Paper
Can the (Indigenous) subaltern speak (at the IPCC)? Problems and challenges in the inclusion of indigenous knowledge in environmental governance
presenters
Renzo Taddei
Nationality: Brazil
Residence: Brazil
Federal University of Sao Paulo
Presence:Online
This presentation deals with the problem of the inclusion of indigenous peoples within platforms such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a privileged place for building the epistemological bases of planetary environmental governance, and related efforts.
Indigenous peoples tend to be seen as victims of climate change. At the same time, the idea that Indigenous thought presents a provocative and productive alternative for understanding reality is growing within the humanities in the face of the diagnosis that, in the context of the Anthropocene, the environmental collapse highlights the failure of models of reality inherited from the Enlightenment, which underlie science and governance mechanisms. Such ideas align with the thinking of important indigenous leaders and scholars from the past and present.
Concomitantly, the role of indigenous leaders is growing in the processes of building environmental governance platforms in several countries. In 2020, the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) gained observer organization status at the IPCC and contributed to subsequent reports. It is to be expected, however, that collaboration between representatives of indigenous peoples in climate governance efforts will not be devoid of conflict, especially given the fact that the relational ontologies characteristic of many of the planet's indigenous peoples prevent approaches to intervention in the ecosystem marked by the human exceptionalism that characterizes the scientific mainstream in the physical and natural sciences. The Council of the Saami people of Sweden, Norway, and Finland, for example, in 2021 blocked the SCoPEx research project, coordinated by a team of researchers from Harvard University, in which field experiments on geoengineering (solar radiation management) would be carried out, in Saami territory.
The paper critically examines how the knowledge of indigenous peoples is taken into account in climate governance activities: how it is framed, which aspects are highlighted and erased, and with what effects.
Keywords:
Climate governance; Indigenous knowledge; Indigenous politics at the UN; Environmental knowledge systems; Davi Kopenawa