Environmental governance: Broadening ontological spaces for a more livable world

Abstract

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.

Introduction

The current era is characterized by large-scale, seemingly intractable environmental challenges, from coral bleaching and toxic contaminants to mass extinctions and global climate change. Attempts to mitigate such issues involve a suite of interventions commonly captured under the rubric of “environmental governance” (Lemos and Agrawal, 2006). While environmental governance may refer broadly to the diverse ways that humans manage their environments, we use the term here to refer to a historically particular form of intervention that emerged near the end of the 20th century, characterized by a shift from traditional top-down, state-centered development interventions to more decentralized and globalized multi-actor modes of administrative control (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002; Hilgers, 2010; Lobao et al., 2009).

While this shift has arguably engendered broader public recognition of the importance of institutions, decision-making processes, and incentives in the environmental domain, critiques highlight a host of concerns about contemporary governance and how it is translated into practice. Among these are its continued emphasis on prescriptive and technocratic solutions (Bäckstrand, 2004; Mol, 2001); its location within and reproduction of a global neoliberal political economy focused on aggregate economic growth (Newell, 2008); the radical simplification and commodification of the natural world inherent in market-based regulatory mechanisms (Robertson, 2007; Smith, 2007); and its narrowly conceived definitions of participation, rights, and property, and the circumscribed sets of actors, knowledges, and practices recognized as legitimate (Harvey, 2005; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004). It has also been argued that undergirding the “good governance” discourse lies a pervasive teleology that places Europeans at the top of a global hierarchy (Gruffydd Jones, 2013), obscuring or ignoring colonial histories and power dynamics (see, e.g. Gadgil and Guha, 1992; Sivaramakrishnan, 1999). Yet it is this very history and enduringly unequal global political economy through which Western, or modernist, technocratic ideals have become hegemonic in global environmental governance, marginalizing or silencing alternative approaches to environmental management.

Recently, attention across a variety of disciplines has shifted to a focus on the ontological: what exists in the world; how different cultural worlds and realities come into being; and what happens when diverse onto-epistemologies encounter one another (De la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; Descola, 2013; Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017; Jensen, 2017; Viveiros de Castro, 1998). Building on this diverse scholarship, as well as earlier work from postcolonial studies and the politics of knowledge, we ask what concepts and practices are rendered visible and invisible in current environmental governance paradigms and pursuits, and in what ways these concepts and practices might advance or hinder our ability to envision and enact worlds otherwise. Previous work has argued for a deepened sensitivity to ontological diversity in how worlds are known and enacted, so as to more ethically and effectively navigate contemporary socioecological challenges facing the planet and the human–nonhuman relations upon which its health depends (Blaser, 2013; Burman, 2017; Sullivan, 2017; Yates et al., 2017).

Many scholars, including those from Indigenous backgrounds in particular, have likewise emphasized that coloniality is not only very much alive today in both knowledge and structural power relations, but that it lives on in particular ways through the dominant discourses, practices, and ontology of environmental governance (Burman, 2017; Craft, 2018; Dunlap and Sullivan, 2020; Hunt, 2014; Risling Baldy, 2017; Sullivan, 2017; Viveiros de Castro, 2013). While we draw heavily on Indigenous scholarship, we recognize that the coloniality of dominant environmental governance institutions has broad geographic relevance and subjugates a wide array of ontological orientations (Indigenous and otherwise), which themselves adapt, borrow, and actively participate in the modern era. Thus our critique of “modernist” ontology refers specifically to the interventionist, technocratic, and economically driven ideals that dominate many environmental governance institutions today.

In this paper, we ask: What would it mean to ontologically engage the concept of environmental governance? What constructive and contentious processes and outcomes would result? We present our answer in three parts. First, we examine the ontological underpinnings of three environmental governance domains (land, water, and biodiversity), finding—like scholars before us—that dominant contemporary environmental governance concepts and policy instruments are grounded in a modernist ontology which actively shapes the world. Second, we compare this to a survey of ethnographic 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 questions requires confronting the coloniality woven into the environmental governance project and the modern world system more broadly, and ask how to instead embrace ontological pluralism in practice. In particular, we consider 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 (Burman, 2017; Visvanathan, 2009). While recognizing the inherent limitations of our positionality and place as non-Indigenous scholars operating out of a Western academic institution (Sundberg, 2014), we hope this review makes a positive contribution to the ongoing and long-standing conversation around ontological pluralism, justice, and environmental governance as experienced around the world and that others will push forward, nuance, and challenge the ideas herein.

Ontology and environmental governance

Critical approaches to social inquiry from post-structuralism (Escobar, 1995; Foucault, 1980; Said, 1978) to feminist (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Federici, 2004; Grosz, 2004; Haraway, 1990) and postcolonial studies (Chakrabarty, 2000; Mignolo, 2012; Quijano, 2000; Spivak, 1988) emphasize the need to interrogate questions of power and the ways that dominant discourses, practices, and institutions shape the worlds in which people live. A growing body of scholarship across the social sciences and humanities contributes to this work by foregrounding questions of ontology, such as: “What exists in the world?” and “How are worlds created through assumed categories and corresponding practices?” Fundamental to all of these projects is the recognition of the hegemony of colonial power relations in shaping the modern world. As Indigenous scholars in particular have pointed out, however, the world is far from “post” colonial (Hunt, 2014; Simpson, 2014; Sundberg, 2014; Todd, 2016; Tuck and Yang, 2012). Environmental governance is one arena in which coloniality continues to structure myriad peoples’ lived realities. Taking the above questions seriously leads us to consider another: “How might engaging diverse ontologies enable a more environmentally just and sustainable world?” Together, these inquiries showcase how an ontological emphasis contributes not only a deconstructive eye toward dominant modernist ontologies, but also a constructive one that opens up alternative ways of making and relating to the world.

The scholarship unpacking these questions is vast and has emerged through the cross pollination of such fields as philosophy, science and technology studies, geography, and anthropology (Blaser, 2014; De la Cadena, 2015; Descola, 2013; Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017; Jensen, 2017; Kohn, 2013; Latour, 2013; Mol, 2002; Povinelli, 2016; Scott, 2013; Viveiros de Castro, 1998). Though captured under a variety of names, including posthumanism (Barad, 2003), more-than-human geography (Whatmore, 2006), new materialism (Coole and Frost, 2010), and multi-species ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010), several threads unite these literatures, most notably calls to break apart modernist dualisms, whether nature/culture, human/nonhuman, or living/non-living; promote more expansive ideas of sociality and relationality; and create inclusive spaces for ontological alternatives.

