or not local Indigenous communities
and relevant State/Territory governments have a strong interest and commitment to the IPA, are
important means to assess that IPA management (Department of the Environment 2012b).
It is recognised that one intent of the IPA programme is to include a large area of Indigenous
owned lands in the NRS without purchasing the land, a cost efficient method compared with the
traditional process, by which lands were purchased or resumed by governments to establish
national parks. However, an argument can be made that including Indigenous lands into the NRS
does not necessarily mean conserving these lands. Only the effective management of individual
IPAs would ensure that the biodiversity of IPA lands are preserved and protected. There is a lack
of evidence that environmental outcomes have been achieved, while there is a shortage of
systematic data that analyse any correlations between socio-cultural changes and
establishment/implementation of IPAs (Tremblay 2008).
On the other hand, the benefits of the current NRS remain debatable. The land included in
the NRS is often degraded ex-pastoral leases or facing environmental challenges from introduced
flora and fauna or by global climate change. In this context, Mackey, Watson, Hope and Gilmore
(2008) argued that the foundation of an effective conservation strategy in Australia, which would
be able effectively to adapt to global climate change, must be the development of a whole-of-
continent conservation plan. Slightly less ambitiously, Schlesinger and Gerritsen (2010)
suggested a broader scale conservation mechanism should be established to respond the special
situation in the deserts in Australia, where there exists significant temporal variation in climate
and environmental issues and the area is less populated (and hence harder to manage) and there is
little scientific knowledge about the biota. So, the future use and management of currently intact
lands warrants special consideration. These arguments do not rule out the establishment of extra
protected areas, such as new IPAs, but they do raise some concerns about how to re-evaluate and
re-assess the contribution of the NRS and its different components to future environmental
conservation in Australia. Tremblay (2008) analysed this management failure in the Northern
Territory and suggested an institutional change to respond to a large scale of biodiversity
conservation and regional development. For IPAs, the guidelines being developed are important
to provide practical guidance to how to achieve management plans that recognise the connections
between Indigenous people, country, traditional law and culture, while also meeting national and
international standards for protected area management (Hill et al. 2011; Ross et al. 2009).
Therefore, a transparent mechanism to prioritize park objectives at a large scale, and a clear
process to evaluate achievements and failures, is required. This will ensure that the park
management is not perceived as a cynical attempt to centrally control some kinds of economic
activities (such as tourism development) at localized levels, and will also avoid conflicts over
land use at large regional levels.
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Regional Development and IPAs
Land management in northern Australia, including the conservation and natural resource
management sector, will potentially contribute significantly to the northern Australian economy,
as well as to Indigenous socio-cultural conservation and development. The growth markets for
biodiversity and ecosystem services could provide further economic opportunities, particularly
for Indigenous communities; Effective management of these unique landscapes will create
opportunities for increased tourism and ensure future generations continue to enjoy these world
class environments (Commonwealth of Australia 2014). Thus the IPAs could play important
roles in achieving these goals. Despite the noble goals that are declared in management plans for
protected areas, including IPAs, these plans may not contribute much to the capacity of parks to
fulfil their roles in conservation and socioeconomic development. The failure of parks to embody
the ideals found in the international literature on park management, and the practical difficulty of
assessing the performance of park institutions, reveal profound problems with park management,
in particular a failure to incorporate contemporary social, cultural and economic goals, such as
the disharmony between the major stakeholders, the limited contributions towards regional
income increase and wellbeing enhancement, the absence of monitoring systems and valuation
frameworks, and the shortage in public investment on the NRS (Gerritsen 2010; Tremblay 2008).
The 2006 evaluation (Gilligan 2006) concluded that IPAs successfully delivered improved
social outcomes in regional development. The evaluation suggested that most IPA projects
reported positive contribution to social aspects of local communities, such as improved early
childhood development, reduction of substance abuse, reinforced family and community
structures (Gilligan 2006). The conclusion was generally based on stakeholders’ perspectives.
