Decolonization is key to environmental management and sustainable agriculture.

Indigenous knowledge is local knowledge that is unique to a given culture or society (Warren, 1987). Indigenous knowledge is the systematic body of knowledge acquired by local people through the accumulation of experiences, informal experiments, and intimate understanding of the environment in a given culture (Rajasekaran, 1993). According to Haverkort (1991), indigenous knowledge is the actual knowledge of a given population that reflects the experiences based on traditions and includes more recent experiences with modern technologies. Local people, including farmers, landless laborers, women, rural artisans, and cattle rearers, are the custodians of indigenous knowledge systems. Moreover, these people are well informed about their own situations, their resources, what works and doesn't work, and how one change impacts other parts of their system (Butler and Waud, 1990). 1.2 Value of indigenous knowledge Indigenous knowledge is dynamic, changing through indigenous mechanisms of creativity and innovativeness as well as through contact with other local and international knowledge systems (Warren, 1991). These knowledge systems may appear simple to outsiders but they represent mechanisms to ensure minimal livelihoods for local people. Indigenous knowledge systems often are elaborate, and they are adapted to local cultural and environmental conditions (Warren, 1987). Indigenous knowledge systems are tuned to the needs of local people and the quality and quantity of available resources (Pretty and Sandbrook, 1991). They pertain to various cultural norms, social roles, or physical conditions. Their efficiency lies in the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. According to Norgaard (1984, p. 7): Traditional knowledge has been viewed as part of a romantic past, as the major obstacle to development, as a necessary starting point, and as a critical component of a cultural alternative to modernization. Only very rarely, however, is traditional knowledge treated as knowledge per se in the mainstream of the agricultural and development and environmental management literature, as knowledge that contributes to our understanding of agricultural production and the maintenance and use of environmental systems. 1.3 Diversity of indigenous knowledge Indigenous knowledge systems are: adaptive skills of local people usually derived from many years of experience, that have often been communicated through "oral traditions" and learned through family members over generations (Thrupp, 1989), time-tested agricultural and natural resource management practices, which pave the way for sustainable agriculture (Venkatratnam, 1990), strategies and techniques developed by local people to cope with the changes in the socio-cultural and environmental conditions, practices that are accumulated by farmers due to constant experimentation and innovation, trial-and-error problem-solving approaches by groups of people with an objective to meet the challenges they face in their local environments (Roling and Engel, 1988), decision-making skills of local people that draw upon the resources they have at hand.