Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

With my research paper, I bring critical insights on Indigenous tenure security—a crucial element in addressing climate and ecological crises in the workshop. The findings will challenge workshop participants to reimagine justice in environmental governance, especially for Indigenous tenure justice.

Paper long abstract:

Environmental and climate justice fundamentally centers on questions of access to and control over environmental resources that impact our global climate. These resources, that form an integral part of people's lived environments, are often at the heart of power struggles and inequitable distribution. Recent studies have established clear connections between environmental crises and Indigenous tenure injustice, highlighting how securing Indigenous land rights plays a crucial role in both preventing environmental degradation and addressing historical inequities (Dawson et al., 2021; Popovici et al., 2021; RRI, 2020). Against this backdrop, I present my doctoral research paper that examines the critical institutional challenges that impede justice for Indigenous tenure security—a factor proven vital in addressing environmental and climate crises. Through a qualitative case study of the Indigenous Rajwar peoples of India's Kumaon Himalayas, I demonstrate how power dynamics within multi-level governance structures constrain the comprehensive notion of Indigenous tenure justice. This constraint manifests in four key dimensions: distributional equity, recognition, participation and capabilities. Rather than achieving genuine tenure justice, these dimensions are reduced to mere land distribution operating within patronized governance networks. The paper reveals how dominant state and non-state actors across scale systematically eclipse Indigenous participation in tenure security processes, thereby reinforcing their pre-existing hegemonic and hierarchical authority—a direct legacy of colonial governance systems. Building on this analysis, the paper argues that powerful actors embedded within these nested governance structures engage in "just-washing" (analogous to green-washing) when addressing Indigenous tenure security issues that are crucial to tackling emerging environmental crises.