Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)

Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving through adaptive processes and passed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings — including people — with one another and with their environment. The most widely cited academic formulation comes from ecologist Fikret Berkes, whose framework treats TEK as a knowledge-practice-belief complex operating at four interrelated levels: local, species-specific observations; the resource-management systems that put those observations into practice; the social institutions (rules, roles, codes of conduct) that govern how the knowledge is used and transmitted; and the broader worldview — including cosmology, ethics, and spirituality — that gives the other three levels their meaning.

TEK is held collectively by Indigenous peoples and local communities, developed through direct, sustained experience with a specific land base, waterway, or ecosystem over many generations, rather than through the hypothesis-testing methodology of Western academic science. It is dynamic rather than static — it continues to adapt as environmental conditions and community circumstances change — and it is inseparable from the cultural, spiritual, and governance context that produced it. This is what distinguishes TEK from a simple inventory of environmental facts: the same observation (say, a shift in salmon run timing) carries different weight and different obligations depending on the knowledge system, social institutions, and worldview it is embedded in.

How TEK relates to Traditional Knowledge (TK)

TEK is best understood as the environmental/ecological subset of the broader concept of Traditional Knowledge (TK), which also spans medicinal knowledge, agricultural practices, artistic and craft traditions, and oral histories not specifically tied to ecosystem or resource management. In practice the two labels overlap heavily in the literature — some sources use “Indigenous Knowledge,” “Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ITEK),” or “Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK)” for closely related or near-identical scope — but TEK specifically denotes knowledge of ecological relationships, species behavior, seasonal cycles, and resource management, which is why it is documented separately here: research involving TEK typically touches environmental science, natural-resource management, and climate research programs with their own governance literature and funder guidance, distinct from the intellectual-property and cultural-heritage framing that dominates general TK discussions.

Why this matters for research administration

Research that engages with TEK — co-produced climate studies, wildlife and fisheries management research, environmental impact assessment, ethnobotany, and similar work — raises governance questions that sit outside what a standard human-subjects review is built to catch. A conventional Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocol is designed around individual, informed consent from a research participant; it is not designed to evaluate whether a research team has secured a community’s collective consent to share, publish, or reuse knowledge that belongs to the community as a whole, nor to determine who within a community has the authority to grant that consent, nor to specify how any resulting benefits should be shared back. Research ethics literature on Indigenous research administration has documented this gap directly: unlike individual human-subjects protections, engagement with TEK requires community-level review, and many communities that hold TEK do not have a formal tribal IRB or equivalent body to conduct that review — which means the research institution’s own procedures, not just the community’s, need to account for it.

For a research administrator, this means TEK-involving projects typically require, in addition to (not instead of) any applicable human-subjects review:

• Free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) at the community level — consent obtained from the appropriate community governance body, before the research begins, based on a full and accessible explanation of the research’s purpose, methods, and intended uses of the knowledge shared. See Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC).
• Data sovereignty over the knowledge shared — recognizing the community’s ongoing authority over how TEK is collected, stored, accessed, and reused, even after it has been shared with a research team, consistent with the CARE Principles for Indigenous data governance (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) and the broader framework of Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Indigenous Data Governance.
• Cultural protocols — community-specific expectations around who may share knowledge, in what context, and how it should be attributed or protected from further disclosure. See Cultural protocol.
• Benefit-sharing — a defined, agreed mechanism for the community to receive a fair share of any benefit (scientific, financial, or reputational) arising from research that uses its knowledge, rather than the knowledge flowing one-way into a publication or dataset the community cannot access or control.
• Community-designed review, not just individual consent — see Indigenous community review for how this differs procedurally from standard IRB review.

Real institutional and funder frameworks

Several real, citable frameworks now address TEK specifically in research governance:

• U.S. federal government: a November 2021 joint memorandum from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Federal Decision Making, committed federal agencies to elevating Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ITEK) in Federal scientific and policy processes, and established an interagency working group. That commitment produced government-wide guidance, Guidance for Federal Departments and Agencies on Indigenous Knowledge, released December 1, 2022, directing federal agencies — including research funders — to recognize and include Indigenous Knowledge in research, policy, and decision-making, while respecting Tribal sovereignty and self-determination over how that knowledge is used.
• NOAA has published its own Guidance and Best Practices for Engaging with and Utilizing Traditional Knowledge and Indigenous Knowledge in Decision-Making, and has run joint federal-Tribal TEK projects (for example, reconstructing historical fish-run timing from Tribal oral history) under that guidance.
• NSF, through its Office of Polar Programs, sets explicit community-engagement expectations for Arctic research: proposers are directed to apply the IARPC Principles for Conducting Research in the Arctic and to build knowledge co-production with Indigenous knowledge-holders into the research design from the question-formulation stage, not as an add-on after data collection. Knowledge co-production and inclusion of Indigenous knowledge are also recognized routes for meeting NSF’s Broader Impacts criterion on relevant awards.
• IPBES (the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) operates a formal Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK) Approach, adopted in 2017, that governs how Indigenous and local knowledge is engaged across all IPBES assessment functions. IPBES’s own data and knowledge management policy directs all contributing experts to follow the CARE Principles for Indigenous data governance alongside the FAIR data principles, and to obtain free, prior, and informed consent — a direct, citable example of CARE and FPIC being operationalized inside a major international science-policy body’s research governance, not just discussed as aspirational principles.

None of these frameworks replace an institution’s own research ethics or data governance procedures — they establish the floor a funder or federal agency expects, which a research administrator then has to translate into the institution’s actual protocol design, consent process, and data management plan.

Related CASRAI terms

TEK sits within a cluster of related concepts already documented in the CASRAI Dictionary: the broader Traditional Knowledge (TK) concept it specializes; the CARE Principles, Indigenous Data Sovereignty, and Indigenous Data Governance that govern how it should be handled once shared; Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) and Cultural protocol, which govern how it is sought; the GIDA (Global Indigenous Data Alliance), which stewards the CARE Principles internationally; and Indigenous-knowledge holder contribution and Indigenous community review, which address how knowledge-holder contributions and community consent are recognized within a research project.

References

• Berkes, F. Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management — the foundational academic definition of TEK as a knowledge-practice-belief complex.
• White House OSTP & CEQ, Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Federal Decision Making memorandum (November 15, 2021), and Guidance for Federal Departments and Agencies on Indigenous Knowledge (December 1, 2022).
• NOAA, Guidance and Best Practices for Engaging with and Utilizing Traditional Knowledge and Indigenous Knowledge in Decision-Making.
• NSF Office of Polar Programs, Arctic community-engagement and knowledge co-production guidance (Navigating the New Arctic solicitations).
• IPBES, Approach to Recognizing and Working with Indigenous and Local Knowledge (adopted 2017) and IPBES data and knowledge management policy (CARE + FAIR requirement).