With Issue 18-4, we are wrapping up our first year as editors. When we started, we sought to maintain the core focus of Global Environmental Politics – attention to the relationship between global political forces and environmental change – while also seeking to enhance the pluralism of the journal’s offerings. This issue exemplifies the kind of enhanced pluralism we sought, in this instance with new work on global environmental and Indigenous politics. Three articles in this issue draw attention to different aspects of Indigenous politics: the role of Indigenous rights in transboundary water negotiations and governance; the importance of multiple knowledge systems; and the role that Indigenous groups play in efforts to codify non-Western understandings of people’s relationship to Nature. This collection of articles further highlights increasing attention to several aspects of humans’ relationship with nature: non-Western understandings of human-nature relationships and global norm diffusion concerning non-Western perspectives.
Tying these articles together is a commitment to showing the importance of opening up spaces for Indigenous voices and narratives in global environmental politics (GEP). These articles underscore that Indigenous rights should not be an afterthought when negotiating global environmental treaties; Indigenous communities should have a seat at the table from the beginning of negotiations if policymakers are serious about ensuring inclusivity and full participation in global environmental negotiations. Yet, as with the broader GEP field, the authors in this issue point out variations in Indigenous rights, policies, and law, suggesting that research is needed to understand the evolution of Indigenous politics and norms across different domestic contexts. Methodologically, the articles showcase the use of qualitative methods, as these articles leverage narratives and writings of Indigenous peoples.
Alice Cohen and Emma Norman propose a new framework for fostering transboundary river governance along the Columbia River, which is shared by the United States and Canada. Using Indigenous narratives, the authors illuminate the importance of strengthening Indigenous rights in renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty. A multilateral approach rather than a binational or regional approach, they argue, provides an opportunity to not only rethink the relationship between people and the Columbia River, but also to rethink power relationships within a river basin. Their analysis of transboundary river governance highlights the ways in which conventional theory, which has privileged state power, has been ill equipped to allow a space for Indigenous nations within and across states in treaty negotiations. In doing so, Cohen and Norman meticulously show how the Columbia Basin tribes and First Nations were silenced in the original Columbia River treaty and more broadly in the study of global environmental politics.
Cristina Inoue’s article on Indigenous voices from the Amazon also tackles the notion of “privileged knowledge” and its impact on the study of GEP. Through the concept of “worlding,” Inoue seeks to push scholars of GEP to engage in a broader dialogue with Indigenous ways of knowing and understanding of “Earth politics.” Worlding requires recognizing Indigenous peoples’ discursive agency. To illuminate what is meant by Indigenous knowledge systems and humans’ non-exceptionalism, she focuses on the Yanomani people’s relationship with their forests and their struggles to maintain their forest world.
A third article, while not explicitly at the intersection of Indigenous and environmental politics, focuses on an issue (Rights of Nature) and cases where Indigenous peoples and politics have featured prominently in shaping environmental governance. In “Constructing Rights of Nature Norms in the US, Ecuador, and New Zealand,” Kauffman and Martin observe a trend in governments seeking to define Nature as a subject with rights, calling this an emergent international norm. After exploring the conceptual foundations of the Rights of Nature norm, they explain how and why this idea is expressed so differently in New Zealand, Ecuador, and the United States, despite being part of the same global trend. They find that differing domestic political contexts do more than make an international norm acceptable or not, they serve as key arenas for the definition of the norm itself. Their analysis thus illuminates a key new legal concept, while also contributing to important debates in the international relations literature around the diffusion of and contestation over international norms.
Water is another cross-cutting theme in this issue. In addition to Cohen and Norman’s piece, two other articles highlight water cooperation and governance. In one of the first large-N tests of the environmental peacemaking literature, Tobias Ide and Adrien Detges investigate the impact of cross-border water cooperation on the transition to more peaceful relations between states. They largely confirm that positive, water-related interactions, particularly in the absence of acute conflict, increase the likelihood of more peaceful relations between two states. Peter Jacques and Rafaella Lobo investigate how discourses of sustainability intersect with governing of the world’s oceans. Given a resurgence of sustainable development discourse in global environmental governance, especially with the advent of the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, deeper investigation of the content and context of such discourses to address specific issues is especially timely. Using quantitative content analysis of the FAO State of the World’s Fisheries and Aquaculture reports, Jacques and Lobo show that while ecological and social concerns are increasing, economic concerns remain dominant. Moreover, the economic discourses are increasingly growth oriented, suggesting that economic growth is the central normative driver of the World Ocean Regime.
The last article in this issue looks to re-orient the study of GEP around the ways in which people, material, and ideas move. In “Environmental Mobilities: An Alternative Lens to Global Environmental Governance,” authors Ingrid Boas, Sanneke Kloppenburg, Judith van Leeuwen, and Machiel Lamers argue that GEP has become too focused on the institutions of global environmental governance as the key unit of analysis. Instead they argue that a primary focus on environmental mobilities provides a useful way to more fully grasp the nature of environmental problems, identify governance gaps, and suggest more useful governance practices. In vignettes that explore environmental migration, ocean cruise tourism, and marine plastic pollution, the article lays bare the ways in which different kinds of movement shape governance opportunities and obstacles. Environmental damage can catalyze movement (migrants); movement of material and people can generate environmental damage (cruise tourism); and flows of harmful material (plastics) create their own challenges. It is a powerful call to consider not just sites of governance in the study of GEP, but to fully consider the ramifications of flows of people, material, and ideas.