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Indigenous Transformations towards Sustainability: Indigenous Peoples' Experiences of and Responses...
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Indigenous Transformations towards Sustainability: Indigenous Peoples' Experiences of and Responses to Global Environmental Changes

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2022) | Viewed by 20352

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Meg Parsons

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Environment, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Interests: climate change adaptation; Indigenous and local knowledge systems; sustainable transformations; environmental justice; historical geography; path dependency; Indigenous environmental management; decolonising methodologies; co-design and co-production of knowledge

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The focus of this Special Issue is on Indigenous peoples' efforts to imagine and engender sustainable transformations to address the litany of interlinked social-ecological crises that are negatively impacting their ways of life and livelihoods, as well as their health and social wellbeing. Within the global environmental change literature, there is a suite of new research that explores how actions to address climate change require a shift from small-scale, incremental climate mitigation and adaptation responses to more radical systematic changes to how societies are structured and operated as well as the governance and management of environments, climate risks, and sustainable development. This includes transforming socio-economic and political systems, governance structures, and individuals' and communities' ways of living to embrace more sustainable and equitable approaches to environmental governance and management taking into account the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, other sources of environmental degradation, and climate risks, while also ensuring opportunities for sustainable development. However, the majority of scholarly attention to sustainable transformations is firmly situated within the theoretical and empirical settings of Western knowledge systems and Western cultures, and there is limited attention to how other knowledge systems and cultures perceive, engage with, and enact (or resist) transformations. Emergent research critiques resilience and climate adaptation literature’s lack of focus on the socio-cultural and political dimensions of transformation, and draws attention to how transformative changes in the context of Indigenous societies need to be understood within Indigenous peoples' historical and contemporary experiences of colonisation as well as their ongoing decolonial endeavours.

A critical question that guides this Special Issue is therefore "How do Indigenous peoples imagine and seek to enact sustainable transformations within their nations, businesses, communities, and daily lives?" Articles submitted to this Special Issue should provide empirical case studies and/or further advance theoretical understandings of what, why, where and how deliberate transformations can (or are already) occur for Indigenous peoples that address climate change issues, other environmental crises, and the challenge of sustainability. These can include inquiries focused on: the factors that enable or constrain Indigenous nation/tribe/community resilience and transformations towards sustainability; understanding the relationships between individual and collective agency in transformative changes within Indigenous societies; understanding how Indigenous peoples’ historical experiences of deliberate transformations can be used to create equitable, effective, and sustainable transformations for Indigenous peoples founded on Indigenous worldviews, values, knowledge systems, and sovereignties; the creation of Indigenous and collaborative environmental governance and management arrangements that recognise Indigenous knowledge, values, authority, and sustainable development needs; and understanding what sustainability transformations mean when situated within Indigenous knowledge systems and enacted through Indigenous governance arrangements. Ultimately, the papers from this Special Issue will deepen academic and practitioner knowledge about sustainable transformations for Indigenous peoples and in doing so provide insights that can contribute to the design and implementation of more equitable, inclusive, and holistic forms of environmental governance and management approaches, as well as assist in efforts to decolonise decision-making processes.

I look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Meg Parsons
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • transformations
  • Indigenous Knowledge
  • climate change adaptation
  • climate change mitigation
  • global environmental change
  • resilience
  • Indigenous environmental justice
  • sustainable development
  • decolonising environmental governance
  • Indigenous community-based environmental management

Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

27 pages, 5368 KiB  
Article
(Un)Heard Voices of Ecosystem Degradation: Stories from the Nexus of Settler-Colonialism and Slow Violence
by Leane Makey, Meg Parsons, Karen Fisher, Alyssce Te Huna, Mina Henare, Vicky Miru, Millan Ruka and Mikaera Miru
Sustainability 2022, 14(22), 14672; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su142214672 - 08 Nov 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2045
Abstract
We examine the ecosystem degradation of the Kaipara moana as an example of the nexus of settler colonialism and slow violence. Settler colonialism is a type of domination that violently interrupts Indigenous people’s interactions and relationships with their land-, sea-, and water-scapes. Slow [...] Read more.
We examine the ecosystem degradation of the Kaipara moana as an example of the nexus of settler colonialism and slow violence. Settler colonialism is a type of domination that violently interrupts Indigenous people’s interactions and relationships with their land-, sea-, and water-scapes. Slow violence provides a conceptual framework to explore the slow and invisible erosion of ecosystems and to make visible how unseen violence inflicted upon nature (such as deforestation and sedimentation pollution) also unfolds at the intimate scale of the Indigenous body and household. Here, we present how the structural violence of settler colonialism and ecological transformations created a form of settler colonial slow violence for humans and more-than-humans which highlights the ethical and justice features of sustainability because of the link with settler-colonialism. We argue for the need to include local knowledge and lived experiences of slow violence to ensure ethical and just ensuring practices that better attend to the relationships between Indigenous peoples and their more-than-human kin (including plants, animals, rivers, mountains, and seas). We build on this argument using auto- and duo-ethnographic research to identify possibilities for making sense of and making visible those forms of harm, loss and dispossession that frequently remain intangible in public, political and academic representations of land-, sea-, and water-scapes. Situated in the Kaipara moana, Aotearoa New Zealand, narratives are rescued from invisibility and representational bias and stories of water pollution, deforestation, institutional racism, species and habitat loss form the narratives of slow violence. (Please see Glossary for translation of Māori language, terms and names.) Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Indigenous Transformations towards Sustainability: Indigenous Peoples' Experiences of and Responses to Global Environmental Changes)
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30 pages, 7978 KiB  
Article
Decolonising Flooding and Risk Management: Indigenous Peoples, Settler Colonialism, and Memories of Environmental Injustices
by Meg Parsons and Karen Fisher
Sustainability 2022, 14(18), 11127; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su141811127 - 06 Sep 2022
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 4446
Abstract
This paper examines the history of settler-colonialism and how settler-colonial-led policies and projects to remake the landscapes and waterscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand resulted in the production of Indigenous environmental injustices. Underpinned by theorising on ecological justice and decolonisation, we draw on archival [...] Read more.
This paper examines the history of settler-colonialism and how settler-colonial-led policies and projects to remake the landscapes and waterscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand resulted in the production of Indigenous environmental injustices. Underpinned by theorising on ecological justice and decolonisation, we draw on archival sources and oral histories of Māori and Pākehā (European) individuals living in a single river catchment—the Waipā River—to trace how actions to remove native vegetation, drain wetlands, introduce exotic biota, and re-engineer waterways contributed to intensifying incidence of floods. While Pākehā settlers interpreted environmental transformation as inherently positive, Indigenous Māori perceived it as profoundly negative, a form of ecological dispossession. We demonstrate that while Pākehā narrated floods as disaster events, Māori viewed colonisation as the true disaster, with floods and fires merely products of settlers’ mistreatment of the environment. Moreover, the colonial government’s efforts to control floods resulted in Māori being further alienated from and losing access to their rohe (ancestral lands and waters) and witnessing the destruction of their taonga (treasures including forests, wetlands, and sacred sites). For Māori of the Waipā catchment, flood risk management regimes were far more destructive (socially, economically and spiritually) than flood events. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Indigenous Transformations towards Sustainability: Indigenous Peoples' Experiences of and Responses to Global Environmental Changes)
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16 pages, 314 KiB  
Article
Urban nullius? Urban Indigenous People and Climate Change
by Melissa Nursey-Bray, Meg Parsons and Ariane Gienger
Sustainability 2022, 14(17), 10830; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su141710830 - 30 Aug 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 4852
Abstract
Climate change is impacting cities and urban regions in significant ways, and people living within them must work out how to live with and adapt to the changes they bring. Indigenous peoples are increasingly moving to and living in cities, yet how they [...] Read more.
