Background
Until recently, protected areas in South Africa were constructed and sustained as bastions of the state, reserved for the conservation and consumption of the natural environment only. Within this framework, communities that fell within areas designated for National Parks and Forests were forcibly removed, with no consideration given to the value of local knowledge in environmental decision-making, and less still to the ways in which locality and natural resources play a fundamental role in the social, cultural and spiritual identities of local communities. The long history of attrition also meant that communities themselves began to lose their ability to control and manage natural resources.
Today, this policy of enforced exclusion is being replaced by Community Based Natural Resource Management models (CBNRM). CBNRM aims for local communities to once more be included within the decision-making processes which affect the conservation and management of their local environment. It draws specifically on indigenous knowledge as the basis of an integrated management system.
However, while featured as one of the main development paradigms for conservation in South Africa, little success can yet be accredited to CBNRM. A principal reason may be that culture and local knowledge systems remain outside the expertise of environmental managers, and wider partnerships that link cultural conceptualizations of landscape with natural resource management have yet to be explored.