Indigenous Environmental Governance: A Literature Review and Research Agenda

• In Event: Indigenous Environmental Governance: Struggles and Strategies for Safeguarding the Future

Abstract

Indigenous people have suffered disproportionally from global environmental stressors, at the same time as the value of indigenous knowledge and practices are increasingly being recognized in global policy debates. Whereas the integration of indigenous people has been studied within different subfields of environmental governance (e.g. biodiversity, climate change, forestry), there is still a lack of systematic knowledge of indigenous environmental governance across these policy areas. This systematic literature review poses the following questions: When and why does the integration of indigenous knowledge and practices contribute to environmental sustainability and justice? What are the frequent mismatches between global environmental governance approaches and indigenous knowledge(s), practices and interests? Under what conditions is it possible to overcome such mismatches?
Based on an analysis of almost 200 selected publications, we provide an overview of the opportunities and challenges identified at different scales, geographical locations, and policy-areas, with the purpose of identifying remaining research gaps. In addition to our empirical findings, we will propose a conceptualization of ‘indigenous environmental governance’, understood as a concept that is inter-relational, that crosses scales and that has to be sensitive to different contexts and power relations.

Author

• Maria-Therese Gustafsson, Stockholm University