“It's good for the forest and it's traditional”: Indigenous ecologies and land management at the community/NGO interface in southern Belize
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: In 2019, the Maya Leaders Alliance unveiled “The Future We Dream,” a vision document sharing a common interest among the Mopan and Q'eqchi’ Maya people of Belize for a future in which they are committed to sustaining a reciprocal relationship with and stewardship of the land. In this context, this paper shares results from three communities bordering a forest reserve who were asked to identify important practices, which they considered “traditional” and “environmentally sustainable,” as part of a collaborative NGO project to promote indigenous forest management. Through analysis of data collected alongside Indigenous Community Promoters (ICPs), it explores how these terms were defined and deployed to discuss healthy forests and healthy communities. The paper discusses how collaborative and community‐led data collection addresses both the need to decolonize sustainability discourse and produce better data for better project outcomes (Maya, traditional ecological knowledge, forest management, environmental sustainability, indigenous land rights).
DOI: 10.1111/cuag.12315
Authors: Kristina Baines, Pablo Miss (Miis)
Institutions: City University of New York, Guttman Community College
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Life on land
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4394836930