Although it is arguable that measurable outcomes necessarily provide better evidence, we prefer
to believe that some key measurable outcomes would triangulate the reported perspectives. This
suggests that it is useful to establish a more comprehensive system to assess the effectiveness of
IPAs, which will be discussed in next section.
The requirements of Australia’s IPA program are multi-faceted, and the main official
objectives of a protected area are environmental and biodiversity conservation (Concu and May
2010; Gilligan 2006; Smyth 2006). However, regional development is not substantially
considered as a main driver. While the IPAs’ contribution to the National Reserve System seems
obvious, the importance accorded to its role in regional development is less clear.
However, in the areas where local people reside in or at the vicinity of the protected area it is
expected also to contribute to the social and economic well-being of these people, i.e. local
livelihoods. This latter community development role is strongly supported by most Indigenous
Land Councils. Unless concrete efforts are made to address the community development-cum-
livelihood issues of Indigenous peoples living in and around protected areas, park management
aimed to protect wildlife will rarely succeed. Participatory park management that involves
Indigenous peoples and that addresses livelihood issues of Indigenous communities will
ultimately succeed in its efforts toward wildlife conservation (Nepal 2002).
As most IPAs are located in peripheral rural areas or the remote rangeland areas of central
Australia, their importance for regional development is even greater than would be the case if
they were located in more settled regions. Therefore, compared with the national parks element
of the national reserve system, IPAs are inevitably more likely to be strongly associated with
regional development and community involvement. To some extent, IPAs are a vehicle to engage
Indigenous people in local development including not only environmental conservation but also
economic growth and social development.
Despite decades of international efforts towards involving indigenous and traditional peoples
in protected area management, there are few successful examples (Nepal 2002). This seems to be
even clearer in multifunctional protected areas, where in some cases the social and cultural
dimension of sustainable development can be even more valued than the economic or the
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environmental dimensions. Therefore, the paradigm that conceived protected areas essentially as
instruments for environmental conservation is being somehow replaced, at least in Europe, by the
idea that protected areas are primarily instruments for the integration of environmental
conservation with regional and local (economic) development (Mose 2007). An evolution of this
type has also occurred with Australia’s IPAs.
It is debatable whether the establishment of protected areas will significantly contribute to
the regional development of local communities and local areas. A number of case studies in
Europe have suggested that the direct economic benefits of a protected area for its respective
region seem to be relatively low, except perhaps for the local and regional tourism sector and for
the activities and businesses related to agriculture and forestry. On the contrary, the evidence
seems to point to a far more important impact for indirect economic, social, cultural and
environmental effects (Mose 2007). A correlation exists between the increase in public
participation in the planning and management of protected areas and the concomitant increase in
the emphasis that is given to regional economic development, instead of a singular focus on
environmental protection. This is especially so where in some cases the social and cultural
dimensions of community development can be even more valued than the economic or the
environmental dimensions (Mose 2007), which is the case for the IPAs in northern Australia.
Assessment of Management Effectiveness of IPAs
Review of the IPA system has focussed on the programme management itself (rather than
individual IPAs’ management) and its cost-benefit effectiveness from the perspective of national
investment in protected areas (or national reserves system building), as well as the socio-
economic aspects of IPAs. The indicators applied were mainly based on stakeholders’
perspectives. It is obvious that the assessment on the core of the IPA program — its contribution
to environmental conservation – needs to be paid more attention in future evaluation.
IPAs are based on voluntary arrangements. This raises a real issue as to how the
management approaches and standards applied to the NRS could be transferred to IPA
management (Walker 2010). There has not been a set approach to assess the management of
IPAs. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has been advocating a
systematic approach to assess the management effectiveness of protected areas (Hockings,
Stolton, and Dudley 2000). It would be helpful to design and test an approach for assessment of
management effectiveness of IPAs in Australia based on the IUCN system.
Thus an IPA would be assessed on criteria such as: representativeness of the lands or sea in
an Australian Biogeographical Region with significant natural and cultural heritage values;
community participation; capacity of the community; and the support from the relevant
State/Territory nature conservation agency (Department of Environment, 2012b).