Climate change is impacting cities and urban regions in significant ways, and people living within them must work out how to live with and adapt to the changes they bring. Indigenous peoples are increasingly moving to and living in cities, yet how they experience climate change within them is not understood. While literature explores Indigenous experiences of climate change and how Indigenous knowledge is being used to combat it, this work is geographically located in rural and remote Indigenous territories—not cities. This paper presents the results of a review that sought to find out why this is the case. Our aim was to identify scholarship that discussed how Indigenous people are affected by climate change in cities. To do so, we undertake a narrative literature review, which analyses content to distil key concepts in the literature, which are then presented in the paper to form a narrative. We find a significant gap in the literature addressing Indigenous experiences and voices concerning climate change in cities. We argue that this is due to the ongoing legacy of settler colonization, which has erased Indigenous peoples from urban territories to the extent that even when they are visible, urban Indigenous people are characterized as inauthentic and vulnerable. We call for action to overturn this insidious form of urban nullius to reclaim and assert Indigenous voices on and about climate change and policy in cities. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Indigenous Transformations towards Sustainability: Indigenous Peoples' Experiences of and Responses to Global Environmental Changes)
40 pages, 3466 KiB  
Article
Diversifying Indigenous Vulnerability and Adaptation: An Intersectional Reading of Māori Women’s Experiences of Health, Wellbeing, and Climate Change
by Danielle Emma Johnson, Karen Fisher and Meg Parsons
Sustainability 2022, 14(9), 5452; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su14095452 - 01 May 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 5092
Abstract
Despite evidence that Indigenous peoples’ multiple subjectivities engender diverse lived experiences both between and within Indigenous groups, the influence of multiple subjectivities on Indigenous peoples’ vulnerability and adaptation to climate change is largely un-explored. Drawing on ethnographic research with Indigenous Māori women in [...] Read more.
Despite evidence that Indigenous peoples’ multiple subjectivities engender diverse lived experiences both between and within Indigenous groups, the influence of multiple subjectivities on Indigenous peoples’ vulnerability and adaptation to climate change is largely un-explored. Drawing on ethnographic research with Indigenous Māori women in Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper provides empirical evidence that subjectivity-mediated power dynamics operating within Indigenous societies (at the individual and household scale) are important determinants of vulnerability and adaptation which should be considered in both scholarship and policy. Using an intersectional framework, I demonstrate how different Māori women and their whānau (families) live, cope with, and adapt to the embodied physical and emotional health effects of climate change in radically different ways because of their subject positionings, even though they belong to the same community, hapū (sub-tribe), or iwi (tribe). In underlining these heterogenous experiences, I provide an avenue for reconsidering how climate adaptation scholarship, policies, and practices might better engage with the complex, amorphous realities within Māori and other Indigenous communities. I argue it is possible to develop more inclusive, tailored, and sustainable adaptation that considers divergent vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities within Indigenous communities, groups, and societies and supports customised vulnerability-reduction strategies. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Indigenous Transformations towards Sustainability: Indigenous Peoples' Experiences of and Responses to Global Environmental Changes)
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32 pages, 1900 KiB  
Article
Green Energy—Green for Whom? A Case Study of the Kabinakagami River Waterpower Project in Northern Canada
by Stephen R. J. Tsuji, Dan D. P. McCarthy and Stephen Quilley
Sustainability 2021, 13(16), 9445; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13169445 - 23 Aug 2021
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2863
Abstract
Green energy has become a term that heralds efforts of environmental conservation and protection worldwide; however, much of it is marred with questions of what it means to be green. More precisely, it has become a question of Green for whom? [...] Read more.
Green energy has become a term that heralds efforts of environmental conservation and protection worldwide; however, much of it is marred with questions of what it means to be green. More precisely, it has become a question of Green for whom? While many of the impacts of supposed green energy projects are local in their reach, some may be more regional in their scope, such as hydroelectric power. Hydroelectric power generation negatively impacts the environment and people who rely on the environment for sustenance, such as, Indigenous peoples of northern Canada. Taking into account their position with respect to the areas impacted by these green projects, many Indigenous peoples have voiced their concerns and doubts concerning green energy, which is purported to be a mode of energy production that champions the environment. The Kabinakagami River Waterpower Project serves as a case study for both the potential effects of the project and the different views associated with these endeavors. If nothing else, the accounts and testimonies found within shall stand as a testament to the hubris of calling an energy project green without properly assessing and considering the impacts. While these statements relate to the case presented, they also carry significance in the wider world due to the numerous Indigenous communities around the world that are having their spaces slowly being encroached upon in the name of sustainable growth, or green energy. This will especially be true in the post-COVID-19 period where green energy and a green economy are being touted as a way towards state and worldwide recovery. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Indigenous Transformations towards Sustainability: Indigenous Peoples' Experiences of and Responses to Global Environmental Changes)
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