Cultural disconnects and polar bear management

In Canada, polar bear management is in the hands of the provinces and territories.  In the northern territory of Nunavut, management is shared by the territory and local user groups. 

Martha Dowsley of Lakehead University gives a nice introduction to Canadian polar bear management arrangements in Developing multi-level institutions from top-down ancestors.  In this title, "multi-level" refers to the involvement of different levels of government in polar bear management; "Developing... from top-down ancestors" refers to the evolution of multi-level management from an earlier single-level national or regional management regime.

Dowsley and George Wenzel of McGill, look at joint territorial-local management in Nunavut when the two levels are divided by cultural differences, in "The Time of the Most Polar Bears": A Co-management Conflict in Nunavut.  "Co-management" refers to the shared territorial-local management.  

Here's the (heavily annotated and somewhat reorganized) abstract:                     

Since the 1990s, Inuit traditional knowledge (Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit) has taken on a substantial role in polar bear management in the Canadian territory of Nunavut through its direct use in quota-setting procedures.

In areas of Nunavut, disagreements between the territorial and local management partners emerged in 2005.  Local Inuit wanted larger hunting quotas than the game managers thought were warranted:

A co-management conflict has arisen from an increase of hunting quotas in January 2005 for Inuit living in the Baffin Bay and Western Hudson Bay polar bear population areas.

Dowsley and Wenzel reviewed minutes from management discussions about quota setting and gathered survey information from Inuit informants.  They trace at least part of the disagreement to a cultural disconnect:

During consultations with wildlife managers and through other interviews in 2005, Inuit indicated their lack of support for quota reductions. Discussions with Inuit reveal two categories of problems that, though couched in the polar bear management issue, involve the co-management system and the integration of Inuit and scientific knowledge more generally. The first relates to direct observations of the environment by both Inuit and scientists and the synthesis of such information.

This first disconnect has to do with different ways of processing information about bears.  Inuit and scientific perspectives can complement each other.  The Inuit can contribute particular information, while the scientists can provide the benefits of their generalizations.  The Inuit provide concrete information, the scientists, a more abstract perspective.

Inuit hunters live in remote villages close to the bears.  They know the local geography and the way that the local polar bears move through it.  Their knowledge is particular: they are aware of the local seasonal and spatial patterns of bear movements, they know when there are a lot of polar bears in the neighborhood, they know the condition of the bears around them, and they know how these numbers and conditions compare to those in the past.  Finally, they know each other; they know the talents of their neighbors, their foibles, who is good at hunting, who has a dog team, and so on.  The Inuit

...tend to be cautious about overgeneralizing or simplifying their knowledge and prefer to admit ignorance rather than speculating on topics... Often they share information as anecdotes of individual events rather than drawing generalizations as scientists do.

Traditional Inuit understandings are:

...almost always formed from a local geographic focus.  Traditional knowledge of wildlife can be useful at the population level as a source of information on population trends, which can be ascertained, for example, from the body condition of harvested animals... or from movement patterns of migratory species such as caribou... However, ...[this type of knowledge - Ben] has at times proven less reliable in discussions of animal population size or distributions. [this quote is not from the abstract - Ben]

In contrast, the territorial game managers have a more general, less particular, and more cosmopolitan knowledge.  They are tapped into the world wide body of polar bear facts, trends, patterns, generalizations from facts, hypotheses, and hypothesis tests.  They build models and can use them to project bear populations and trends under different assumptions about harvest strategies.  They have a better sense of the need for randomized sampling and are experts in extrapolating from - and understanding the limits of extrapolations from - observations.

In this case:

The quotas were based on Inuit observations and their conclusion that these polar bear populations had increased. Scientific information suggests that climate change has concentrated polar bears in areas where humans are more likely to encounter them, but that the populations are in decline as a result of overhunting and climate-change effects on demographic rates.

Dowsley and Wenzel are optimistic that if the disagreement between the Inuit and wildlife managers were based on different sources of information about the bears, they could be resolved by discussion, education, and gathering more information.  But there is another, deeper disconnect.  This has to do with the traditional northern view about game:

The second relates to Inuit conceptualizations of human-animal relationships and the incorporation of scientific studies and management into that relationship.

The traditional northern view is that game animals behave purposefully, giving themselves to humans who behave correctly, for harvest.  Correct behavior involves thought and action - you don't want to take the animal for granted, you don't want to reject an animal that offers itself, you want to behave respectfully towards the remains.  In this older world view, the availability of animals for harvest doesn't depend on the numbers harvested in the past, or on the size of the population.  It depends on correct behavior. 

This set of ideas may reflect a culture whose people occupied relatively small territories which were visited by migratory populations on an annual cycle.  There is little opportunity for these people to observe the animals through the entire life cycle or to form ideas about the relation of the harvest to the population size. In any event, once the migratory population has moved beyond the territory of the band, the animals are as good as lost.

Today, the idea of a connection between the animals available for harvest and the population size is widespread among the Inuit (Dowsley and Wenzel say they found a range of perceptions from the Euro-Canadian scientific view to a combination of traditional Inuit and Euro-Canadian), but just the same, the older ideas are still important. I've posted on this cultural idea and its management implications before: Over-exploiting the Arctic animal commons; A World Without Overfishing?

What's the implication for management here?  For one thing, there may be a sense that a quota system, with the distribution of hunting rights in the form of "tags" to take a bear, is presumptuous, is "bragging."  Again, the quota system may mean that hunters without tags will have to turn down a bear that offers itself for capture.  Competition among hunters for the limited number of tags is unseemly and may cause polar bears to leave the area, searching for other hunters who will show more respect.  In this instance, there was a nearby hunter community (Greenland) that did not have quotas at the time.  If the scientists say the quota must be smaller because there are fewer bears, maybe the real problem is that the bears left, looking for more respectful hunters.   

Back to the abstract:

These problems reveal that differences between Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit and scientific knowledge are not fully understood and accounted for within the co-management system and that the system does not effectively integrate Inuit cultural views into management.

There is another way to think about the disagreement over quotas.  The harvest of a bear is a choice between immediate consumption and investing in future bears (a bear not harvested today may be harvested - older and larger - later, and may help increase in the bear population as well).  Two people who believe exactly the same thing about the physical terms of this "consumption now - consumption later" tradeoff may make different decisions about current consumption.  The person who places the relatively higher value on current consumption compared to future consumption would be likely to consume more bears now.  Are there cultural differences between Euro-Canadian and Inuit time preference?  Does Inuit culture discount the future more heavily?  Dowsley and Wenzel don't mention this, and I assume it wasn't suggested by the information they collected.

Notes: The annotations are my - sometimes loose - interpretation of what Dowsley and Wenzel are thinking.  Here's a news story from Greenland based on an interview with Wenzel: What co-management needs.

Source of map: Natural Resources Canada.

Comments

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Yes polar bear populations are indeed rising but only because of their Republican style rapacious depredation upon those poor poor cute little furry seal pups. What we need desparately is a polar bear re-education effort. These creatures can be reformed and could easily be taught how to harvest tofu from organically grown polar beans. Next we work on the seal pups who have suffered such abuse from the polar bears they have resorted to killing our little finned and scaled freinds of the deep.