This scholarship has also faced criticism, with many highlighting the dangers of approaching ontology apolitically and ahistorically (Bessire and Bond, 2014; Hunt, 2014; Ramos, 2012; Sundberg, 2014; Velásquez Runk et al., 2019). While some have pushed back against the “ontological” framing, considering it simply another term for cultural relativism (Graeber, 2015; Heywood, 2012), others recognize its value but question any clear division between epistemology and ontology (Burman, 2017; Sullivan, 2017), arguing that concepts like onto-epistemology (Barad, 2007) and Place-Thought (Watts, 2013) better capture the entangled, recursive relationship between ways of knowing and ways of being. Indigenous scholars have pointed to ways in which this ontological “turn” itself may reproduce dimensions of coloniality (Hunt, 2014; Sundberg, 2014; Todd, 2016), from the reinforcing of Euro-American categories and the silencing of scholars’ cultural positionality, to a lack of engagement with Indigenous scholarship and praxis, or the epistemically violent collapsing of heterogeneous and dynamic cultures and knowledges.

A burgeoning literature is engaging these critiques by recognizing and confronting the ways in which “the inherent coloniality of the modern ontology” (Blaser, 2009: 18) has structured and continues to shape human–environment relations and regimes of environmental governance (Blaser, 2009, 2014; Burman, 2017; Sullivan, 2013, 2017; Velásquez Runk, 2009; Viveiros de Castro, 2013; Watts, 2013; Wildcat, 2013). As Burman (2017) argues, specific forms of knowledge and situated practice give rise to particular realities, in a process Blaser (2014) calls “worlding.” Such realities are not isolated or homogenous but rather meet and intersect in a world of power asymmetries, presenting the possibility that “[a]s one specific reality gains dominance, other realities are denied” (Burman, 2017: 931). This literature argues that addressing ontology is essential for reimagining environmental governance “because consolidated assumptions regarding the nature of categories of being in the world shape human action in the world, and thus have ethical, including ecoethical, effects” (Sullivan, 2017: 225).

Whether captured heuristically as “Western” (Hunt, 2014), “Eurocentered” (Sundberg, 2014), “Euro-American” (Sullivan, 2017), or “modern” (Blaser, 2009), the ontology underpinning dominant environmental governance practice is argued to rest on a longstanding, and somewhat variegated, hierarchical premise in which “only humans, and often only some humans, possess intelligence and mind” and everything nonhuman does not (Sullivan, 2017: 225–226). This premise, reflecting Cartesian mind/body dualism, reinforces the atomization of “other-than-human natures,” removing nonhumans from pre-existing relational fields and reducing them from convivial subjects to isolated objects (Sullivan, 2013: 55).

This dominant, hierarchical ontology enables “the modernist project of severed relationships” (Sullivan, 2013: 60) and is perhaps most visible in the contemporary hegemony of market-based and neoliberal approaches to environmental governance (Sullivan, 2017). Whether found in policy mechanisms like payments-for-ecosystem-services (PES), integrated programs like REDD+, or governing ideas like the “green economy” (Sullivan, 2013, 2017), such approaches are grounded in the reduction, abstraction, and commodification of the natural world, the “cosmology of late capitalism” (Viveiros de Castro 2013: 29), and ultimately “the creation and production of disembedded, pacified things” (Sullivan, 2013: 59–60). The hierarchical nature of this ontology has been captured by other scholars as the “binary arborescent cosmos” of professional conservationists compared to the “rhizomic,” entangled, and riverine cosmos of Panamanian Wounaan (Velásquez Runk, 2009: 463), and as ecological science’s attention to “ecosystems” versus Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee conceptions of “societies” as agent-filled, interactive human and nonhuman worlds (Watts, 2013). Watts (2013: 23) offers an alternative notion of environmental governance in which:

…habitats and ecosystems are better understood as societies from an Indigenous point of view; meaning that they have ethical structures, inter-species treaties and agreements, and further their ability to interpret, understand and implement. Non-human beings are active members of society. Not only are they active, they also directly influence how humans organize themselves into that society.

Such ontological framings require seeing sociality as something inclusive and expansive (Sundberg, 2014), where nonhumans, whether living or nonliving, material or immaterial, have agency, co-produce reality, and possess minds or souls. These diverse ontologies (or onto-epistemologies) might be thought of as “non-modernist”—or what Sullivan terms “amodern” (2013: 59)—to contrast with what we are referring to in this paper as the “modernist” ontology inherent in dominant environmental governance regimes, however aspirational and imperfectly achieved (Latour, 1993).

Interrogating environmental governance through an ontological lens offers the chance to reframe how its challenges and solutions are formulated. Decentering humans from problem spaces can make clear the role and place of nonhuman interconnections and create space for new ontological categories (Blaser, 2014; De la Cadena and Blaser, 2018). Grappling with such new categories can in turn make visible previously unseen ones, showcase frictions when ontologies meet (Tsing, 2005), and illuminate other ways of organizing the world (Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017). Doing this, however, requires recognizing “how ‘reality’ is continuously enacted and transformed in practice” (Pauwelussen and Verschoor, 2017: 298) and that ontologies are dynamic, always overlapping, and embedded in structural relations of power (Burman, 2017; Burow et al., 2018; Hunt, 2014; Sullivan, 2017). Recognizing this, Burman (2017: 935) encourages the practice of “ontological disobedience” in ways that “[carve] out spaces for the generation of other realities…while relations of production and consumption are transformed.” This is unquestionably political work and may require mobilization and protest, alongside other means. As Burman reminds us, the “cognitive injustice” of ontological domination is not only “about whose knowledge is allowed to count as legitimate knowledge…but also about whose reality is allowed to be real” (2017: 925)—that “[c]ognitive injustice and material injustice are…dialectically connected” (Burman, 2017: 935). Addressing these injustices, however, requires not only confronting the inevitability of ontological incommensurabilities but also navigating the discursive and material conflicts and tensions that result (Blaser, 2009; Burman, 2017; De la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; Hunt, 2014; Tuck and Yang, 2012; Watts, 2013).

We build on these literatures and lessons in the following sections to first interrogate the dominant environmental governance categories of land, water, and biodiversity and then ask what environmental governance would look like if it were “thought and practiced differently” (Sullivan, 2013: 62). Through this work, we see how modernist ontologies are created and re-created through the production of concepts and practices; how non-modernist ontologies and practices have been and are advancing other ways of being and relating in the world; and how rethinking environmental governance through alternative ontologies could move “political thought and practice beyond the onto-epistemic limits of modern politics and what its practice allows” (De la Cadena and Blaser, 2018: 6).