Payments for ecosystem services (PES), also known as payments for environmental services
(or benefits), are incentives offered to landowners or land caretakers in exchange for managing
their land to provide some sort of ecological service. They have been defined as "a transparent
system for the additional provision of environmental services through conditional payments to
voluntary providers” (Tacconi 2012). An IPA is actually a PES-based activity. However, the
basis for PES and IPA investment is unproven in terms of securing the maximum return for
conservation dollars (Greiner 2010). In many remote or very remote areas, there is a very small
population and human disturbance of the natural system is limited. So, purely from
environmental conservation perspective, there are not strong reasons to set up a protected area.
Hence, the intrusion of community development and local livelihoods would be one of elements.
IPAs are being applied to try to respond to these both issues. However, without any strong
institutional arrangements, management practice has been shifting between environmental
conservation and regional development, and is hard to identify if the IPA system is achieving
either (as indicated by Tremblay 2008). Apart from generally positive assessments of individual
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IPAs (Walker 2011), there has been a paucity of literature available to assess the management
performance of IPAs. Concu and May (2010) suggested that “Australia’s IPA program has
extended the national system of protected areas with little attention to the environmental
conditions of the landscape, and with minimal public expenditure. It has not extended Indigenous
landowners’ powers to manage their land; IPAs are rarely effective in addressing environmental
problems that originate outside their boundaries.” In addition, governmental policy makers and
their scientific confreres may have different views about what is worth conserving, as against the
views of Indigenous people (Walker 2011; Zander 2013). Consequently, whether an IPA
protects biodiversity may be the subject of contestation about how that is defined. And the value
of an IPA would be defined differently, depending upon whether Indigenous community
development and livelihoods were prioritised or pure (i.e. scientific) conservation characteristics
were the priority. To this we now turn.
Traditional Knowledge in IPA Management
The indigenous people of the world possess an immense knowledge of their environments, based
on millennia of living close to nature. They have an understanding of the properties of plants and
animals, the functioning of ecosystems and the techniques for using and managing them that is
particular and often detailed (Mayor 1994). Indeed one recent analysis (Gammage 2011)
proposed that the whole of Australia, before the European conquest, was a closely managed
estate. Via fire Aboriginal people managed Australia’s ecology for millennia.
The value of Indigenous knowledge is yet to be fully utilized in the implementation of
sustainable development policies. Unfortunately, policies for conserving and restoring ecological
sites often ignore, or only cursorily incorporate, local Indigenous people’s skills and traditional
conservation techniques (such as with the use of fire, cf Gammage 2011). Too often Indigenous
people are mainly seen as subsidized labour.
There has been a lot of research exploring Indigenous traditional knowledge for
environmental management, especially on topics such as environmental philosophy in indigenous
culture (e.g. Kuo et al. 2011; Muecke 2011.) and Indigenous participation (e.g. Nepal 2002;
Walker 2011). Research in different parts of the world reflects local special interests. In Australia
it is important to acknowledge the misappropriation of this knowledge as a major threat and
noting the pressure on Indigenous knowledges from growing international interest in developing
natural and cultural resources (Smallacombe, Davis and Quiggin 2006; Zeng 2011; Zeng and
Gerritsen 2011). In Taiwan, many studies focus on the conflicts between Indigenous traditional
knowledge and modern environmental management approaches (cf. Chi 2004; Lin 2010; Lin
2011). In China, a lot of studies have concentrated on traditional knowledge protection (cf. Liang
and Bai 2009).
The efforts to integrate Indigenous knowledge into mainstream natural resource management
would contribute to understanding of and solutions for the contemporary crises of over-
exploitation of natural resource (Ross and Pickering 2002).
