Paper short abstract:

Through document analysis this paper examines the ways in which International Whaling Commission’s policies on Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling have come to expect extraordinary resilience and disproportionate adaptability from indigenous communities.

Paper long abstract:

In it’s nearly 80-year history, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) has shifted from a “whalers club” to an international governance body chiefly focused on the protection and conservation of global cetacean populations (Birnie, 1985; Stone, 2001; Kalland, 2009). Drawing on recent scholarship on environmental dispossession and indigenous marine tenure (Coté, 2010; Norman, 2015; Reid, 2015; West, 2016; Demuth, 2019; Durney, 2020), this paper examines the conceptual history and current implementation of the IWC’s Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling (ASW) policy. I argue that the IWC struggles to accommodate indigenous worldviews and ways of relating to the more-than-human due to its rootedness in colonial ideas of spatial fixity and territorialisation. As a result, disproportionate pressures are placed on indigenous communities who are forced to manoeuvre these regulatory landscapes to secure rights to their customary practices and marine-based livelihoods. This paper scrutinises the way in which international conservation models expect extraordinary resilience and adaptability from indigenous communities, while dominant models of governance are limited in their capabilities to accommodate alternative knowledge systems and ways of being in the world. Particular attention is paid to two issues 1) how legal and regulatory exclusion from marine spaces or resources disrupts both economic activities and the practice and transfer of traditional ecological knowledge for indigenous communities, and 2) how and whether lack of complexity in the ways in which marine life, particularly charismatic species such as whales, is conceptualised in regulatory policies restricts the accommodation of traditional ecological knowledge.