Introduction to the Special Issue - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Introducción al número especial

Transformative Water Relations:
Indigenous Interventions in Global
Political Economies
(cid:129)
Kate J. Neville and Glen Coulthard

Abstracto
This Special Issue of Global Environmental Politics, on water governance, focuses on the
disruptive and transformative potential of Indigenous politics for revealing the multi-
plicity of political economies and enhancing the theory and practice of global environ-
mental politics. In this issue, we unsettle the assumptions of dominant colonial systems
of production and exchange (often the starting point for global environmental politics
eruditos), using water to bring to light the conﬂicting approaches of settler colonial and
Indigenous political economies. With a focus on the settler colonial states of the Global
North—speciﬁcally, Canada and the United States—the contributing authors interrogate
the ways in which different forms of water relations are positioned at the center of con-
ﬂicting understandings of land, law, and development trajectories. Through analyses of
varying forms of water infrastructure, water law, and waterways, and with careful atten-
tion to spatial and temporal distances in production and trade systems, the articles cu-
rated here examine conﬂicting legal forms and traditions, upstream and downstream
relaciones, and opportunities for and limits to resistance by affected communities. en un
dominant global political economy with increasing distance between sites of extraction,
producción, consumption, and discard—and even further removed from the ﬁnancing
that underpins these commodity chains—our Special Issue suggests that the acknowledg-
ment and visibility of multiple forms of water relations contribute to reshaping both
economies and environmental outcomes.

“Water is life.” This slogan is heard at protests and gatherings around the world,
in art and in song, to resist the disruption of water resources, whether through
their contamination, their consumption or rerouting for energy infrastructure,
or their removal from common access through privatization. The phrase is central
to movements that oppose industrial development projects and exclusionary
enclosures. It also requires listeners to think through water as more than a com-
modity in a capitalist system. While water is implicated within extraction and

Global Environmental Politics 19:3, Agosto 2019, https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00514
© 2019 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Publicado bajo una atribución Creative Commons 4.0
Internacional (CC POR 4.0) licencia.

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2 (cid:129)

Transformative Water Relations

production processes across sectors, from energy to agriculture and beyond, él
is as—if not more—deeply embedded in social practices and spiritual tradi-
tions across cultures and regions. In North America, “Water is life”— or “Mni
wiconi” in the Lakota language—became a rallying cry during the highly
publicized resistance at Standing Rock, North Dakota, mounted by the Oceti
Sakowin (and their allies) against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipe-
line over a ten-month period in 2016. The phrase marks the deep ontological
roots of Indigenous peoples’ critiques of environmental injustices relating to
land and water. “For the Oceti Sakowin,” writes Lakota historian Nick Estes
(2019, 21), “Mni Wiconi, or ‘water is life,’ relates to Wotakuye, or ‘being a
good relative.’”

Moving beyond consideration of water as a right or responsibility, y
past questions of institutional arrangements for water management (topics that
already have deep engagement by global environmental politics scholars in this
journal, p.ej., Fischhendler 2008; Fischhendler et al. 2011; Gerlak 2004, 2016;
Gupta and Van der Zaag 2009; katz 2011; Lindemann 2008), this Special Issue
shifts to focus on water relations—the interactions between and across humans
and water systems. Seen in this normative light, Indigenous peoples’ “resistance
to the trespass of settlers, pipelines and dams is part of being a good relative to
the water, land and animals, not to mention the human world” (Estes 2019,
21). We suggest that the multiplicity of values that surround water enables us
to explore the ways in which different ontologies shape the social, legal, después-
litical, and economic structures that govern collective life and how these
worldviews facilitate or constrain negotiations across these systems. en par-
particular, the articles examine the core question of how water relations shape
and are shaped by political economies, interrogating the intersection (or col-
lision) of capitalist and Indigenous economic forms. These structures and pro-
cesses are mediated by waterways, shaped by water access and use, enabled
through water consumption and diversion, and enriched through connection
and engagement.

