Do Indigenous Peoples Govern The Environment?

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

Abstract

In this paper I aim to explore the significance of indigenous governmentality to environmental governance. As such the paper traces recent developments in academic thinking regarding environmental governance and considers whether there is any alignment, or possible inspiration to be found, with indigenous environmental ideas and practices. Confronting ideas of governmentality the paper also considers anew the contradictions that exist in a neoliberal multicultural era in which indigenous rights and mechanisms of participation have been expanded whilst older logics of racism and primitive accumulation have persisted. Reflecting on what is now an extensive literature exploring multiple empirical cases of state- indigenous community legal and political engagements over land and extractive resources in Latin America, the paper takes seriously other scholars’ arguments that legal and political advances towards consultation, dialogue, co-management or local content analysis are forms of systemic entrapment. However, the paper also observes that whilst reforms to governance mechanisms can and most frequently do debilitate radical alternatives, there are moments of creative articulation (Hale 2011) between states, indigenous peoples and the private sector in which positive results for people and environment win through. Beyond identifying empirical examples of such instances I argue that they are in part responsible for the- albeit periodically fragile- incremental widening and improvement of environmental justice and governance in modern Latin America. Moreover I suggest that instances of creative articulation could be indicative of critical additions to a broader global understanding of environmental governance in the present.

Author

• John Andrew McNeish, Norwegian University of Life Sciences