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Abstract:
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"Community knowledge plays a critical role in common property resource management regimes. Knowledge and information are obvious requirements for any type of resource management. Less obvious is the role that access to information plays in the ability to restrict access in otherwise open or shared-access common property resource (CPR) regimes. Indeed, in some informal (as opposed to de jure) CPR regimes, control of the flow of knowledge is the primary mechanism through which access to resources is restricted to outsiders.
"The findings of the lower courts in the seminal Delgammuukw case (Supreme Court of B.C. 1991; Court of Appeals for B.C. 1993) placed a fiduciary duty on the provincial government to ensure that aboriginal rights are not 'unjustifiably infringed upon by the resource development activities of the Crown, or its licensees' (B.C. Ministry Forests 1995). To honour this responsibility, the B.C. government began a major collaboration with aboriginal communities throughout the province. Provincial agencies, most notably, the Ministry of Forests, have been funding community-mapping programs, so called Traditional Use Studies (TUS). Under the TUS program, aboriginal communities are mapping their own knowledge of cultural and resource geography.
"Conflicts, however, have emerged over the sharing or use of the TUS data. The nature of these conflicts indicates that there are fundamentally different understandings about information and its role. The province proposes that TUS map data, without descriptions of their meaning or significance, be housed in a government database, directly accessible for agency planning and for a first stage review of developement plans. Aboriginal parties, on the other hand, find the risk of allowing this information to leave their hands unacceptable. Instead of honouring a fiduciary duty, the sharing structure has given the TUS program an appearance of information capture, with a possible consequence of placing the rights it intended to protect under greater risk."
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