The collection expands the ﬁeld of global environmental politics (GEP) por
turning to the insights offered by Indigenous political economic scholarship
and practice on the opportunities—but also tensions—that emerge in efforts
to challenge colonial economic and development practices. The ﬁeld of political
economía, as advanced through GEP, considers the role of power in patterns of
investment, producción, and exchange and the effects these patterns have in
shaping environmental sustainability and well-being. GEP scholars consider
the implications for the environment and people of changing geopolitical rela-
tionships, international ﬁnancial markets and their volatility, and spillover and
shadow effects of trade systems. The global political economy, as demonstrated
through research in GEP, can be characterized as socially embedded (Conca
et al. 2001), globally interconnected and highly unequal (Boyce 2002; Craig
2004; Havice 2012), post-Fordist in structure with multiple layers of frag-
mentation and integration (Conca 2001; Görg and Brand 2006), cada vez más

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Kate J. Neville and Glen Coulthard

(cid:129) 3

elongated with growing distance between nodes in commodity chains (Princen
1997, 2002), dependent on rapid exchange, shaped by processes of ﬁnanciali-
zación (Clapp 2014), and prone to casting shadows of environmental and social
damage on places far from sites of consumption (Dauvergne 2010; Swanson
2015). Although these analyses are informed by critical theory perspectives
and often motivated by justice concerns for vulnerable ecosystems and commu-
niidades, these studies tend to center their attention on dominant structures of
global exchange. To disrupt these models, and the damaging social and environ-
mental consequences that arise from such systems, it is not enough to make visible
the networks that sustain these economies or uncover their distant and hidden
costos; more scholars need to highlight alternative models of political thought
and economy that might offer a different set of perspectives on a multiplicity of
paths forward. GEP scholars turn to many ideas to think through alternate futures
and transformative potential—these include critiques of capitalist logics (Princen
2003 on the need for sufﬁciency and restraint), the potential for multilevel gover-
nance and the challenges this poses to understanding jurisdiction and territory
(Conca 2012, on the rise of the region; Jordan et al. 2012, on the possibilities
and limits of multilevel governance in the EU for climate policy), and challenges
to understanding states that complicate mainstream conceptions of sovereignty
(Hunold and Dryzek 2002, through green political theory; Dalby 2004, on em-
pires and historical contingency). Although often unacknowledged by Western
academic work (Todd 2016), scholars and practitioners of Indigenous politics
have been writing about and revealing such systems for decades, documenting
long-standing knowledge of alternative structures of exchange and production that
are premised on different ontologies of land, ambiente, desarrollo, and sov-
ereignty (p.ej., Alfred 2005; Coulthard 2014; Daigle 2016; Larsen and Johnson
2017, Simpson 2011, 2017; vatios 2013).

These forms of production and exchange persist—and even thrive—alongside
and despite the power of dominant economic models. As Dhillon (2018, 1) writes
in her introduction to a special issue of Environment and Society, on Indigenous re-
surgence and environmental justice, “Indigenous peoples are mapping the contours
of alternative modes of social, political, and economic organization that speak to
the past, present, and the future.” Paying attention to such theory and action serves
us well in both the critical and constructive aims of scholarship on GEP.

The articles collected in this Special Issue thus turn to Indigenous political
scholarship, which the ﬁeld of GEP has so far failed to engage in depth, to con-
sider the transformative possibilities that are offered by considering a diversity
of political economies and practices. We see this relative lack of engagement
with Indigenous politics as curious, if not troubling, on at least two fronts: primero,
as demonstrated in the articles, there are clear intersections between GEP and
Indigenous politics that produce valuable insights into the political economy
of water governance in settler colonial contexts, y segundo, this failure of en-
gagement ignores emerging national and international research norms with re-
spect to the inclusion of Indigenous peoples and perspectives when carrying out

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4 (cid:129)

Transformative Water Relations

work and research on issues of immediate concern to them and the ecosystems
for which they are responsible.1

