Indigenous Environmental Movements and the Function of Governance Institutions

Type: 
Literature
Publication: 
Whyte, Kyle, Indigenous Environmental Movements and the Function of Governance Institutions (April 25, 2016). Whyte, K.P. 2016. Indigenous Environmental Movements and the Function of Governance Institutions. Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory. Edited by T. Gabrielson, C. Hall, J. Meyer & D. Schlosberg, 563-580. Oxford University Press.. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2770066
Year Published: 
2016
Description: 

Indigenous environmental movements have been important actors in twentieth- and twenty-first-century global environmental politics and environmental justice. Their explicit foci range from the protection of indigenous environmental stewardship systems to upholding and expanding treaty responsibilities to securing indigenous rights in law and policy. This chapter suggests that these movements open important intellectual spaces for thinking about the function of environmental governance institutions in addressing complex environmental issues such as clean water and forest conservation. Different from institutional functions based on market mechanisms or appeals to human psychological tendencies, a variety of indigenous environmentalists suggest that institutions should function to convene reciprocal responsibilities across relatives as diverse as humans, non-human beings such as plants, entities such as water, and collectives such as forests.

Category: 
Governance, Indigenous Environmental Movements, Reciprocal Responsibilities, Philosophy