The flux of trust: caribou co-management in Northern Canada.

When contemplating the effects of development, information about a variety of factors--in addition to critical habitat considerations--must be gathered. This information should include consideration of caribou condition between seasons, between year classes as well as inter-annual variation. If caribou are in good shape, they can handle a certain amount of disruption, but if they are compromised, they may not be able to absorb the stress induced by development activities. For example, if cows are in poor condition when they get to the calving grounds, then protection of these areas may be immaterial. Focusing only on critical habitat may also ignore the importance of protecting spring staging areas or winter feeding grounds. Without a broadened perspective, factors such as the movement of wolves into post-calving areas at post-calving time, or the effects of summer browsing on the resilience of plant biomass, may also be lost. With changes in range use, there are changes in migration patterns and changes in physical condition. Understanding these changes will involve multiple knowledge sets and will require a space for multiple knowledge-holders--including hunters, elders, and biologists--to exchange ideas with each other and to continue learning about caribou populations as adaptive and complex systems.

Conclusions

The foregoing discussion indicates that existing knowledge about caribou is frequently uncertain. The social learning involved in making management decisions, subsequently includes mutual acknowledgement among co-management participants of the limitations of what is known about caribou systems. To address this challenge caribou co-management participants work toward the development of learning processes that allow people to share multiple perspectives on what is known about caribou systems and to establish thresholds of acceptable change in linked caribou-hunting systems. At the local scale, biologists and traditional caribou hunters are looking at ways to measure changes in caribou body condition and to map their migration routes over time--and to do this in ways that are legitimate in their respective learning traditions. At regional scales, aboriginal leaders and Canadian government policy-makers have the task of identifying the kinds of changes that are culturally and socially acceptable to traditional caribou hunting societies and the wider Canadian society. Ultimately these cross-scale choices must be combined so that changes measured on the ground shape decisions made about evolving social and cultural values. Through time, trust in the range of knowledge possessed by caribou co-management participants is built around the ways caribou can buffer and respond to environmental and human-induced changes.

Through the establishment of community-based monitoring programs, co-management systems may produce better ideas about the convergence and/or complementarity of multiple spheres of knowledge. Community institutions--for knowledge collection, interpretation, and use--would be rooted at a local level. Co-management systems that support such community institutions would truly be espousing the subsidiarity principle--where larger scale decision-making structures exist to support local needs. Such enactment of the subsidiarity principle can help to avoid hypocritical scenarios--which are documented by co-management scholars--who often observe forums where traditional knowledge is given stature at the international level, but little acknowledgement at local and regional levels (Feit 1998), which is where traditional knowledge lives.

Ultimately, co-management systems must establish the space and the humility to acknowledge the importance of trust between participants as well as trust in the knowledge that is employed to make management decisions. This trust will not be created unless there is agreement that it is the responsibility of aboriginal co-management participants to determine when and how to include traditional knowledge in the co-management process. Without trust, between people and in the knowledge that shapes decisions and actions, it is impossible to supply alternative institutions that recognize changing resource management settings.

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Anne Kendrick has a Ph.D. from the Natural Resources Institute, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. Her thesis project examined trust-building as a major component of social learning in caribou co-management systems. She can be reached at the Natural Resources Institute, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3T 2N2 or at kendrickanne@hotmail.com.