Environmental visibilities and invisibilities

This section explores which dimensions of human–environment relations are rendered visible and invisible within contemporary governance framings and practices. First, we present a discussion of “visibilities” by analyzing three common domains of environmental governance: land, water, and biodiversity. Providing a brief sketch of each, we then discuss dominant conceptual framings and the key policy instruments through which they are deployed. Synthesizing the ontological assumptions underlying these conceptual framings and their deployment, we reflect on the conditions they give rise to and help sustain. Concepts and instruments were identified through an analysis of scholarly and gray literature, including reports and websites of prominent actors in each domain (e.g. non-governmental organizations, multilateral financial institutions, etc.). The purpose of this analysis is not to provide an exhaustive description of each domain, whose practical circumstances are heterogenous and vast. Rather, we aim to distill this complexity and focus on the prevailing ways ontological assumptions embedded within dominant discourses and practices enact and sustain particular ways of engaging with the world—i.e. what is rendered “visible” by these ontologies.

Second, in contrast to these three modernist governance divisions, we present a discussion of “invisibilities,” or that which is overlooked or erased by the dominant approaches above. That which is rendered “invisible” by dominant framings is drawn from ethnographic work from diverse world regions and cultural traditions to highlight how human–environment relations have been conceptualized “otherwise” and the implications of these alternative renderings for environmental governance. This is also not intended to be a comprehensive exercise, and it is important to acknowledge the limitations inherent in deriving ontologies from the ethnographic record, including the limitations of our own understanding as cultural outsiders, the translational politics of writing culture (Clifford and Marcus, 1986), and the collapsed temporality that characterizes many ethnographies. Our analysis of “invisibilities” is intended to serve as a starting point in providing contrasting perspectives to the visibilities rendered in dominant environmental governance frameworks, and to open up space for alternative modes of engaging with the living and nonliving worlds.

Environmental governance “visibilities”

Land governance “visibilities”

Land governance is an agenda that has proliferated in international development circles in recent decades, gaining prominence with the convergence of rising food prices, a growing agrofuel sector hungry for land, demand for agrarian reform from transnational peasant movements, and as a response to the popular outcry against the “global land grab” that occurred in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis (Borras and Franco, 2010; Deininger et al., 2012; FAO, 2012). Dominant land governance discourse has focused on the related concepts of rights, tenure security, and land markets. Rights and tenure security (i.e. the certainty that rights will be recognized and protected, see FAO, 2002) are prominent in the guiding literature of international development organizations, such as the World Bank’s Gender in Agriculture Sourcebook, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and the Food and Agriculture Organization’s globally negotiated Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGTs). Although conceptions of rights are typically framed as inclusive of both customary and statutory dimensions, individualized and exclusive rights are often emphasized while collective or joint claims are seen as a threat to individual rights and tenure security, as when customary arrangements are presented as inhibiting women’s access to land (World Bank et al., 2008). Clear, legible, and state-sanctioned rights and tenure security are said to strengthen land markets by facilitating the low-cost transfer of land, which in turn is predicted to enhance well-being by making land available to the most efficient uses and users (Binswanger et al., 1993; Deininger, 2003; Deininger and Binswanger, 1999).

Rights, tenure security, and land markets have been advanced through tenure formalization initiatives and the development of international voluntary standards for land acquisition and investment. Formalized titles recognized by the state are typically viewed as the best way to enhance tenure security (FAO, n.d.; USAID, 2016). Likewise, a host of international voluntary standards on land and investment governance have focused on advancing participatory processes for the inclusion of vulnerable populations in land decision-making. However, the scope of this participation is typically bounded by these same guidelines, which often take the form of codes of conduct for “responsible” land transactions, thereby limiting participation to the setting of terms under which investors may negotiate long-term and exclusive rights to customary land (FAO, 2014; FAO et al., 2010; Interlaken Group and RRI, 2015; Landesa, 2019; USAID, 2015). In these ways, under contemporary land governance frameworks, land is rendered as a fungible, abstracted commodity, which becomes a means for maximizing economic output by those actors who are most directly connected to global commodity markets (German and Braga, 2019; Li, 2014).

Water governance “visibilities”

Water governance has been defined as the “political, social, economic, and administrative systems that are in place to develop and manage water resources, and the delivery of water services, at different levels of society” (Rogers and Hall, 2003: 7). Historically, water management has been closely tied to state bureaucratic development, with many states from the pre-colonial period to the present relying on large-scale hydraulic works for irrigation and municipal water supply (Baviskar, 1995; Benson et al., 2015; D’Souza, 2006; Hassan, 2010; Wittfogel, 1957). However, since the 1970s, a global water governance agenda has emerged. While initially focused on addressing water scarcity problems in the developing world, it since expanded to include pollution and ecosystem-based objectives and stabilized around the principles of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) at the Dublin Conference on Water and Environment in 1992 (Benson et al., 2015; Hassan, 2010). IWRM is a broad framework that promotes a coordinated multi-level approach to water governance, aimed at maximizing economic and social welfare while fostering environmental sustainability (Rogers and Hall, 2003; UN, 1992).

Today, major governance organizations typically frame water as a resource or economic good, delegating associated rights, roles, and responsibilities to both state and nonstate actors and often promoting a major role for the private sector (Hassan, 2010; OECD, 2015; Rogers and Hall, 2003; Turner et al., 2009; WGF, n.d.). Additionally, many governance organizations frame water alternately as a threat (when it is abundant) or a scarcity (when it is limited), emphasizing perceived risks posed to society while abstracting water from its cyclical nature (cf. Mehta, 2005) and cultural meanings (cf. Linton, 2010).¹ These discourses in turn contribute to narratives of crisis that reinforce the need for water governance and outside intervention (Lebel et al., 2005). Technoscientific means to assess, harness, and control water, including tools like remote sensing and hydrological modeling (Linton, 2010), divorce water from its social contexts while presenting new opportunities for both improved predictability and efficiency in water management and large-scale infrastructure investment for further control over water-related risks and benefits (GWP, 2017; IWMI, 2018; Turner et al., 2009).²

Biodiversity governance “visibilities”

Within a decade of its emergence as a scientific concept in the 1980s (Soulé and Wilcox, 1980; Wilson, 1988), “biodiversity” became globally known as a governable object through the publication of the Global Biodiversity Strategy (WRI/IUCN/UNEP, 1992) and the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) (Escobar, 1998; Lowe, 2006). Biodiversity governance has notably shifted in framing, scale, and stated goals over time, moving from a national-level emphasis and focus on exclusionary protected areas (Adams and Hulme, 2001; Walley, 2004) to community-based, local-level endeavors (Agrawal and Gibson, 1999; Blom et al., 2010; Brosius et al., 2005) to today’s focus on the landscape-level and cross-sectoral attempts to achieve multiple, simultaneous goals, with biodiversity conservation co-existing alongside social, economic, and climate mitigation co-benefits (Martin et al., 2013; Sayer et al., 2013; Scherr et al., 2012). Throughout these efforts, different values have likewise been espoused for biodiversity. While conservation NGOs have long emphasized biodiversity’s intrinsic value and beauty—whether captured as charismatic, keystone, umbrella, or flagship species (WCS, 2020; WWF, 2008)—in recent years their language and priorities have shifted toward biodiversity’s instrumental value as conceptualized by multilateral organizations.

