Recognizing Indigenous Knowledge and Values Through the Discipline of Cultural Ecosystem Services: Insights for Research, Management, and Academia

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2024

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The discipline of cultural ecosystem services (CES) has gained momentum in recognizing some of the connection between social and ecological systems mainly through human-nature interactions. CES has gained recognition within management agencies as there have been national memorandums to include ecosystem service research in decision making within federal agencies. While the discipline of CES offers an avenue to recognize connections between humans and our surrounding environments, standard CES research and conceptualization does not do well at including diverse worldviews and values such as Indigenous Knowledge. In this dissertation I seek to explore avenues to elevate the CES discipline to better recognize and understand Indigenous Knowledge and diverse worldviews and values. I am conducting this research as a Native Hawaiian Indigenous social scientist funded by NOAA to support their West Hawaiʻi Integrated Ecosystem Assessment. I conducted this research in Hawaiʻi and within my own community of West Hawaiʻi with four main objectives. These objectives are: (Chapter 2) creating an elicitation tool, the levels of intensity, using a two-eyed seeing approach to present information in a way that could be used by management agencies while better acknowledging the diverse meanings and reasons humans interact with their environments; (Chapter 3) employing the levels of intensity tool in deliberative workshops to understand the deeper reasons of and meanings behind human-nature interactions and move CES research beyond a one-dimensional categorization; (Chapter 4) spatially representing socio-cultural relationships to place and Indigenous Knowledge by conducting participatory mapping interviews about kuleana with key informants of Native Hawaiian knowledge holders in West Hawaiʻi; and (Chapter 5) exploring the benefits and limitations of survey research on CES with a broad audience to better acknowledge some of the diverse meanings and interactions people have with their surrounding environments. Throughout this dissertation I explore ways to elevate Indigenous Knowledge and worldviews so they can be better recognized within current research and management practices.

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Environmental science, Indigenous studies, Cultural Ecosystem Services, Environmental Economics, Indigenous Knowledge, Relational Values

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304 pages

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