Here we summarize two key contributions that emerge from the insights
of our colleagues in this collection. Primero, we identify ontological divides in
understanding the nature of the environment itself and thus in the economies
that ﬂow from human exchanges with the natural world and each other. Glen
Coulthard and Leanne Betsamosake Simpson (2016) refer to the ontological
foundation of Indigenous critiques of settler political economies as “grounded
normativity”: the ethical frameworks provided by Indigenous place-based
practices and associated forms of knowledge relating to the sustainable gover-
nance of people, lands, and water. Conﬂicts over water and the life and energy
contained therein and alongside—whether rivers or ﬁsheries, hydropower or
shorelines—reﬂect not only different value judgments about ecosystems and
resources and money but also a deeper disconnect over what water is, what it
represents, and the place of humans within the wider world. Segundo, turning to
political economy, the collection reveals challenges to dominant political and
economic systems that emerge from diverse Indigenous nations and politics.
These challenges require a rethinking of how institutions are structured, OMS
participates in market exchanges, and what rights are embedded in treaties
and state law. The acknowledgment of different premises for understanding ex-
change and ownership opens up space for a more fundamental transformation
of social and environmental relationships. Indigenous governance systems in
the Global North have persisted over centuries, despite active destruction and
dismantling efforts by colonial governments. Beyond surviving, aunque, Indig-
enous nations are both asserting and reclaiming their social and political prac-
tices within their communities and are also strategically altering settler colonial
states themselves. Indigenous approaches to reclaiming sovereignty from settler
states are reshaping the economic and legal foundations, along with the domes-
tic and international exchange relationships, of nation-states.

With attention to historical relationships of colonialism and the ongoing
contestation of governance systems within and across nations, the Special Issue
articles collected here address both the limits to and the opportunities for
cambiar. Through critical political economy lenses, particularly as understood
in Indigenous politics and thought, these articles offer theoretically and empir-
ically novel contributions to GEP.

Ontological Divides and Bridges
Water ﬂows through and across aquatic and terrestrial systems, within and
through bodies, through frozen, liquid, and gaseous forms. It creates habitat,
sustains life, and occupies transitional and liminal zones at multiple edges.

1. For examples of international and national research standards and guidelines, see the United
Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and chapter 9 of the Government of
Canada’s Tri-Council Policy Statement on conducting ethical research with human subjects.

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Kate J. Neville and Glen Coulthard

(cid:129) 5

The commodiﬁcation of nature and the prioritization of extractive industries lie
at the heart of settler state economies. Water, in this worldview, provides trans-
portation of labor and goods, enables extraction and energy production, y
holds value either as a tradable commodity or as a free input for other wealth-
generation activities. A diferencia de, Indigenous conceptions of water, mientras
emanating from diverse nations, position water as part of a living planet, a menudo
as something sacred (Bradford et al. 2016). Unlike the English language,
which divides the environment and people, many Indigenous languages
capture the interconnections of these systems and beings, including through
intimate local knowledge expressed through place-names and identity and
gender relations with place (Kimmerer 2017; Schreyer et al. 2014; Tuhiwai
Herrero 1994). By mediating social relations and positionality, water underpins
legal structures and practices, playing a role in the potential for autonomy and
sovereignty, the location of communities, the nature of travel and exchange,
the development of property law, and the negotiation of treaties. Divergent
understandings of water thus shape the social organization of economies
and exchange in vastly different ways, with varying political, ético, legal,
and emotional consequences.

Water is, por supuesto, global, transboundary, and mobile: it ﬂows across the
planet through interconnected hydrological processes; moves across, a lo largo de, y
under state borders; y, through complex chains of production, transportation,
and consumption, ends up in embedded or virtual forms in commodities
around the globe. Al mismo tiempo, water is intensely local. Global or even re-
gional averages—of precipitation, streamﬂow, or availability—often mean little
to agricultural communities waiting for rain, riparian communities in ﬂood
condiciones, or urban centers relying on overexploited aquifers. These dual charac-
teristics of water inform the scholarly approaches of our Special Issue authors:
through speciﬁc place-based case studies—in Navajo and Hopi territory and the
US state of Arizona (Curley), Michi Saagiig territory and Canada’s province of
ontario (Whetung), and Lummi Nation territory and the US state of Washington
(Norman), for instance—our authors attend to the politics of scale and material
speciﬁcity as they work to shape political outcomes (as advised by Liboiron 2016,
although in a different context in her work on the agency of plastics). These sit-
uated and layered water relations offer more than contingent and idiosyncratic
insights into speciﬁc places—the work of regional political studies; crucialmente,
by engaging with the speciﬁc histories, power dynamics, waterways, y
economies of these case sites, the authors reveal the ways in which colonial
assumptions about generalizability collide with different Indigenous nations’
relationships in place, how views of waterways and landscapes “from above”
(to borrow from Scott 1998) enable colonial governing authorities to ignore
and obscure pre-existing diplomatic and legal relationships, and how interna-
tional market pressures and globally circulating assumptions about economic
growth and development shape the governing practices that disrupt and reorient
people and places in a range of watersheds around the world.