Biodiversity today is largely framed around this instrumental value and two concepts in particular: either as a resource to be discovered, measured, and alternately protected, utilized, or capitalized (CBD, 1992, 2010; Helmreich, 2009); or as an ecosystem asset and service essential for human well-being and sustainable development (Daily and Matson, 2008; Lélé et al., 2013). These framings are found throughout the global governance sphere (CBD, 2010; FSC, 2012; USAID, 2014) and implemented across ecoregional, organismal, and genetic scales. Biodiversity governance initiatives increasingly utilize an expansive portfolio of market-based mechanisms, including the direct purchasing of land for protection, voluntary tax-deductible conservation easements, and myriad conservation finance schemes, including mitigation banking, payments for ecosystem services (PES) arrangements, and bilateral debt-for-nature swaps (Brosius and Hitchner, 2010; Corson et al., 2019; Dunlap and Sullivan, 2020; Sullivan, 2017). Whether defined through its intrinsic and essentialized or increasingly monetized and commodified value, biodiversity as a concept is fundamentally separate and distinct from humanity.

Underlying ontological assumptions

The prominent framing concepts and policy approaches profiled above for land, water, and biodiversity domains suggest shared ontological assumptions at play in contemporary environmental governance discourse and practice. Cross-cutting themes include a fundamental dichotomy between humans and nature, a focus on human use value and economization, and abstracted units of resources severed from their surrounding environments. As these underlying ontologies are enacted through governance instruments and practices, they give shape to particular kinds of results. Together, the above ontological assumptions help to sustain several common outcomes: the continued commodification and privatization of nature; the creation of bounded divisions among rights holders in the name of resource access and security; and the advancement and legitimization of governance interventions by powerful outside actors such as the state, business investors, and international organizations. These findings align in key ways with those of scholars previously mentioned in Section “Ontology and environmental governance” (Blaser, 2009; Burman, 2017; De la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; Dunlap and Sullivan, 2020; Hunt, 2014; Sullivan, 2013, 2017; Sundberg, 2014; Tuck and Yang, 2012; Watts, 2013).

Looking to the ethnographic record, in the next section we explore alternative ontological understandings and modes of engagement that tend to be rendered “invisible” by the dominant approaches highlighted above. We then articulate several lessons from those alternative understandings for contemporary environmental governance and the dismantling of modernist ontology.

Environmental governance “invisibilities”

In contrast to the modernist delineation of nature as something separate from human society, able to be divided into distinct domains and manipulated for maximized human utility, non-modernist ontologies often emphasize the interconnectedness of humans with natural realms and our enmeshment in wider relational webs. Engaging examples across a survey of ethnographic and scholarly literature invites us to reconsider what environmental governance is and could be.

The nature/culture dichotomy of modernism is perhaps most evident in the concept of biodiversity in which, whether cast as stewards or threats, humans are seen as separate from and exceptional to the rest of nature. Myriad examples across diverse human cultures instead place people within intricate webs of relationality, respect, and reciprocity with other living and non-living things. For Rarámuri ethnobotanist Enrique Salmón, “life in any environment is viable only when humans view the life surrounding them as kin” (2012: 21), and it is iwígara, or breath, that interconnects land, animals, people, wind, and mountains in place-based, “kincentric ecologies.” Similarly, cultural and spiritual traditions across the globe conceive of water as a vital, even sacred, element of the world, inherently and inseparably connected to—and connecting—human and nonhuman living things (Bryan, 2017; Coomaraswamy, 1970; Craft, 2018; McGregor, 2014; Risling Baldy, 2017; Walker and Uysal, 1973; Wilson and Inkster, 2018). One example is the notion of water as the “lifeblood” of a place, common among Indigenous communities across Canada (Yates et al., 2017) and the USA (Risling Baldy, 2017), which rests on an understanding of water as a living entity, connecting human and nonhuman beings across space. According to a Cree elder quoted by LaBoucane-Benson et al. (2012: 7), “there is no separation between the water and human beings […] We are the water, and the water is us” (cited in Yates et al., 2017: 6).

Moving beyond this human/nature dichotomy and instead embracing humans as inseparable from webs of sociality and kinship points to the impoverishment of abstracting and severing “resources” from their ecologies. As Yup’ik scholar Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley observes, “[Yup’ik] wisdom transcended the quantification of things to recognize a qualitative level whereby the spiritual, natural, and human worlds were inextricably interconnected” (2010: 90). In contrast, modernist ontology’s focus on human use value and its attendant processes of privatization and economization forecloses the myriad other ways in which people interact with the world and erases long-standing relationships to place. In many societies, land is imbued with site-specific meaning, with history written onto the landscape, and place bound up with individual and collective identity (Camacho, 2013; Coggeshall, 2018; Fairhead and Leach, 1996; Heatherington, 2010; Lentz, 2006; Salmón, 2012; Sather, 1990; Shipton, 2009; Takano, 2005). Landscapes and their features can signify relationships to spirits and serve as an archive of past social relations (Di Giminiani, 2015; Fairhead and Leach, 1996; Lentz, 2006; Sather, 1990). For Meratus Dayak of South Kalimantan, Indonesia, the forested landscape is “a site of memory” (Tsing, 2005: 257) and a reservoir and keeper of individual and community history (Tsing, 2005). The inseparability of people and place is another common theme in the literature, where ontologies help to secure relationships to place over time (Lentz, 2006; Shipton, 2009). According to Shipton, writing about Luo land tenure in Kenya (2009: 111), “people do not just own or inherit land…; they also belong to it. Belonging to land is part and parcel of belonging to other people – in groups, networks and open categories.” These histories and identities are often made and maintained amid considerable adversity, including colonization (Burman, 2017; Coulthard, 2010; Fairhead and Leach, 1996; Salmón, 2012; Shipton, 2009; Tuck and Yang, 2012), slavery and its aftermath (Coggeshall, 2018), and displacement (Camacho, 2013; Heatherington, 2010).

