Toward a Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Comparative Review ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
Land Water

The politics of environmental justice increasingly feature in environmental governance across multiple levels. Environmental defenders risk their lives to protect land, water, and forests. Non-human actors like rivers are gaining rights. Frontline environmental justice communities now include nation-states like Fiji that faces existential threats from climate change. Indigenous Peoples’ fights for self-determination illuminate how deeply connected and inseparable are the politics of sovereignty, representation, and environment. This chapter explores these developments to chart and examine how a politics of environmental justice can inform environmental and social policies by treating environmental justice as a driver, rather than unintended consequence, of policy and politics. Through this critical, comparative review, the chapter illuminates how and why environmental justice concerns matter for environmental governance and for the study of comparative environmental politics.

scholarly journals Environmental governance: Broadening ontological spaces for a more livable world

2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110185
Author(s):  
Walker DePuy ◽  
Jacob Weger ◽  
Katie Foster ◽  
Anya M Bonanno ◽  
Suneel Kumar ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Policy Instruments ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Ontological Pluralism ◽  
Cognitive Justice ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
United Nations Declaration ◽  
The Right ◽  
Land Water

This paper contributes to global debates on environmental governance by drawing on recent ontological scholarship to ask: What would it mean to ontologically engage the concept of environmental governance? By examining the ontological underpinnings of three environmental governance domains (land, water, biodiversity), we find that dominant contemporary environmental governance concepts and policy instruments are grounded in a modernist ontology which actively shapes the world, making certain aspects and relationships visible while invisibilizing others. We then survey ethnographic and other literature to highlight how such categories and their relations have been conceived otherwise and the implications of breaking out of a modernist ontology for environmental governance. Lastly, we argue that answering our opening question requires confronting the coloniality woven into the environmental governance project and consider how to instead embrace ontological pluralism in practice. In particular, we examine what taking seriously the right to self-determination enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) could mean for acknowledging Indigenous ontologies as systems of governance in their own right; what challenges and opportunities exist for recognizing and translating ontologies across socio-legal regimes; and how embracing the dynamism and hybridity of ontologies might complicate or advance struggles for material and cognitive justice.

Unfinished Constitutional Business: Rethinking Indigenous Self-Determination

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 962-963
Author(s):  
Ravi de Costa
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Many

Unfinished Constitutional Business: Rethinking Indigenous Self-Determination, Barbara A. Hocking, ed., Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005, pp. 293.In the introduction to this collection of papers from a 2001 conference in Brisbane, Australia, the editor asks, “can indigenous peoples' experiences of colonisation reshape our constitutional language?” (xv). The contributions to the book reflect the breadth of indigenous experiences as well as the range of ways that many nation-states will have to revisit their constitutions in order to satisfy the goal of decolonization/self-determination. Indeed, the book requires us to rethink what we consider to be a constitution in the context of unresolved and highly unsatisfactory indigenous-settler relations. More than a document or series of political institutions, the book explores the many ways that colonial societies have been and remain constituted by non-indigenous assumptions and ideologies and considers whether and how these impair claims for indigenous self-determination.

scholarly journals Legal and Ontological Pluralism: Recognising Rivers as More-Than-Human Entities

2021 ◽  
pp. 235-282
Author(s):  
Meg Parsons ◽  
Karen Fisher ◽  
Roa Petra Crease
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Ontological Pluralism ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Indigenous Knowledge Systems ◽  
Settler Societies ◽  
Definition Of

AbstractWe explore the ways in which the formal recognition (to some extent) of Indigenous knowledge systems within environmental governance and the role of reconcilition in achieving environmental justice. We examine whether recent agreements between the New Zealand Crown (Crown) and Māori tribal groups (iwi), known as Treaty ‘settlements’, to establish shared co-governance and management over rivers encapsulate and are capable of achieving environmental justice for Māori. We draw on schoalrship on legal and ontological pluralism to consider questions of how to remedy environmental injustice and what reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples means in settler societies. Rather than seek to provide a singular definition of Indigenous environmental justice (IEJ), we instead examine how Indigenous peoples in Aotearoa New Zealand and other colonial societies are engaged in efforts to negotiate with and challenge the colonial legal orders, develop their laws, policies, and governance frameworks to achieve justice within the freshwater realm.

scholarly journals Beyond Academia: Indigenous media as an intercultural resource to unlearn nation-state history

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (21) ◽  
pp. 29-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Lehman
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Indigenous Rights ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Indigenous Media ◽  
Nation States ◽  
State History ◽  
The Right

This article proposes that settler communities cannot teach or understand our shared intercultural history without listening to ideas presented by Indigenous communities about their own history in lands currently occupied by modern nation- -states. This history enables us to understand the power of the ethnographic gaze and its relation to The Doctrine of Discovery (1493), which extinguished Indigenous rights to lands and resources, rights later transferred to the modern nation- -states through the legal notion of “eminent domain”. These rights include the ownership of intangibles such as the image and storytelling through photography and film. Maori scholars Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Barry Barclay and Merata Mita are cited on knowledge production, copyright and image sovereignty to decolonise our understanding of the right to self-representation. The study includes a brief analysis of films that help decolonise an ethnographic gaze at these relationships, particularly the Brazilian documentary “O Mestre e o Divino” by Tiago Campos Torre (2013).Keywords: Indigenous peoples. Nation-state history. Film. Self- -determination.

