Dr. Dario Novellino is an advocate for indigenous peoples’ and pastoralists’ rights with an academic background in social anthropology. Over the last thirty years he has shaped his existence into a coherent mission for the defence of collective rights of unprivileged communities. In 1987, at the age of 24, Dario began organizing the Tanabag Batak tribe of Palawan to counter logging operations and he assisted them in the writing of a petition to the President of the Philippines. A few months later, the company’s license was revoked and the Batak forest was spared from destruction.
Following this initial success, Dario’s effort to protect the traditional resource rights of indigenous peoples, especially in Palawan, has been relentless, resulting in new and stronger forms of empowerment for the local communities and in the mapping and recognition of their ancestral domains both at the national and at the international levels.
Particularly, Dario spearheaded the use of participatory video techniques for community-based advocacy. Equipped with a car battery, a projector and a video camera, he travelled on foot for months amongst Pala’wan communities that had witnessed the impact of mining and oil palm expansion and recorded their experiences and grievances. Then, he shared these recorded testimonials with isolated indigenous groups on the same island, who could have been the next in line. This cumulative summary of audio-recorded local voices has turned out to be a powerful tool to stimulate reflections on the impact of extractive and oil palm industries, leading to informed decisions and various forms of peaceful resistance. A measure of the relevance of Dario’s work is the meaningful link being established between locally grounded struggles, global advocacy and international campaign initiatives.
Since 2017, he has also helped transhumant pastoralists of Southern Lazio Region to assert their rights to grazing land, bringing their voices to the attention of both decision makers and parks’ managers. As of now, Dario continues to use his anthropological background to help both indigenous communities in the Philippines and Italian pastoralists to document, recover and digitalize oral narratives and knowledge systems. The final output is the creation of visual digital archives made fully accessible to local custodians and the public opinion at large.
To know about Dr. Novellino’s work, please visit -
https://www.kent.ac.uk/anthropology-conservation/people/1046/www.kent.ac.uk/anthropology-conservation/people/1046/novellino-dario
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dario-Novellino