Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and the Environment: The Akan Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are a number of academic studies that suggest that conservational values embedded in religio-cultural thoughts could be used in collaboration with science in finding lasting solutions to the environmental problems. However, despite these abundant studies and advocacy, environmentalists have ignored these in environmental management strategies. It is against this background that this paper examines the relevance of Akan indigenous ecological knowledge to environmental management strategies in Ghana. Three qualitative techniques were employed in this study: key-informant personal interviews, participant observation and focus-group discussion. The paper argues that there are a number of resources and concepts in Akan indigenous knowledge systems that help to conserve the natural environment. It is believed that the sacredness of these conservational resources can contribute to the pursuit of effective ways of curbing the crisis, which is the ultimate objective of policy-makers. In the process, the paper engages through critical analysis the argument for and against integrating Indigenous Ecological Knowledge (IEK), in the quest for finding a lasting solution to the environmental crisis in Ghana. The paper argues that IEK contains vast knowledge and moral values that can inform contemporary conservational strategies. The paper notes that IEK ensures the survival of not only the natural environment but the people as well. The paper therefore challenges Ghanaian environmentalists, ethicists, researchers and policy-makers on the need for a critical engagement with IEK.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".