Global Environmental Law at a Crossroads

Co-Management of Natural Resources by Indigenous People and States: A Method to Promote Environmental Justice and Sustainability

Room 107

This paper will explore the potential contributions that could be made to achieving environmental justice, as well as local, regional and global efforts toward environmental sustainability, through embracing the concept of co-management of nature in which the natural world is a participant represented by those humans retaining traditional knowledge of sustainable co-existence. In particular, my focus will be on the potential of partnerships between settler governments with access to ‘modern’ scientific knowledge combining with Indigenous peoples relying on their ‘traditional’ ecological knowledge. I will examine how recent reinterpretation of longstanding international human rights, along with the development of international environmental standards and the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples creates a supportive international law framework for newer approaches within nations that could bear positive results. The paper will then concentrate on how the presence of domestic legal pluralism, which has occurred in a number of countries in recent years through major constitutional reform or negotiated agreements, is enabling the development of joint management and decision-making over shared territories and natural resources that can generate more eco-friendly outcomes. This latter portion will concentrate on a few jurisdictions that may suggest the broader viability of this strategy.

Through the influence of treaties of a former era between Indigenous peoples and European colonisers, as well as new treaty settlements, we are witnessing the growth of new arrangements whereby parks, lakes and river systems, conservation lands, marine reserves and specific species of flora and fauna are being ‘managed’ in a manner that imbeds Indigenous principles of mutigenerational guardianship and stewardship responsibilities as well as direct Indigenous participation or co-governance into national and regional operational plans. It will be suggested that these developments create positive examples of new approaches to how we relate to our environment that can be of broader application.