SHILLONG, Jan 14: “Knowledge that comes out of this project, should reach a large group of stakeholders. It should reach people who take decisions at the political level, but we should try to involve other partners as well”: this was a comment made by one of the participants of the workshop held last week in Shillong at ICSSR-NERC, starting a new five-year research project that focuses on the growing tendency to conserve and protect forests, rivers and wildlife in terms of cultural heritage.
Initiated by Leiden University and Ashoka University, ‘Futuring Heritage: Conservation, Community and Contestation in the Eastern Himalayas’, involves interdisciplinary social scientific research to be conducted across three important sites in the eastern Himalayas. These include Sikkim, the location of the Khangchendzonga National Park, which is so far South Asia’s first and currently only mixed UNESCO world heritage site of outstanding Universal Value.
A second sub-project focuses on East Garo Hills, where attempts to gain UNESCO recognition for the projected Garo Hills Conservation Area have so far remained unsuccessful. A third region which the project focuses on is Jaintia Hills, where attempts to define forests and rivers in terms of cultural heritage have until now remained largely dependent on community initiatives. The project focuses on community driven efforts aimed at making environment into heritage, and how such initiatives fit with the attempts made by NGOs and government organisations to foster these.
The project is being conducted by a consortium consisting of researchers associated with Leiden University (Netherlands), Ashoka University (Sonepat) and RV University (Bengaluru), who are working closely together with a number of societal partners from India, and particularly from the Northeastern region. Among these societal partners are state Forest Departments (FD), the Garo Hills Autonomous District Council (GHADC), tourism operator Holiday Scout, the Meghalaya Basin Management Agency (MBMA), Sikkimese NGO Mutanchi Lom Aal Shezum (MLAS), the North East Slow Food and Agrobiodiversity Society (NESFAS, Shillong), Society for Urban and Rural Empowerment (SURE, Jowai), UNESCO, the World Wildlife Fund and the Wildlife Trust of India.
In the kick-off workshop, held at ICSSR-NERC (Shillong), the project researchers introduced the research which the objectives of the project demand. These responses were reflected on by the societal partners.
In the subsequent two days, the societal partners to the project presented papers reflecting on their engagement with community driven conservation so far. These reflections are due to be compiled into a policy brief, which the consortium intends to published with the Integrated Mountain Initiative (IMI) to make their findings accessible to a broad audience of policy makers, practitioners and academics working on the Himalayan region.
The workshop was concluded with a day focusing on the importance of the creation of maps, and the sort of data these can entail, which will be important as a research methodology for the upcoming data-gathering phase of the project. The project consortium is open to connecting with other societal and academic partners, who would be committed to the main questions which the project focuses on.
