Socially Just Conservation

Indigenous communities worldwide face multiple challenges to maintain their unique cultural identity and value systems. In the natural resource management arena, these challenges include the imposition of western solutions to environmental management and biodiversity protection. Indigenous peoples are responding to these challenges by asserting their cultural identity, developing cultural re-vitalisation programs, and actively participating in western political processes to ensure their ongoing involvement in the environmental and natural resource management domain. This book considers this issue through an examination of Indigenous hunting of threatened species (turtle and dugong) in a protected area, specifically the Aboriginal community of Hope Vale which is located along the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, Australia. Discourse analysis is used to examine the importance of developing common linguistic understandings in environmental management. Research findings show that the way language is used in environmental decision making does matter and that management agreements must be socially just in order to achieve conservation outcomes in Indigenous contexts.