Embodied experience with the landscape and its constituents is a key means of fostering deep relationships with place over time. For Anishinaabe scholar Simpson (2014), land is not only the context of Nishnaabeg knowledge, but its method and teacher. Simpson sees being on the land, with all of the struggle this entails for an Indigenous group in the Canadian settler state, as the wellspring of Nishnaabeg intelligence, governance, and resurgence. In his oral history of Liberia, South Carolina, Coggeshall (2018) describes the vital importance African American residents place on continuing to occupy family land. Being present on the land allows family members to sustain links to their heritage, to commune with their ancestors in the place where they are buried, and to feel the land’s “embrace,” despite sustained racialized attempts to remove them (2018: 201). Other examples demonstrate how attachment to place is strengthened through consuming the land’s produce. For residents of Orgosolo, Sardinia, products of their pastoral livelihoods (cheeses, meats) evoke the hardships and joys of daily life in this region (Heatherington, 2010). Likewise, Salmón’s (2012) imagery of “eating the landscape” captures how the social processes, knowledge, and memories kept alive through preparing and eating local foods affirm Rarámuri cultural identity and sustain their connection to place. In these examples, landscapes are valued not only as a means of sustenance, but as the source of cultural identity, knowledge, and sociality. Such embodied connections can also contribute to traumatic loss when the relationship to a particular place is severed. One resident of Orgosolo, facing the impending enclosure of the community’s common grazing lands for a national park, expressed a deeper sense of loss than economic privation, feeling “as if someone dear to [her] had died” (Heatherington, 2010: 85). Heatherington further explains that:

To grieve for the impending loss of the communal territory as though for the death of a person held dear is to grieve for the landscape with all the weight of rich social memory, faith, and experience in one’s heart. It is to mourn a loss of community, commensality, and reciprocity that is part of that landscape and the property relations that have sustained it. (2010: 102)

Expanded notions of agency are a second key contrast with modernist ontology. The reduction, abstraction, and commodification of places and place-based relationships, like those described above, become untenable in ontologies that recognize nonhuman actors as subjects, rather than objects. Nonhuman beings across the world are frequently seen “as soul-possessing, signifying, intentional selves” represented in different forms and meanings (Kohn, 2013: 93). In West Kalimantan, Indonesia, for example, birds act as auguries for selecting swidden sites (Dove, 1993). Honey bees for the Meratus of South Kalimantan are rights-holders who must be sung to as individuals’ tree tenure is upheld and legitimated through the bees’ approval (Tsing, 2003). For the Koyukon of the Yukon, spruce trees, fish, birds, and myriad mammals all possess powers and spirits distinct and unique from each other (Nelson, 1983).

In many societies, nonhuman spirits separate from material organisms also interact with and influence people and animals and demand respect. For Kuranko and Kissi horticulturalists from the Republic of Guinea, land spirits have a parallel society to that of humans, including their own villages that are associated with certain landscape features (large rocks, pools, forest patches). These spirits can help or hinder human activities on the landscape, and a contractual relationship must be established by human first-comers and ritually maintained by their descendants to maintain legitimate access and ensure the land’s productivity (Fairhead and Leach, 1996). Among Bajau communities of West Sulawesi, Indonesia, persons must ask permission of spirits before seaweed may grow in that spirit’s land (Lowe, 2006). For Mapuche people in southern Chile, rivers, lakes, and wetlands are sacred places inhabited by not only diverse flora and fauna but also spirits, called ngen, who must be asked permission before a person can enter in search of food, medicine, or water. Damming or contamination of the water source can cause ngen to abandon it, leaving behind people and place without spiritual protection and leading to corresponding societal ills, such as alcoholism, depression, or disease (Benöhr and Lynch, 2018).

Engaging ontologies grounded in relational understandings in which nonhumans are understood to represent subjects in themselves, rather than mere resources or services for human use (De la Cadena, 2010; Kohn, 2013), “entails questioning deep-seated assumptions about life and ecology: who is living, in what ways are we in relation with them, what constitutes selves in these relations, and to what obligations are we committed” (Salazar Parreñas, 2018: 7). Such an ontological orientation would guide us into respectful relations with others, muting the perceived boundaries between us, such that the well-being of others is intimately associated with our own. Among people as widely dispersed as Maori gardeners and hunter-gatherers of New Zealand, Kantu horticulturalists of Borneo, West African horticulturalists, and the Tukano people of Brazil, the fecundity of land, forests, and fisheries is ontologically linked to human behaviors, such as whether gratitude is duly expressed, reciprocal relations of exchange with the land are respected, or individuals refrain from harvesting in restricted areas (Best, 1909; Clay, 1991; Dove, 1988; Jorgenson, 1989; Lentz, 2006). In this way, relational ontologies shape and guide peoples’ conduct through forms of positive and negative behavioral reinforcement. In Gujarat, major drinking water sources are associated with female deities who are asked to watch over village waters each time a new well is dug. Here, there is a unity between the natural and spiritual world, wherein people earn symbolic capital for ecologically positive behaviors, and water management is driven by notions of individual duty in exchange for symbolic or spiritual reward, rather than purely material gain (Mehta, 2005). Alternatively, the hills in Mapuche territory are capable of purposely acting to “disorientate humans who do not conduct themselves properly” (Di Giminiani, 2015: 494), and the ancestors of fish are similarly able to seize Tukano infants from those who harvest in restricted areas (Clay, 1991).

Grappling with these ethnographic observations and breaking outside a modernist ontology has implications for how environmental governance is practiced today. As Yuchi scholar Daniel Wildcat (2013: 515) reflects in his introduction to a special issue on “climate change and Indigenous peoples of the USA”:

Can you imagine a world where nature is understood as full of relatives, not resources, where inalienable rights are balanced with inalienable responsibilities, and where wealth itself is measured not by resource ownership and control, but by the number of good relationships we maintain in the complex and diverse life-systems of this blue green planet?

One implication of living in an interconnected world peopled with nonhuman relatives is that a very different notion of resource or tenure “security” could be enacted. Where the landscape is kin (Salmón, 2012) and agentive (Di Giminiani, 2015), where water spirits provide protection (Benöhr and Lynch, 2018), and where people structure access to land and water in ways that sustain collective well-being (Lansing, 1991; Mehta, 2005; Shostak, 1981; Spear and Waller, 1993), the importance of securing individual rights recedes. Rather than emphasizing the recognition and protection of private resource rights, environmental governance efforts to enhance “security” might instead conceive of ways to allow people to (re)establish and maintain good relations with others, as Wildcat (2013) suggests.

Re-framing security in terms of relations of care and commitment (Jackson and Palmer, 2015; Singh, 2013, 2015; Sullivan, 2009; Viveiros de Castro, 2013) would require a realignment in values, elevating reciprocities and care-taking over rights, to enable worlds in which each human action is not thought of in terms of individual utility, but in terms of the web of consequences it carries for other beings and things. Doing so will likely necessitate abandoning rigid territorial boundaries and notions of absolute ownership and require centering collective interests. Many societies have developed means of coordinating collective benefit despite scarcities. In Bali, for example, holy water temples and seasonal rituals dedicated to agricultural deities play a key role in managing the sustainability of complex rice production landscapes (Lansing, 1991). This integration of cosmological and agroecological systems enables the coordinated distribution of irrigation water and drainage for optimal pest control, soil nutrient stabilization, and collectively orchestrated cropping patterns. Many pastoralists and hunter-gatherers have flexible conceptions of land and access uniquely suited to their livelihoods (Shostak, 1981; Spear and Waller, 1993). Among Maasai pastoralists, spatial and temporal variability in water and forage makes fluid access to territories essential to livestock survival and range rehabilitation, which has long been supported through notions of land as “communal territory containing resources rather than as a resource which could be appropriated by individuals” (Spear and Waller, 1993: 258).

