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Abstract:
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From introduction:
"An important insight established in Common Property studies is that local communities' capacity for fair and sustainable resource management relies on practitioners situated knowledge. In the context of CPR studies such knowledge is most commonlyconceptualized as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) or indigenous knowledge (IK).Yet, IK and TEK are almost totally absent from scholarly work on the Middle East. In this paper I discuss reasons for this absence, but also invoke a more fundamentaldiscussion of scholarly approaches to the role of knowledge in resource management.
"IK and TEK are typically either implicitly or explicitly contrasted with science.Paralleling this contrast is an academic partitioning of tasks that in effect mean thatdifferent bodies of theories and scholarly work focus on IK/TEK and sciencerespectively. In this paper I take issue with this partitioning of the field of social studiesof knowledge. I argue that not only the content of the various traditions of knowledge,but also the contexts within which conceptualizations such as IK or science work and that make possible their existence should be examined. If we focus too much on IK/TEKas the contrast to modern science we risk ignoring, suppressing or failing to acknowledge many kinds of practical knowledge.
"I question how, and why, IK/TEK has achieved prominence in some socio-geographical locations and not in others. With regard to studies of the Middle East, it is notable thatthere is not only a lack of attention to IK/TEK, but that the whole field of natural resource management, and especially locality based rules and practices of common property resources is marginalized. Middle Eastern authorities themselves do not employ labelssuch as IK or TEK in their approach to natural resource management. The lack of studieson natural resource management, IK and TEK in the Middle East stands in stark contrast to a pronounced academic interest for and partly also a managerial focus on TEK andIK in for example Africa, India and North America."
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