Insufficient Public Investment
At present there are relatively small amounts of money invested in the IPA system. The greater
part of this investment comes in the form of Australian Government funding. In 2010/2011
financial year, $11.25 million was committed by Australian Government, through the Caring for
our Country initiative, to support IPAs (Table 1). This included funding for Australia's 42
declared Indigenous Protected Areas and to help develop new Indigenous Protected Areas
through new and continuing consultation projects. For newly declared IPAs, the average funding
was $206.94 per sq. km, and the ongoing support for previously declared IPAs was only $20.60-
$57.37 per sq. km.
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ZENG AND GERRITSEN: KEY ISSUES IN MANAGEMENT OF IPAS
Table 1: Funding Overview 2010/11*
Funding type Total 2010/11
Funding
Funded
IPA
No.
Average funding
per IPA
Average
funding per
sq. km
Newly declared IPA projects $1,335,500 10 $133,550 $206.94
Newly funded IPA
consultation projects
$560,000 8 $70,000
Ongoing IPA consultation
projects
$3,866,000 30 $128,867
Multi-year funding - declared
IPAs over five years
$4,112,500 23 $178,804 $20.60
Multi-year funding - declared
IPAs over four years
$1,376,250 8 $172,031 $57.37
Total $11,250,250 Data sources: (Department of Environment, 2011a)
From 2008-09 to 2012-13, the funding for Indigenous Protected Areas was around $50
million (Data source: Department of Environment, 2011b). However, considering the large area
of IPAs (i.e. 48 million hectares, or 0.48 million sq. km), the governmental investment per sq. km
of IPA is only just over $100 over five years. IPA investment is much less than average
investment for the rest of the NRS. This might suggest that governments see the IPA system as a
cheap means of expanding the NRS on the one hand, and that the investment in IPAs is
insufficient on the other.
Discussion
The IPA format incorporated landowners and solved some problems (such as: lack of Indigenous
ownership and authority on land management; absence of Indigenous control at different levels;
relatively high management cost; et al.) that occur in the co-management model being practiced
in many parks and other conservation types within the national reserves system (Smyth 2006).
However, Aboriginal management participation raised other issues such as the potential
exclusion or restrictions on external intervention including governmental guidance and NGOs
participation. These possibilities have some attraction, given the relatively low capacity of local
Indigenous communities to manage conservation management and regional development
program funding in ways that accountability-obsessed government funding agencies wanted.
Australian Indigenous people suffer significant disadvantages in their wellbeing, compared
with non-Indigenous people. In many rich countries including Australia, the gap in wellbeing
between indigenous and non-indigenous emerges through the process of development, and
become clear and substantial at some stage (MacDonald 2010). Hunter (2006) showed that
around 40% of the Indigenous population living in remote and very remote Australia – about
50,000 people - had incomes below the Australian poverty line. Although this population is only
around 0.2% of the Australian population, they reside in about 1,200 small geographically
dispersed communities, over a huge area that covers about 20 per cent of the Australian continent
where most IPAs are located (Altman 2007). Altman (2007) proposed a Hybrid Economy model
that suggested the nature of the economic problem in remote Indigenous Australia is mis-
specified, and challenged the dominant, market-based regional development policies applied in
remote and very remote Australia. The IPA would be one vehicle to engage local communities in
such a hybrid economy model and contribute to regional development.
An understanding of Indigenous traditional knowledge and how it differs from non-
indigenous knowledge is an important basis for determining how it is applied. Knowing what it
encompasses and how it is acquired and held is fundamental to being able to make good use of
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that knowledge and to encourage all parties to be aware of the added value its use will bring. In
many places around the world, indigenous people possess valuable traditional
environmental/ecological knowledge through interacting with their proximate ecosystem.
Typically, these indigenous people have their own experience and knowledge of how to exploit
surrounding ecological resources. This knowledge is earned through practical experience and is
transmitted from one generation to the next through oral communication, mythic reiteration and
ritual practice. Indigenous ecological knowledge is utilized in customary practices such as
hunting, fishing and gathering. Since these activities require knowledge of customary ways of
procuring these resources, the exercise by Indigenous peoples of their rights to carry out these
activities in accordance with their laws and customs may be regarded as a demonstration of their
assertion of their rights to their traditional knowledge systems.