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6 (cid:129)

Transformative Water Relations

Bookending the collection of research articles are two papers that center on
ontological questions and use narrative approaches to develop their theoretical in-
sights (Whetung, Behn and Bakker). The three intervening articles (Diver et al.,
Curley, Norman) examine efforts by different Indigenous nations to reassert sover-
eignty and negotiate governance arrangements, whether by engaging with settler
colonial state regulation and legislation or by offering alternatives to state pro-
cesses. Whetung as well as Behn and Bakker draw on stories—from Michi Saagiig
(an Anishinaabe nation) and Dunne-Za (a Dene nation) traditions, respectively—
to offer insights into other ways of understanding relationships with water, lugar,
y otros. While drawing on Western practices of theory building and application,
our authors simultaneously enact a mode of theory that accords with what
Simpson (2014, 7) describes within Anishinaabe intellectual traditions:

Theory also works a little differently within Nishnaabeg thought. “Theory” is
generated and regenerated continually through embodied practice and
within each family, community and generation of people. “Theory” isn’t just
an intellectual pursuit—it is woven within kinetics, spiritual presence and
emotion, it is contextual and relational.

The collection starts with Whetung, who launches us directly into the
ontological questions at stake in this collective work. By turning to contemporary
and historical changes to Michi Saagiig territory and governance in what is now
claimed as part of Ontario, Canada, she introduces an “internationalism” that
challenges mainstream international relations scholarship. In detailing the many
human and other-than-human nations recognized and respected by Anishinaabeg
treaties, Whetung thereby unsettles Western understandings of territory, diplomacy,
and legal orders. Her work documents the gendered dynamics of colonial political
economies and the erasure of existing systems of governance through physical
changes on the landscape, tracking the conversion of free-flowing rivers into canals
along the Trent Severn Waterway in service of colonial commerce. Whetung illustrates
the clash between Western/Eurocolonial and Anishinaabeg modes of understanding
states and legal systems, drawing out the relational dimensions of Anishinaabeg law.
Para hacer esto, she illuminates the principles of “shoreline law,” using a theoretical
grounding developed from a combination of Western legal scholarship, feminist
political theory, and Anishinaabeg teachings from Michi Saagiig elders and
knowledge holders. Through this work, she provides a careful analysis of the ways
in which certain forms of political economy not only dominate but also subsume or
make impossible other forms of economies and relations. Yet Whetung also reveals
the ongoing practices of Michi Saagiig people in upholding and reclaiming their land
and laws through practices of resistance, including occupation of territory and
declaration of rights through paddling, hunting, fishing, and cultivating wild rice.

We end the research article section with Behn and Bakker’s account of
hydropower development on the Saaghii Naachii/Peace River by the govern-
ment of British Columbia (BC) in Canada, in which the authors bring together
two divergent methodological approaches. At the outset, they draw on political

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Kate J. Neville and Glen Coulthard

(cid:129) 7

ecology and political economy critiques of the centrality of extractive industries
to colonial power, making visible the dispossession that enables the expansion
of the BC and Canadian economies. This ﬁrst analytic section will look familiar
to scholars of GEP, with a critical assessment of the historical trajectory of
hydropower in BC and its role in entrenching speciﬁc political interests. Behn
and Bakker describe the strategic deployment and bounding of impact assess-
ments as a form of “manufactured ignorance,” involving the “exclusion of
speciﬁc questions, datos, analytical methods, and ways of knowing.” While one
solution is to expand the scope of assessments to consider cumulative impacts,
Behn and Bakker propose that such a response modiﬁes outcomes but maintains
a colonial logic. As an alternative, they turn to Dunne-Za storytelling to develop
an ontologically distinct approach to addressing conﬂicts over land, agua, y
energía. Stories offer far more than diversions from serious scholarship: como
Simpson (2011, 33) articulates from an Anishinaabe perspective,

[S]torytelling is at its core decolonizing, because it is a process of remember-
En g, visioning and creating a just reality where Nishnaabeg live as both
Nishnaabeg and peoples. Storytelling then becomes a lens through which
we can envision our way out of cognitive imperialism, where we can create
models and mirrors where none existed, and where we can experience the
spaces of freedom and justice.

