by Helene Marsh

Watching Indigenous hunters butcher an endangered green turtle on a beach is disturbing for a person like me, a conservation scientist who has never visited an abattoir or a factory farm. I found it even more perturbing to learn that the hunters consider the act to be one of conservation. They believe that returning the turtle's blood and butchered remains to the sea guarantees that turtles will remain for their children to hunt.

Such huge cultural differences in perceptions increase the challenge of effective cross-cultural communication about conservation. I have been acutely aware of this challenge for more than 30 years. As a researcher, I am often asked to provide scientific input into discussions between Indigenous hunters and environmental managers about conserving green turtles and dugongs (sea cows). Both are threatened species of high cultural value to Indigenous hunters in many countries.

Nonetheless, I was shocked to find that some key negotiators had effectively been speaking different languages despite using the same words. A member of my research group, Melissa Nursey-Bray, exposed this "uncommon understanding." Melissa used discourse analysis to identify major themes in the transcripts of interviews with hunters and managers about A Guugu-Yimmithirr Bama Yii, the dugong and turtle hunting management plan developed by Hope Vale Aboriginal Community. This plan won the Australian Prime Minister's Award for Community Leadership and Sustainability in 2000. However, within a few years, all those involved considered the plan a failure because it had not been implemented effectively.

When the environmental managers discussed "hunting," their priorities were biodiversity, species protection, animal rights, and sustainability. The community's concerns were cultural survival, Indigenous rights, and community well-being. When discussing planning, the Hope Vale people wanted to know who would be affected, what the planning process would involve, and how the next hunting season would be managed. The managers were much more interested in a product to be implemented over the long term against agreed performance indicators.

Each group was unaware of the other's values and concerns despite 20 years of negotiation and a shared belief that the plan reflected mutually agreed outcomes. With such fundamental differences unrecognized and unresolved, it is unsurprising that the plan failed, especially as Hope Vale's sea country is remote and effective enforcement prohibitively expensive unless driven by community peer pressure.

Colleagues and I followed up on Melissa's work with a simple exercise with a group of Indigenous turtle and dugong project officers from remote island communities in Torres Strait, (between Australia and Papua New Guinea). We asked the project officers to brainstorm the features of an effective turtle and dugong hunting management plan from their perspective and then rank them. They prioritized (1) management driven by culture and Native Title rights, (2) respectful partnerships, and (3) employment and capacity building.

We independently repeated the exercise with a group of environmental managers, most of whom had considerable experience working with Indigenous peoples. The managers' planning priorities were (1) ecologically, socially, culturally, and economically sustainable outcomes measured against agreed short and long term criteria and indicators, (2) commitment to capacity building, compliance, enforcement, and community education, and (3) capacity to be adaptive and independent, with initial but not necessarily ongoing support from government. The outcomes of this exercise supported Melissa's findings.

Management interventions are unlikely to work unless the different priorities of the key stakeholders and landholders are identified, understood and considered by all parties. When negotiating a management intervention, processes are required to ensure all stakeholders understand each others' priorities. In many cases, these differences in priorities are so profound that consensus will be impossible. But at the very least, the priorities of the various stakeholder groups can be combined in a checklist against which draft planning documents can be evaluated. Such a checklist ensures that the proposed management interventions address the needs of as many key stakeholders as possible.

In 1993, Australia's highest court recognized that turtle and dugong hunting is a Native Title Right for Traditional Owners in their sea country. Consequently, environmental managers now acknowledge that successful management must be community-based and the Australian government is underwriting turtle and dugong management plans in selected hunting communities.

Almost all communities that are developing turtle and dugong management plans have independently chosen to control hunting via a permit system. Indigenous Australians are all too familiar with permits; permits controlled their lives in less enlightened times and were (and in some cases still are) a source of considerable friction between Indigenous communities, the bureaucracy, and the wider community. Given this history, I find it fascinating that many community plans blend a permit system with traditional rules about hunting and butchering. Indigenous communities may accept western management methods if they are familiar with them and can incorporate them into existing frameworks. If scientists or managers propose management tools, they need to frame them in the language and cultural understandings of the key stakeholder communities.

Scientists and managers may negotiate soundly based alternative management tools with Indigenous communities. However, if these fail through poor implementation, communities will dismiss them and, potentially, the science behind the tools. In the mid 1980s, the Australian government established a large dugong sanctuary in western Torres Strait at my recommendation and after protracted negotiations with local Indigenous communities. But the dugong sanctuary has only been a paper park, never effectively enforced or even advertised outside official documents. Some Traditional Owners in Torres Strait now eschew spatial closures as a management tool even though western scientific knowledge of dugong distribution, hunting practices, and fisheries enforcement in the region indicates that large closures have considerable potential for reducing human impacts on dugongs. Appropriately designed closures could also potentially reinforce traditional conservation practices. Managers should be wary of token interventions; management measures ineffectively implemented over the long-term may foreclose future options.

Conservation biologists are committed to making a difference. We want our science to inform real world outcomes. Unlike environmental managers, researchers are privileged to work on the same problems for long periods enabling us to garner a deep understanding of the factors leading to success or failure of various interventions. In my experience, such understanding is much less valued than technical knowledge, even within well-established advisory processes. Researchers need to document their experiences as well as their scientific findings in language accessible to all stakeholders. They also need to work with managers and key stakeholders to develop ways in which both technical and experiential knowledge can be incorporated into adaptive management.

Helene Marsh (James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia) received a 2008 Distinguished Service Award from SCB for her involvement in the development of policy and management strategies that promote conservation, work with aboriginal communities to promote sustainability in traditional harvest practices, and research on the basic ecology of endangered species.

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