The realization of the pivotal role of TEK in natural resource management has paved the
way for seeking participation of locals in its policy and decision-making process related to the
environment. However, TEK is always strongly associated with specific locations and scales.
Although there are many common/general principles shared in TEK in different groups of
Indigenous people, it will be distorted and misunderstood or misinterpreted if it is placed beyond
locations and scales (Zeng, Schlesinger, and Gerritsen 2014).
It is believed that the Indigenous knowledge from different Indigenous communities in
different countries would have some differences and similarities. Different researchers from
different cultural backgrounds would also have different observations and perspectives on these
issues. A comparative study, which involves researchers from different backgrounds, therefore,
would be helpful to understand different Indigenous cultures and therefore contribute to the
integration of traditional knowledge into modern sciences to find the solutions for global
environmental crises. Further research on the integration of Indigenous knowledge into the
modern natural resource management knowledge system and contemporary practices would
benefit the effective management of IPAs.
Insufficient public investment would hinder the establishment and functioning of IPAs. It is
possible to tap some additional sources of funding for IPAs such as funding sources from private
sector and non-governmenal organizations (NGOs). One of possibilities could be various forms
of royalties. This could be easily applied, for example, in the case of the management of feral
camels (Zeng 2014). To manage feral camels, participation by stakeholders is critical. Indigenous
people are more central to feral camel management than many other stakeholders, given that 43%
of feral camels live on Aboriginal lands (Saalfeld and Edwards 2010). However, there are few
mechanisms for them to be involved. Besides benefits from environmental conservation and
cultural protection, an economic incentive is also required and might work well in practice. A
royalty on each camel removed from the landscape, payable by the government and the
pastoralists, could be applied based on the calculation of reduction of carbon emissions by such
camel removal activities (Zeng 2014). This could be called a “carbon royalty”. Stakeholders such
as Indigenous people could directly benefit from such program, which would also enhance the
management of IPAs.
Another new form of investment in landscape scale conservation that could be applied to the
large IPAs of Australia could be from private and philanthropic trusts. This was an option
pursued in a recent analysis of the options for the conservation management of central Australia
(Salmon and Gerritsen 2013). In recent years a variety of philanthropic trusts have purchased or
leased land in remote Australia mostly for the purposes of biodiversity conservation. It would be
a new initiative but one that is eminently feasible for these trusts to form partnerships with IPAs.
Other options for securing extra funding for IPAs include for them to establish eco-tourism
enterprises. These would have the added dimension of access to Indigenous culture, so they
would probably find a ready market. This option must be handled with some caution. Indigenous
tourism in central Australia has recently declined because governments “overloaded” Indigenous
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tourism organizations or facilities with extra roles, such as community or economic development
(Gerritsen and Zeng 2011).
Full participation by Indigenous stakeholders in the whole process of design and
management of an IPA is important. Meanwhile, a broad consultation and cooperation with
external stakeholders (governments, conservation organizations, and the public) is also critical,
as the ultimate goal of IPA funding is that they contribute to the National Reserve System and
regional development.
The Biosphere Reserve is an internationally recognized concept that specially deals with the
potential conflicts between regional development and environmental conservation at a large scale
of protected areas landscapes. Under the Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB) of The
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), there is a World
Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR). Composed of 631 biosphere reserves in 119 countries,
the WNBR of the MAB Programme represents a unique tool for international co-operation
through sharing knowledge, exchanging experiences, building capacity and promoting best
practices Biosphere reserves harmonize conservation of biological and cultural diversity, and
economic and social development, through partnerships between people and nature (UNESCO
2014a). In practice, biosphere reserves harmonize conservation of biological and cultural
diversity, and economic and social development, through partnerships between people and nature
(UNESCO 2014b). There is the potential to apply the concept of Biosphere Reserve to IPAs and
so link the IPAs to regional development, including monetising public access and understanding
of Indigenous culture and biodiversity conservation on Indigenous lands.
