Connecting across difference in environmental governance: Beyond rights, recognition, and participation

Abstract

This paper explores the significance of current paradigms for connecting across difference in environmental governance, with a focus on dominant practices and the erasures that occur in the process. It focuses on three core concepts and corresponding practices: rights (adhering to both persons and property, procedural, and substantive); recognition (of harms done, of those harmed, or of those deserving of special recognition); and participation (in which information, decision authority, and/or benefits are shared with affected populations). The paper begins with a literature review on the history and purported benefits of each of these concepts, the environmental arenas where they occur, and the critiques that are leveraged against them. To envision what it might look like to connect across difference differently, we situate these critiques in the literature on coloniality and use this to develop a conceptual framework for evaluating efforts to connect across difference in environmental governance. We then illustrate the application of this framework in the environmental arenas of biodiversity conservation and extractivism to crystalize through lived experiences what it means to operate inside of these paradigms and to move beyond them. The paper highlights how current paradigms for connecting across difference are deeply situated in (settler) colonial logics of hierarchies of value, state sovereignty, and Indigenous erasure. We conclude with a vision of how environmental governance can move beyond its current colonial hegemony by centering decolonial and abolition ecologies scholarship that decenters settler ontologies in favor of more radical alternatives for relating with the so-called “natural” world.