Content area
Full text
Introduction
Protected areas (PAs) are one of the main strategies used for environmental protection and a cornerstone of land management policies worldwide. Emerging in the US in the nineteenth century, the PA ideology was based on a negative nature-society relation: nature could only be preserved if kept uninhabited, set aside for science and recreation purposes, but otherwise left untouched (COATES, 1998; COLCHESTER, 2004; REDFORD; STEARMAN, 1993). This 'traditional preservationist' point of view, whereby the aesthetic, biological and ecological features of the environment are highly valued, tends to exclude completely the social aspect inherent to PAs creation (ABAKERLI, 2001). Until the mid-1960s, PAs were set up around the world favoring top-down approaches by states with little or no concern for their impact on local people (WEST et al., 2006).
The social impacts of PAs began to be widely recognized in the 1970s when the idea that parks should be socially and economically inclusive began to become widespread in general conservation thinking (ADAMS; HUTTON, 2007). Gradually, several social actors responsible for PA creation and maintenance have been accepting the importance of the traditional communities (indigenous peoples, quilombolas - slave descendants' communities, rubber tappers and so on) and of the local communities inside PAs and in the surrounding areas, taking into account their rights, responsibilities and interests. This recognition is a result of the understanding that PAs are complex systems and that when creating them, an overlapping of territorialities occurs: a protected area is simultaneously a conservation territory, a scientific research territory, a production territory, a living space territory, a culture and landscape territory and more. Multiple territorialities have originated from multiple uses and multiple social actors involved in or affected by the delimitation of such areas (COELHO et al., 2009).
In 2000 the World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) jointly published their 'Principles and Guidelines on Protected Areas and Indigenous/Traditional Peoples' (NELSON e HOSSACK, 2003), in which they recognize the rights of indigenous and other traditional peoples inhabiting PAs, their importance in the co-management of resources and contribution to the management of PAs and also their knowledge, innovations and practices when integrated to government and PA managers, as a means to enhance...