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fields that were turning to the problems of environmental conflicts and resource use. This

took the shape of critiques of nature/culture binaries and western eco cosmology. There were

attempts to break down such binaries and an interest in alternative frameworks, identifying

indigenous, local, and traditional ecological knowledge as offering such alternative

frameworks. I have suggested these institutional debates are part of a wider culture complex,

with the function that culture has been used to reflexively govern resources, and govern

people governing resources. On this point I have also suggested that the term biocultural

complex, as an extension of Bennett’s culture complex, might be a helpful conceptual

framing to explore. I have opened up several critiques of these projects. The main one

focuses on the limitations posed by the categories of tradition and local knowledge. I have

suggested that through breaking down of nature/culture binaries in the context of

environmental conflicts, new binaries have emerged (traditional/modern, local/global). While

the terms traditional and local knowledge help to open the discursive space of environmental

governance beyond its biological focus, they also function to further limit the discursive

space by limiting the definition of culture, a point I return to in chapter five.

I have endeavoured to make it clear that I am in no way suggesting a disregard for

indigenous rights to resources, nor am I suggesting that such a richness of ecological

knowledge does not exist among communities. Rather, I have suggested that shining a light

on the practices and institutions involved in defining culture (and nature) is as equally

important as the project of articulating alternative cosmologies as a panacea to the many

biocultural issues at stake.

In this chapter I examined the ways that the term culture is mobilised in sustainability

debates. In the next chapter I turn to cultural aspects of sustainability. I dig deeper into the

origins of a sustainability discourse and critique powerful global forms of knowledge –

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western science, concepts of nature/culture and other overarching knowledge practices .

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