Caribou co-management in northern Canada: fostering multiple ways of knowing

Abstract

The links between social and ecological systems are represented by diverse ways of looking at human–environment relations. The continuing exchange between different ways of knowing may be crucial to integrative thought about social–ecological linkages. For many indigenous societies, the separation of social and ecological systems does not make sense. A ‘human–environment’ divide is especially absent from many arctic and subarctic cultures. How does this fundamental ideological difference play out in resource management systems that incorporate stakeholders both from ‘the West’ (Euro-American) and from indigenous cultures for whom a human–environment or social–ecological divide is a relatively new and foreign concept?