Contribution short abstract

Pluriversal Environmental Governance challenges Western anthropocentrism. Using Grounded Theory on Latin American data, governance is explained as co-governance with more-than-human political actors (Pachamama, plants), operationalising decolonial social change for environmental justice and degrowth

Contribution long abstract

The persistent global ecological crisis is symptomatic of a significant governance deficit, fundamentally rooted in dominant Western, anthropocentric, and colonial-extractivist paradigms. This research addresses this urgent need by centring Indigenous knowledge systems and relational cosmologies, which offer transformative pathways toward more just and sustainable human-environmental entanglements.

Employing a critical and decolonial research paradigm, and drawing upon Grounded Theory (GT), this study inductively generates a model of Pluriversal Environmental Co-Governance in Latin America. Data collection involved semi-structured interviews with Indigenous leaders, scholars, activists, and legal experts, forging transboundary collaborations that prioritize Indigenous epistemologies over a priori Western theory.

The generated model describes ecological stewardship rooted in relational ontologies and Indigenous jurisprudence interacting with colonial legacies. Key findings highlight profound ontological differences from Western frameworks, supporting a more-than-human political ecology. Indigenous systems perceive the environment as a community of political actors (e.g., Pachamama), dissolving the Western subject/object dichotomy and aligning with the Western juridical concept of Rights of Nature. Environmental degradation is interpreted as a relational disease stemming from the pathology of colonisation and objectification.

The study conceptualises governance as territorial co-governance, wherein critical decision-making incorporates the rights and agency of more-than-human entities, often mediated by spiritual dialogue. This Pluriversal configuration proposes a model of epistemic delinking from colonial modernity for environmental justice and degrowth, emphasising the ecological need to hold multiple worldviews in dialogue without reducing their difference to universal anthropocentric categories.