Importantly, any efforts to advance such relations of care must avoid recapitulating earlier environmental governance interventions that tended to burden Black and brown women with environmental care or exploit their labor (Leach, 2007; Schroeder, 1999; Singh, 2015). Instead, there is a need to recognize how axes of difference—including race, ethnicity, sex, or gender—remain significant and in so doing make space for the substantial environmental and relational care work that many marginalized people already do, often despite considerable adversity (e.g. Camacho, 2013; Carney, 2017; Coggeshall, 2018; Mehta, 2005; Penniman, 2018). Recognizing and supporting such work would, at the most basic level, necessitate denouncing and protecting against the displacements that have become commonplace to make way for conservation, development projects, and agribusiness (Fairhead et al., 2012; Peluso and Lund, 2011).

Perceiving humans as inseparable rather than distinct from natural systems would have a further implication of enabling us to more clearly see mutualistic relationships between particular human livelihoods and landscapes—as is widely documented in the literature on anthropogenic and sacred forests (Balée, 1989; Fairhead and Leach, 1996; Irvine, 1989); patch modification (Stocks, 1983); and soil enrichment (Frausin et al., 2014; Hecht and Posey, 1989). Embracing such intertwined relationality would enable conservationists to see that nature is culture(d) and that people are not threats but rather a part of landscapes, and together with biodiversity, inseparable from (the reproduction of) place (Basso, 1996; Feld and Basso, 1996; Ingold, 2000; see also: Coulthard, 2010; Lindberg, 2007; Salmón, 2012).

Rather than prioritizing pristine landscapes over degraded ones, anthropogenic mosaic landscapes in many cases foster and create biodiversity (Angelsen and Rudel, 2013), as seen in Panamanian agroforests among Wounaan (Velásquez Runk et al., 2010); the “cultural forests” of Amazonia, Borneo, and West Africa (Balée, 1989; Fairhead and Leach, 1996; Lombardo et al., 2020; Rival, 2000; Sather, 1990); the vast crop varietal repertoire developed and maintained by peasant farmers worldwide (Brush, 2004; Nazarea, 2005; Richards, 1985; Salmón, 2012); and the history of forests in the southeastern USA (Delcourt and Delcourt, 1998; Nowacki and Abrams, 2008). For the Kenyan Maasai, examples of human activity fostering biodiversity range from species-rich glades resulting from livestock corral mobility (Donihue et al., 2013) to potentially facilitative relationships between domesticated cattle and wild ungulate species (Odadi et al., 2011). Human livelihood patterns fostering biodiversity are also found in national forest landscapes in the American Pacific Northwest, as well as myriad hillsides of Japan, which encourage the emergence and flourishing of the matsutake mushroom (Tsing, 2015). As Tsing documents, it is human “disturbance” that enables the most expensive mushroom in the world to mutualistically nestle in, spread throughout, and strengthen pine forests. Seeing such relationships outside the dominant ontological categories of environmental governance allows us to question and reflect on other dichotomies as well, such as the binary categories of human and nonhuman, domesticated versus wild, and aquatic or terrestrial.

Lastly, thinking beyond dichotomies can also help us to embrace and adapt to dynamic environments. For example, instead of seeing water as external to society in the form of a constant threat or scarcity, we might shift perspective to highlight the dynamic presence of water within our environment, foregrounding aquatic ontologies rather than the terrestrial ones so characteristic of dominant modernist framings. In river deltas, floodplains, and other landscapes at the confluence of land and water, modernity imposes an arbitrary division that privileges the terrestrial at the expense of the aquatic (Da Cunha, 2018; Lahiri-Dutt, 2014), but the ethnographic literature abounds in cases where the inverse is true. For example, rather than thinking of water as eternally scarce in absolute terms, scarcity can instead be understood as a cyclical phenomenon, regularly fluctuating in space and time (Mehta, 2005). Dilip da Cunha (2018) describes how in monsoon Asia, rivers did not have clearly demarcated boundaries until the colonial practice of inscribing them as fixed lines on maps, thereby justifying dam-building and other methods of flood control. Local people, however, have been accustomed to naturally occurring hydrological rhythms, where a swelling river and the “rain-driven wetness” (Da Cunha, 2018: iv) that precedes it have often been seen as life-giving and productive forces (D’Souza, 2006; Ehlert, 2012; Mehta, 2005). By foregrounding the aquatic in ontologies of wet environments, these examples help illustrate the mutual constitution of society, water flows, and landscapes (Krause, 2017).

Similarly, training our focus on the aquatic aspects of our environment may better promote adaptation to changing hydrological dynamics in the context of contemporary climate change. In Southeast Asian river deltas, for example, societies traditionally viewed the area as an extension of the sea into land, rather than the other way around (Morita, 2016; Taylor, 2014). As populations grew, infrastructure developed around this aquatic orientation, with transportation canals extending watercourses inland, houses built on stilts, and agricultural and urban designs adapted to seasonal floods (Morita, 2016). With Western-inspired modernization, however, land-based infrastructures such as roads and bridges became predominant, and modern irrigation and land reclamation projects enacted an increasingly terrestrial ontology, which profoundly increased vulnerability to flooding. The growing frequency of floods and hydrological variability due to climate change suggests that a return to aquatic ontological orientations and associated amphibious infrastructures might be beneficial (Morita, 2016; Morita and Jensen, 2017).

Based on the above examples, we join others in arguing for the need to think outside of dominant modernist environmental governance framings and ask what is possible beyond the stale dichotomies of wild/domestic, pristine/degraded, human/animal, and others. Practicing an environmental governance “otherwise” will require the ability to “see” human and nonhuman actors and relationships across a diverse range of spatial and temporal scales, whether the fluvial, amphibious worlds of river deltas (Krause, 2017; Morita and Jensen, 2017), symbiotic collectives of organisms and microbiomes (Tsing, 2015; Tsing et al., 2017), or timescapes of nuclear radiation and climate change (Adam, 1998; Beck, 1992). As climate change progresses, species’ ranges shift, an extinction crisis unfolds, global inequities deepen, and human–environment relations continue to be reshaped, taking seriously nonhumans as actors, agents, selves, and kin means asking not only what obligations we have to such beings, but what can be learned from their perspectives and the relations with and between them (Cruikshank, 2006; Kohn, 2013; Viveiros de Castro, 2004). How might degradation or disturbance look differently when human/nature binaries are transcended? What flourishing is allowed in? And what would an environmental governance look like that respected the manifold relationalities and obligations of care between humans and nonhumans?

