“It's good for the forest and it's traditional”: Indigenous ecologies and land management at the community/NGO interface in southern Belize

Abstract

In 2019, the Maya Leaders Alliance unveiled “The Future We Dream,” a vision document sharing a common interest among the Mopan and Q'eqchi’ Maya people of Belize for a future in which they are committed to sustaining a reciprocal relationship with and stewardship of the land. In this context, this paper shares results from three communities bordering a forest reserve who were asked to identify important practices, which they considered “traditional” and “environmentally sustainable,” as part of a collaborative NGO project to promote indigenous forest management. Through analysis of data collected alongside Indigenous Community Promoters (ICPs), it explores how these terms were defined and deployed to discuss healthy forests and healthy communities. The paper discusses how collaborative and community-led data collection addresses both the need to decolonize sustainability discourse and produce better data for better project outcomes (Maya, traditional ecological knowledge, forest management, environmental sustainability, indigenous land rights).