local knowledge
Faced with increasing rainfall variability – especially continuous, four-year droughts – mountain farmers in Southwest China’s Yunnan province have developed innovative strategies to minimize water-related threats to their livelihoods.
Yufang Su, Jianchu Xu and a team of World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) scientists conducted case studies of three mountain communities in rural Yunnan,...
The world is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. For those in the North, that can seem abstract; for the rural poor in the developing world, it’s all too real. Their absolute dependence on the bounty of forests, deserts and coasts means ‘biodiversity loss’ can mean losing all: food, fuel, building material, medicine, forage, livelihoods and culture.
The...
The villager in Nepal has ideas about what medicine should be, respect for specialists who can diagnose and cure, and a faith in the basic validity of the system. This paper explores the methods of healing within a village in central Nepal. As can be seen, there are various techniques of curing - herbal, ritual, western - all of which are integrated into a system designed to deal with the...
A successful system of animal husbandry is the critical element in maintaining a successful trading system in an area with poor transportation, such as the Himalayas. Although the author has argued elsewhere that access to pack animals and plentiful pasture land gave the Thakalis an advantage over neighbouring groups in establishing themselves as the major trading group in central Nepal, his...
The first part of the author's argument is related to 'local knowledge', 'indigenous knowledge', or sustainable agriculture: local of indigenous knowledge is neglected but a valuable resource. Like many researchers in environmental and sustainable agriculture studies, anthropologists complain that development planners neglect the role of local knowledge in Nepalese agricultural production....
For indigenous peoples round the world, traditional knowledge based on natural resources such as medicinal herbs forms the core of culture and identity. But this wealth of knowledge is under pressure. Indigenous communities are increasingly vulnerable to eviction, environmental degradation and outside interests eager to monopolise control over their traditional resources. Intellectual...
Since January 2005, this action-research project has focused on developing alternative tools to protect traditional knowledge which are rooted in local customary laws rather than based on existing Intellectual Property standards. Existing IPRs (eg. patents, copyrights) are largely unsuitable for protecting rights over traditional knowledge because they provide commercial incentives, whereas...
In Nepal, Farmer Managed Irrigation Systems (FMISs) dominate the number and the irrigated area. They were built and managed by farmers themselves for centuries. The main objective of this paper was to analyse the factors that made thes FMISs function well for so long. FMISs communities have indigenous but ultra-modern knowledge of layout, construction, management, ecology and hydrology....
Local people’s preference scores for firewood species were studied through pair-wise ranking tools of Participatory Rural Appraisal technique from Yuksam-Dzongri trekking trail, Sikkim, India. A wide variety of plant species used as firewood was enlisted. These woody tree species with potential firewood use value were analysed for their Firewood Value Index (FVI) considering energy value,...
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