A growing body of scientific evidence lends support to this effort by illustrating the link between the presence of local and Indigenous peoples’ institutions and rights to improved conservation and climate change mitigation outcomes, as well as the essential role of such peoples in advancing a healthier and more sustainable world (Baragwanath and Bayi, 2020; Delcourt and Delcourt, 1998; Garnett et al., 2018; Stevens et al., 2014). In our final section, we argue that ultimately answering the questions above requires confronting the coloniality woven into the environmental governance project historically and today. Much like Tsing (2015) asks about late capitalism, we might ask what relationships could flourish in the ruins of colonialism? What worlds might be possible if subjugated peoples regained the power to govern their landscapes? And how might actors more equitably coordinate governance efforts between differing ontological positions?

Discussion and conclusions

The scholarship reviewed in the sections above raises critical questions for the future, including: What might environmental governance look like in practice if we were to place such ontological invisibilities front and center? And how can ontological pluralism be respected across diverse and contested actor groups and governance scales? These questions feel especially salient given emerging concerns about “post-truth” politics in the USA and around the world (Neimark et al., 2019). In the realm of international policy, one arguable example is found in the One Health movement promoted by the World Health Organization, which challenges the distinction between nature and society, as well as human and nonhuman, by recognizing the inseparability between human, animal, and environmental health (Verweij and Bovenkerk, 2016; Wolf, 2015). Others are approaching such questions through existing legal systems. The Rights of Nature movement attempts to incorporate Indigenous ontologies into state law by bestowing legal personhood status on natural entities—from rivers and lakes to national parks, edible plants, glaciers, ecosystems, biomes, the entire animal kingdom, and Mother Earth (Chapron et al., 2019; O’Donnell and Talbot-Jones, 2018). By allowing a person or organization to speak on behalf of the entity endowed with legal personhood (Croley, 1998; Stone, 2010; cf. Latour, 2004) and lawsuits to be taken up against those who fail to respect these rights, duties, and responsibilities (Naffine, 2009; O’Donnell and Talbot-Jones, 2018), the movement aims to redress environmental ills by placing the rights of nature on par with those of individuals and corporations. A third example lies in age-old efforts at world crossing through the creation of deliberative spaces and processes (“consultation,” “participation,” etc.).

Yet to what extent do these examples offer pathways toward promoting ontological pluralism and challenging modernism’s dominance? Each has been the target of myriad critiques. For instance, Rights of Nature laws have encountered difficulties with implementation and enforcement (Croley, 1998; Stone, 2010); limitations of funding, decision-making authority, and political independence (O’Donnell, 2012); and unclear organizational boundaries, particularly when the entity in question crosses national borders (O’Donnell, 2017). A long history of critiques of participatory process also highlights how deliberative spaces are manipulated by powerful outside actors and interests; fail to address substantive legitimacy; and help produce obedient knowledge and subjectivities (Agrawal, 2005; Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Gibson and Marks, 1995; Igoe et al., 2009; Nadasdy, 2002, 2007). They have also been shown to be key to advancing the neoliberal project itself (Ferguson, 1995). Broadly speaking, each of these programs lacks a clear pathway toward fulfilling their goals and insufficiently addresses the inevitable trade-offs of conflicting needs and value systems (Verweij and Bovenkerk, 2016).

More importantly, however, because these examples tend to operate within existing governance structures, they do little to confront the power dynamics these systems perpetuate. Instead, such efforts arguably re-center colonial rationalities by bringing subjugated knowledges, peoples, and legal systems into state-centered, colonial, and modernist frameworks (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Even the philosophy of Sumaq Kawsay or Buen Vivir (Quechua/Spanish for “full life” or “living well”), which encourages individual and societal actions that benefit the wider natural and human community to promote harmonious, reciprocal, and enduring human–environment relationships (Gudynas, 2011; Williford, 2018), has been co-opted in some countries to promote conventional extraction-focused neoliberal agendas, complicating its effectiveness in practice (Merino, 2016).

Whether advanced through national laws or the attempted implementation of UNDRIP, the disconnects between modernist and non-modernist legal frameworks have deeply ontological roots (Blaser, 2013; Craft, 2018). As Sa’ke’j Henderson (2018) notes, international human rights law is grounded in Eurocentric conceptions of human dignity and “the belief that human nature is exceptional, elevated and distinguishable from other life forms,” in contrast with many Indigenous and other ontological framings in which value is shared across “all life forms” (Henderson, 2018: 9, 13). This speaks then not only to contested legal principles but potentially incommensurable ontologies. One source of tension arises due to the fact that Indigenous ontologies are in many cases lived through, sustained by, and accessible only via Indigenous language and concepts. “The danger,” Anishinaabe-Métis lawyer Aimée Craft notes (2018: 55), “is that by using non-Indigenous legal mechanisms for the affirmation and framing of sacred relationships in non-Indigenous languages, we may lose the spirit of the relationship itself.” And so, while the Rights of Nature movement has been interpreted by some as an affirmation of Indigenous ontologies, it has ultimately done little to unsettle settler state sovereignty, settler futures, and the hegemony of “one-world worlds” (Craft, 2018; Henderson, 2018; Law, 2015; Tuck and Yang, 2012).

Grappling with such ontological incommensurabilities demands something more than simple efforts at world crossing and translation, and Indigenous scholars have been at the forefront of efforts to think through the challenges and contested politics implicated in efforts to incorporate ontological pluralism or hybridity in governance practice. As many have argued, “Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies represent legal orders” in their own right (Todd, 2016: 18; see also Hunt, 2014; Lindberg, 2007; Napoleon, 2007). The same might be said about the non-modernist ontologies underlying alternative approaches to environmental governance in non-“Indigenous” contexts, such as many of those surveyed above. In this section, we take much inspiration from this body of Indigenous scholarship, itself so often grounded in praxis, and the ongoing work of political activists, lawyers, teachers, and storytellers (e.g. Coulthard, 2010; Lindberg, 2007; Napoleon and Friedland, 2016; Todd, 2016; Tuck and Yang, 2012).

Embracing ontological hybridity in ways that can overcome the pitfalls of legal pluralism requires confronting the structural relations of power that have enabled ontological dominance in the first place. Such relations are rooted in long histories of colonial violence and oppression, including in many cases settler occupation and dispossession of Indigenous people from lands long inhabited, enslavement of people and exploitation of their labor, forced assimilation, and genocide. In other cases, it has included political and economic domination, biopolitical regulation, and the enforcement of foreign legal and cosmological orders. Referencing Wolfe (2006), Tuck and Yang (2012: 5) stress that this unfolding history represents a “structure” of power, not an “event”:

…the disruption of Indigenous relationships to land represents a profound epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence. This violence is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation. […] settler colonialism is a structure and not an event. In the process of settler colonialism, land is remade into property and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property. Epistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made savage.

