Although there are different approaches to sustainability auditing, those considered authoritative use scientific indicators and instruments to measure and predict the impact of organizational operations on socio-ecological systems. Such approaches are biased because they can only measure phenomena whose features lend themselves to quantification, control, and observation directly with the instruments produced by technology. This technocratic bias is a product of the mechanistic worldview, which presumes that all components of socio-ecological systems are identifiable, discrete, and material. In contrast to the (...) mechanistic worldview, indigenous people use animist familial representations. In the case of New Zealand Māori a family tree is used to represent socio-ecological systems. This is a flexible conception, which views socio-ecological systems as both composites made up of interlinking causally-connected parts but also as reciprocating systems that have intangible elements such as consciousness, emotion, and agency. The technocratic approach is ontologically incapable of incorporating intangible elements to such a degree we consider that it incompatible with animist approaches. It is not, however, epistemologically-incongruous for indigenous peoples because of the flexible hybridity of their worldview. This worldview provides a broad moral framework, which avoids discrediting subjectivity and reducing socio-ecological systems to only their instrumental value. Finally, we conclude that the indigenous approach has much to offer the field of sustainability auditing, given that it provides a moral framework, and insight into building assessment systems upon abductive reasoning. (shrink)

Ethnoveterinary research, development, and extension (ERD&E) has emerged as a rich field for discovering, adapting, and transferring appropriate and sustainable animal health technologies to rural and peri-urban stockraisers, especially in Third World countries. This field is defined as the holistic, interdisciplinary study of local knowledge and practices, together with the social structure in which they are embedded, that pertain to the healthcare and healthful husbandry of animals used for a multitude of purposes. Especially in the Third World, livestock play a (...) large number of important roles that are little understood or appreciated in today's First World. Study of these benefits and their role in Third World livelihoods offers numerous lessons that span not only the virtues but also some of the technical, ethical, and methodological challenges of working with local knowledge. ERD&E emerged as an internationally recognized branch of research in the mid-1970s largely in response to an increasing concern with animal health in the context of practical, field-level projects in animal agriculture. As many as 90% of the world's population continue to rely mainly on their own localized ethnomedicine for the bulk of their personal healthcare as well as their veterinary needs. With the escalating costs of Western healthcare technologies, it is essential to build upon this local knowledge. Of course, ethnoscience is not perfect, and recognition of the immense value of ERD&E does not imply that conventional science is to be abandoned. Rather each has much to learn from the other. Making knowledge by judiciously drawing upon insider and outsider, site-specific and universalistic, and both old and new understandings can take us back to a brighter development future. (shrink)

This study explored local controls relating to trees and spacesof the local environment in Nyamaropa Communal Lands in theNyanga District of eastern Zimbabwe. Controls were consideredin a broad and inclusive framework encompassing codified rules,taboos, and, regulatory norms and emotions. Special emphasis waslaid on people‘s emotional and ethical investment in the abovecomponents of the environment – trees and spaces. The studyemployed intensive informal and group interviews. Results showthat there is tremendous emotional and ethical investment intrees and spaces of the environment in (...) Nyamaropa. Emotions comein a variety of forms: fear, shunning, love, reverence, andconfidence and security enhancement. The emotional and ethicalnorms are designed to govern behavior and the context of resourceutilization. These norms have implications on the organization ofspaces of the local environment and regimes of resource utilizationoccurring in them. Location of resources in spaces of the environmenthas implications on the management of resources within them. Thedomains of human habitation – home bases and home fields – werefound to be the most emotionally laden spaces with trees in thembeing actively planted, nurtured, conserved, eliminated, or destroyedon the basis of certain emotions and norms. The findings of the studyhave implications within the framework of decentralization and ofdemocratization of natural resource management. (shrink)