Indigenous and Local Knowledge in Environmental Decision Making

Centering attention on the case of climate change, this chapter presents the most prominent debates on the participation of indigenous peoples in environmental policy and governance. Guided by the climate justice literature, this contribution argues that the inclusion of indigenous and local knowledge in environmental decision making is hampered by a three-layered explanation: a distributive, a procedural, and an epistemic injustice. Distributive (in)justice refers to the way in which indigenous peoples carry the burden of climate change impacts and policies while rarely receiving the direct benefits. Procedural (in)justice refers to the exclusion of indigenous peoples from the main decision centers of climate policy. Finally, epistemic (in)justice captures the way in which climate policy overshadows indigenous people’s capacity to communicate their own knowledge and way of relating to the environment. This contribution highlights the need for more trans- and interdisciplinary research on environmental decision making, but also for a more inclusive academia in terms of encompassing different sources of knowledge.