Dana +10 Workshop

Mobile indigenous peoples (e.g. pastoralists, hunter-gatherers, some swidden agriculturalists) have sustainably managed the land they live on for centuries. However, in the name of biodiversity conservation, some have been displaced, dispossessed and expelled from their traditional territories and left destitute and culturally impoverished. While these practices have been largely discarded in rhetoric by biodiversity conservation agencies, progress in human rights observance and land restitution has lagged behind new thinking on the relationship between people and protected areas. Thus, local and national policy and institutional change in the field have not kept pace with advances in thinking at the international level; nor do they always live up to public declarations of concern for human rights.

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The Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford Department of International Development (QEH), University of Oxford, has worked with other bodies to address the concerns regarding the welfare of mobile indigenous peoples in biodiversity conservation. A key product was the Dana Declaration on Conservation and Mobile Peoples in 2002, with guidelines for a complementary strategy for both protected areas and meeting human needs (see annex).

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Ten years after the Dana Declaration on Mobile Peoples and Conservation was agreed in Wadi Dana, Jordan, it is time to follow up on the achievements of the past decade and consider the future. Working with the representatives of the World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples – WAMIP and others similar groups, the Dana + 10 workshop will, among other outputs, develop a statement to be delivered at the Rio+20 meetings in June 2012 to continue to promote the human rights of mobile indigenous people in the context of biodiversity conservation and democratic environmental governance in the face of continuing expansion of protected areas, land grabbing, and further dispossession. The workshop ultimately aims to continue to raise and maintain awareness of the special vulnerabilities and needs of mobile indigenous peoples.