One alternative to structural relations that perpetuate ontological violence would be the realization of Indigenous rights to self-determination, as established in international law (Todd, 2016; UN, 2007), including carving out spaces of Indigenous sovereignty within the borders of nation states. Simpson argues that the very concept of sovereignty is “inappropriate” because it emphasizes Western domination outside an Indigenous domain, though it nonetheless remains an important goal given the “structural condition of ongoing Indigenous dispossession and disavowal of that dispossession” (Simpson, 2014: 105). Insofar as Indigenous ontologies represent legal orders in their own right, these are “legal orders through which Indigenous peoples throughout the world are fighting for self-determination, sovereignty” (Todd, 2016: 18). Such struggles for self-determination and sovereignty are thus crucially also struggles for “ontological self-determination” (Viveiros de Castro, 2004), where cognitive-discursive and material politics intersect, and can be opportunities for exploiting ontological “gaps” (Sullivan, 2013, 2017) or practicing forms of “ontological disobedience” (Burman, 2017).

At the same time, “simply arguing for the recognition of Indigenous law is inadequate because we cannot just assume that there are complete and intact legal orders that can spring to life through recognition,” given histories of repression, dispossession, and cultural genocide (Askew, 2018: 89, citing Napoleon and Friedland, 2014, supra note 11). Recognition of Indigenous onto-epistemologies is essential, but not sufficient (Martin et al., 2013; see also Coulthard, 2007). Efforts are needed to rebuild Indigenous cosmological–legal–political orders and sustain Indigenous languages to redress colonial wrongs. Yet the burden of revitalizing Indigenous legal orders must not be borne exclusively:

by Indigenous peoples who bear no responsibility for causing the violence that led to the loss in the first place. Indigenous peoples must lead the work of rebuilding if it is to happen, but the federal government should provide financial support to ensure that Indigenous communities can enlist, educate and compensate people to do the labour-intensive work of revitalization. (Askew, 2018: 90)

Stories, narratives, and folklore are in many cases the pedagogical methods of Indigenous ways of governance and must be taken seriously as legitimate tools for this rebuilding (Napoleon and Friedland, 2016; M. Wildcat et al., 2014), embodying essential lessons about the world and how to relate to the diverse entities that populate it. As the “invisibilities” profiled above suggest, these imply certain ethical and political commitments with real-world ramifications. Scholars point to concrete projects of “re-rooting” displaced peoples and “re-commoning” colonized lands through (re)establishing more localized, self-sufficient economies, building community space, enhancing food sovereignty, developing “solidarity networks” for trade and exchange, and maintaining equitable leadership structures (Nirmal and Rocheleau, 2019). Such efforts could resonate with many people, including Black lives in the African diaspora who “struggle with discourses that erase and despatialize their sense of place” (McKittrick, 2006: xiii). These ideas echo the concept of “grounded normativity” proposed by Coulthard and Simpson (2016: 254), which “refers to the ethical frameworks provided by these Indigenous place-based practices and associated forms of knowledge.” They write:

Grounded normativity houses and reproduces the practices and procedures, based on deep reciprocity, that are inherently informed by an intimate relationship to place. Grounded normativity teaches us how to live our lives in relation to other people and nonhuman life forms in a profoundly nonauthoritarian, nondominating, nonexploitive manner. Grounded normativity teaches us how to be in respectful diplomatic relationships with other Indigenous and non-Indigenous nations with whom we might share territorial responsibilities or common political or economic interests. Our relationship to the land itself generates the processes, practices, and knowledges that inform our political systems, and through which we practice solidarity. (2016: 254)

Yet conceptions of decoloniality advanced by some Indigenous scholars challenge metaphoric uses of the term (which tend to collapse the interests of all subjugated peoples) in favor of material conceptions of decolonization aimed at restoring specifically Indigenous lives and land. This is a vision of undoing the ongoing coloniality of Indigenous-state relations through an “ethic of incommensurability” that “implicates and unsettles everyone” (Tuck and Yang, 2012: 5). Here, there is no possibility for rendering settler and Indigenous futures commensurable. Advancing the latter is a more radical project of upending the former.

As non-Indigenous scholars, exploring the implications of these ideas has been an exercise in self-reflection, humility, and uncertainty. What does outsider advocacy for an ontologically plural reconceptualization of environmental governance, while avoiding romanticization or the continued privileging of outsider perspectives, look like? Is it possible to contribute without falling into the trap of reinforcing Western-based institutional knowledge at the expense of marginalized and subjugated ontologies? By striving to give due credit to where ideas originate and amplify historically marginalized authors, we hope this work assists the circulation of those ideas and extends their network of influence. At the same time, we are aware that our contribution and advocacy likely articulates in both helpful and harmful ways with these struggles for cognitive and material justice.

Staying with this discomfort, we suggest that embracing ontological pluralism and hybridity in environmental governance requires a strong spirit of allyship with those who have been historically excluded, one based on shared ethical and political commitments and a willingness to work to prefigure the kind of world this implies (Coulthard, 2007). Another is to engage more directly in collaborative scholarship and public discourse to build support for decolonizing projects, enable broader recognition of the value of Indigenous and other non-modernist ontologies, produce high-quality public scholarship, and promote the work of marginalized actors across genres and platforms.

While there is no panacea for how to advance such a project, inspiration may be drawn from the dynamic conversations that ensue within spaces of social change and knowledge production intentionally created not “with rather than for” (Freire, 1970; see also Kirsch, 2006), but led by (CRC, 1977; Mabo and others v. Queensland, 1992; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012; see also Hale, 2006) those diverse voices whose realities have been rendered invisible by the modernist project. Taking UNDRIP’s right to self-determination and its radical implications seriously means confronting the “coloniality of reality” (Burman, 2017) by not only reimagining who sits at the center of environmental governance conversations—defining objectives and how to achieve them—but also what that means for existing and future power relations.

In this time of what has been called the Anthropocene (Steffen et al., 2015), the “age of extinction” (Salazar Parreñas, 2018), and even the “end of the world” (Tsing, 2015), ontologically re-envisioning environmental governance seems more urgent than ever. Grappling with the world as it is today and future challenges resulting from historical legacies and path dependencies will require recognizing new actors and reconceptualizing our relationships to them. We argue that scholars and practitioners of environmental governance have much to learn from non-modernist ontologies and the governance systems they embody and uphold. Of equal or greater importance though is the need to recognize and ultimately confront the coloniality of the modern world system which upholds particular forms of environmental governance at odds with decolonial visions; to grapple with the cognitive, material, and territorial tensions this entails; and to advance, through collaboration, allyship, and centering the work of those who have been excluded for so long, meaningful structural change to broaden ontological spaces and create a more just and livable world.