Fishing in the ‘Troubled’ Waters: Recognizing, Respecting, and Rewarding Local Ecological Knowledge, Innovations and Practices Concerning Aquatic Biological Diversity

Studies of indigenous ecological knowledge are getting attention not only among resource managers, policy-planners and Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) but also within and among local and indigenous communities themselves. During modernization, many of these communities have realized the threat of knowledge erosion and are attempting to take control of such knowledge, which outsiders have often documented and appropriated without sharing benefits with the providers. External researchers rarely share the gains made through publication, value addition to or commercialization of this knowledge. Their relationships with the knowledge providers are extractive and utilitarian, with no accountability, hence this paper’s title ‘troubled waters’. Fishing for knowledge in such waters is fraught with risks and threats.