Indigenizing Self-Determination at the United Nations: Reparative Progress in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Miranda Johnson
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
United Nations General ◽  
Political Independence ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Colonial Histories

Abstract When the United Nations General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, it introduced into the international legal lexicon a new dimension to the concept of self-determination. The declaration emphasizes indigenous peoples’ distinctive rights to land, culture, language, and collective identity. It does not propose political independence or sovereign statehood, instead insisting on indigenous peoples’ equal rights of citizenship within existing nation-states. The distinct dimension of self-determination that the declaration introduces is one that speaks of indigenous peoples’ particular colonial histories of dispossession and the restoration of their rights and identities in the present, but without disrupting the political continuity of the states that surround them. It is reparative rather than revolutionary. In this article, I examine the construction and contestation of an indigenous right to self-determination both in relation to earlier definitions, and among and between the peoples and states who drafted the declaration.

Indigeneity and US Settler Colonialism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Powys Whyte
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Indigenous Identity ◽  
Blood Quantum ◽  
The Us ◽  
Collective Self

Indigenous identity in the US context presents many difficulties, including issues related to the use of blood quantum, ethnic fraud, and tribal disenrollment. These difficulties should be understood as oppressive dilemmas and disappearances that are built into those structures of US settler colonialism that seek to erase indigenous peoples. Kim TallBear suggests at least one possible alternative for addressing issues associated with indigeneity and settler erasure. TallBear’s alternative is multifaceted, focusing on collective self-determination, survival, and land, and it can be used—as just one example—to understand current uses of indigeneity in some contemporary indigenous environmental justice projects.

Sovereignty, Self-Determination, and Natural Resources

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jérémie Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Natural Resources ◽  
International Law ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Potential Role ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
The Right

The issue of sovereignty over natural resources has been a key element in the development of international law, notably leading to the emergence of the principle of States’ permanent sovereignty over their natural resources. However, concomitant to this focus on States’ sovereignty, international human rights law proclaims the right of peoples to self-determination over their natural resources. This has led to a complex and ambivalent relationship between the principle of States’ sovereignty over natural resources and peoples’ rights to natural resources. This chapter analyses this conflicting relationship and examines the emergence of the right of peoples to freely dispose of their natural resources and evaluates its potential role in contemporary advocacy. It notably explores how indigenous peoples have called for the revival of their right to sovereignty over natural resources, and how the global peasants’ movement has pushed for the recognition of the concept of food sovereignty.

Indigenous Planning: From Forced Assimilation to Self-determination

2021 ◽  
pp. 088541222110266
Author(s):  
Michael Hibbard
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Land Rights ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Indigenous Cultures ◽  
Indigenous Planning ◽  
Indigenous Land Rights ◽  
Indigenous Land

Interest in Indigenous planning has blossomed in recent years, particularly as it relates to the Indigenous response to settler colonialism. Driven by land and resource hunger, settler states strove to extinguish Indigenous land rights and ultimately to destroy Indigenous cultures. However, Indigenous peoples have persisted. This article draws on the literature to examine the resistance of Indigenous peoples to settler colonialism, their resilience, and the resurgence of Indigenous planning as a vehicle for Indigenous peoples to determine their own fate and to enact their own conceptions of self-determination and self-governance.

scholarly journals The materiality of languages in engagements with the environment

Multilingua ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Siragusa ◽  
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Related Language ◽  
Global North ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Human Actors

Abstract Communication, an apparently intangible practice, does in fact affect the way people engage with their social worlds in very material ways. Inspired by both ethnographic and archival-driven research, this special issue aims to fill the gap in studies of language materiality by addressing entanglements with other-than-human agencies. The contributions of this special issue on verbal and non-verbal communicative practices among Indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in the Global North and the South interpret language materiality as practice- and process-oriented, performative, and embodied relations between humans and other-than-human actors. The articles cover three major sub-themes, which ostensibly intertwine to a greater or lesser degree in all the works: (in-)visible actors and elements-related language; language materiality narrating and producing sociality; and the emotions and affect of language. The topic of this special issue, the materiality of languages, manifested in multiple engagements with the environment, proves particularly critical at the moment, given the current environmental crisis and the need to comprehend in more depth social relations with numerous other-than-human agencies.

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