Challenges and Opportunities of Integrating Local Knowledge into Environmental Management

The chapter aims to draw lessons from the Motueka River catchment and draw broad conclusions about the integration of local knowledge into environmental management, both at the scale of the Motueka River catchment and more generally for other local knowledge use initiatives. We also summarise the current discourse concerning local knowledge, its definitions and integration into the research process.
The first section will clarify some of the many terms and def-initions relating to local knowledge and provide an overview of the main options for local knowledge acquisition and analysis, and will also present the parameters of the Motueka angler case. The second section will provide the main results of this research, both in terms of the investigation on trout decline and sedimentation, and in terms of local knowledge use for catchment management. Finally, we discuss the opportunities and challenges of integrating local knowledge in natural resource management.