Incorporating Traditional Ecological Knowledge into Western science in the Arctic Council: Lip service? ...

• Main Author: Sidorova, Evgeniia Jen
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Graduate Studies 2020
• Subjects: Arctic Council; Indigenous knowledge; international relations; knowledge co-production; Political Science > International Law and Relations; Arctic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.11575/prism/38704; https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/113195

The utilization of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in wildlife management has been a prominent topic for several decades. Since its establishment, the Arctic Council (AC) has emphasized the importance of TEK and its utilization in its work. Yet, the AC has not been successful in the process of knowledge coproduction. Why has TEK not been meaningfully incorporated into the Arctic Council? To answer this question, the study created and applied the Participation-Indigenous-Local-Application-Cross-cultural evaluation scale to the AC documents in order to analyze to what degree TEK has been incorporated into them. The research included interviews with 15 Indigenous leaders, officials, and scholars who were involved in the work of AC and/or worked with Indigenous communities and TEK projects. This study argues that lip service occurred as a result of several factors: state diversity in the perception of TEK as a concept, lesser effectiveness of Permanent Participants in the incorporation of TEK, ...