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findings insufficient. The politics at stake are that scientific findings are used to restrict

community and fisher access to fishing grounds and species.

The idea of preserving tradition, in particular traditional knowledge, to address

contemporary and future environmental problems is also expressed in the programs and

rhetoric of global organisations, such as Slow Food (as noted earlier) and the super national

organisation UNESCO. Slow Food’s Presidia and Ark of Taste programs mirror the framing

of tradition. For example, the Ark of Taste catalogues ‘small-scale quality productions that

belong to the cultures, history and traditions of the entire planet: an extraordinary heritage of

fruits, vegetables, animal breeds, cheeses, breads, sweets and cured meats’ (Slow Food

Foundation for Biodiversity 2015, para. 1). For Slow Food, biodiversity, knowledge, taste

and tradition are interwoven. Their programs aim to protect this heritage for the sake of

biodiversity, which ‘ensures that ecosystems are able to confront changes, to adapt and to

survive. The fight to save biodiversity isn’t just any fight: it is a battle for the future of the

planet’ (Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity 2015, para. 3). The Presidia project aims to

save diverse species and traditional food products at risk of extinction and importantly they

are considered ‘an important reservoir of knowledge and experience’ (Slow Food Foundation

for Biodiversity 2016, para. 3).

These same arguments were also taken up in academia. For example, anthropologist

Alf Hornborg (1996, pp. 45-62) asks whether traditional societies have something to

contribute to sustainable development. In doing so he frames traditional and indigenous in

terms of local ecological knowledge, which he calls “contextual knowledge”, delineating this

from modern or “decontextual knowledge” environmental knowledge within which he places

expert Western scientific knowledge. Hornborg’s conclusion is that contextual knowledge

may have much to offer the management of resources and therefore sustainable development,

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