Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Indigenous climate justice imaginaries are approached as methodological challenges to dominant climate research, exposing limits of techno-managerial models and calling for reflexive ways of producing climate knowledge for just futures, grounded in Indigenous epistemologies.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary climate research and governance rely on methodological frameworks that privilege abstraction, quantification, and techno-managerial intervention. While these approaches have expanded the capacity to model climate risk, they also constrain how climate justice, responsibility, and planetary futures are conceptualised. This paper approaches Indigenous climate justice imaginaries not as empirical inputs to be incorporated into existing climate regimes, but as methodological challenges to how climate knowledge itself is produced.

Situated within critical development studies and political ecology, the paper interrogates the epistemic assumptions embedded in dominant climate research practices, particularly those aligned with global policy architectures such as the UNFCCC, IPCC assessments, and national climate action plans. Indigenous imaginaries are engaged here as sites that foreground relationality, place-based responsibility, and more-than-human ethics, exposing the limits of methods that separate environment from society, knowledge from governance, and future planning from lived relations with land and water.

Rather than presenting Indigenous climate action as alternative solutions or best practices, the paper treats Indigenous imaginaries as epistemic interventions that unsettle dominant methodological commitments. It argues that engaging Indigenous climate justice requires methodological transformation, not merely inclusion, positioning reflexive research design as a precondition for just and plural climate futures.