The authors propose that, generally, a better way for Indigenous Australian to actively
participate in natural resource and environmental management is through their indirect
participation in this management. Similarly indirect participation in economic exploitation and
business operations is preferred, given that the general lack of Indigenous governance and
managerial capacity, their lower empowerment and limited human capital in commercial
activities have been some of the important inhibitors to driving Indigenous economic
development in Australia (Ernst & Young 2014). However, Indigenous traditional knowledge
and their ownership of Indigenous lands would support them sharing the significant benefits of
integrated land management in national land management and environmental conservation
strategies.
Conclusions
IPAs are a creative mechanism to organise biodiversity conservation on Indigenous lands without
transfer of land ownership. However, several issues remain without current solutions.
One of the important issues is the contribution of IPAs to the NRS. There is evidence that
some environmental outcomes have not been achieved, while there is a shortage of systematic
data that analyses the correlations between socio-cultural changes and the establishment and
implementation of IPAs. There is a need for further evidence-based research in this regard.
Another issue is that, compared with the rest of the NRS, IPAs are inevitably more likely to
be managed with concurrent regional development and community engagement elements.
However, it is debatable whether the establishment of protected areas will significantly
contribute/accelerate the regional development of local Indigenous communities and local areas.
There is probably some potential to join Indigenous communities’ IPA activities with other
economic development activities to get further benefit from applying Indigenous traditional
culture and customary use of natural resources for their own economic benefit.
The fact that IPAs are based on voluntary arrangements raises a real issue as to how the
management approaches and standards applied to the NRS could be transferred to IPA
management, or indeed if they are particularly relevant. Effective management is the key to
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secure the initial achievement of the IPA, but there has not been an Indigenous-derived approach
to assess the components of such management of IPAs.
It would be helpful to design and test an approach for assessment of management
effectiveness of IPAs in Australia based on the IUCN system. The Biosphere Reserve would be
an effective way to respond to institutional arrangement to place IPAs on the more practical
combined goals of both biodiversity conservation and regional development. One of most
successful achievements of the IPA programme was to include a huge area of Indigenous lands in
the NRS without purchasing that land. From the government perspective this is a cost effective
approach, compared with the land purchase and conversion process traditionally associated with
parks establishment. However, this government control, via its funding, provides a challenging
management dynamic. Indigenous people are often aware of how the “scientific” is privileged
over Indigenous knowledge (Walker 2011). How to ensure the IPA management would be both
effective and inclusive remains an issue requiring further research.
If PES is a scientific basis for governmental investments in IPAs, the monitoring and
assessment of IPAs’ management becomes more important as IPAs are added to the NRS.
Insufficient investment would hinder the establishment and functioning of IPAs. However, there
are some possibilities to seek extra sources of funding such as “carbon royalty”, private and
philanthropic trusts, and income-generating development activities.
Australian land management that incorporates traditional and non-traditional owners is a
significant topic. As Australian land use evolves and includes the establishment or emergence of
traditional owners, the issue of management requires sensitive research interventions. In IPA
management, it is important to explore the effective approaches and mechanisms to integrate
Indigenous knowledge into modern environmental management knowledge system and NRM
practice such as, for example, how to incorporate aspects of such Indigenous knowledge and
traditional practice into the requirements of government reporting mechanism. Given IPAs are
being actually applied, particularly in northern Australia, to try to respond to both issues,
environmental conservation and community development/local livelihood, a further research in
how to apply Biosphere Reserve concept in the IPA establishment and management in northern
Australia is also recommended.
Acknowledgements
Comments by two anonymous reviewers greatly helped to improve an earlier version of this
manuscript.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Dr. Benxiang Zeng: Senior Research Fellow, The Northern Institute, Charles Darwin University,
Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia
Prof. Rolf Gerritsen: Professorial Research Fellow, The Northern Institute, Charles Darwin
University, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia
31
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