Stories are vessels for teachings: they reveal connections and hold histories
(Battiste 2013, 179), demonstrate legal principles (Borrows 2016), remind lis-
teners of diplomatic practices and social responsibilities, establish consequences
to action and behavior, and envision possible futures (Simpson 2011, 2017).
Behn and Bakker reveal colonial efforts to “render technical” the process of hy-
dropower development and land use change, aiming to override Indigenous tra-
ditions that “render sacred” the relationships and connections on and with the
land and water. Through storytelling, they unsettle assumptions about place,
law, and resistance, revealing the relational and social economies that persist
alongside and in spite of colonial incursions—and the possibilities these hold
for collective futures.

Strategic Reshaping of Settler States and Practices

Alongside the invitation to GEP scholars to consider ontological and methodo-
logical challenges, the Special Issue articles present a series of analyses that reveal
how the lines between participation in and resistance to colonial systems can be
blurred. Indigenous governments and communities can strategically wield the
tools of the state to acknowledge and defend their lands, practicas, and values.
The use of colonial systems to defend Indigenous rights offers one path toward
greater autonomy and can alter the practices of the state itself, reshaping gover-
nance in multiple ways. Still, these processes have limits, and there are dangers to
such integration (Coulthard 2007, 2014).

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8 (cid:129)

Transformative Water Relations

Even as they assess the possibilities for altering state practices through
engagement, our authors draw on the deep and expanding literature on the politics
of recognition, much of which cautions against Indigenous participation in colonial
state systems. Although participation can offer Indigenous peoples some additional
power within the state, it can undermine broader and longer-term transformation of
governing relationships by acknowledging the authority of the colonial state, de este modo
limiting possibilities for reclaiming autonomy and self-determination (Coulthard
2014; Daigle 2016). By engaging with speciﬁc cases—for example, water quality
standards across the United States, water rights and legal precedent in Arizona,
water contamination from upstream agriculture in coastal Washington—the
authors of this Special Issue provide in-depth empirical evidence for the tensions
they identify in these “colonial entanglements,” a concept from Dennison
(2012) used by both Curley and Diver et al. to examine the dynamics of Indig-
enous peoples’ participation within the structures of settler states.

The interventions in this issue explore the possibilities for—but also limits of—
the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge, authority, and values into settler state
governance practices. Diver et al. examine the adoption of state-like powers by tribal
governments in the United States, where provisions under the Clean Water Act allow
their “treatment as a state” in terms of conferring on them the authority to set local
water quality standards. Conducting an analysis across the tribes in the United States
that have engaged with TAS provisions, with a focus on environmental contaminants,
they document the inclusion of cultural and ceremonial concerns in tribes’ water
quality standards. Still, these entanglements lead to a form of water management
eso, although it expands the limits otherwise imposed by the state, still adheres
to colonial perspectives on water resources, especially given structural constraints
to tribal authority posed by US property rights regimes.

Curley further complicates the story of colonial entanglements addressed
by Diver et al. with his examination of Hopi and Navajo leaders’ assertion of
their water rights through appeals to phrasing from a twentieth-century US
Supreme Court case. Curley takes us to the Little Colorado River, where he tracks
opposition to water settlements by Hopi and Navajo (Diné) los ciudadanos, demonstrat-
ing how these communities used existing US water laws and court decisions to
contest state-mediated water allocations. Rather than acquiescing to state control,
Curley argues that Hopi and Navajo claims revealed the contradictions embedded
in the actions of the state, undermining the legitimacy of colonial water law and
increasing the governance space for upholding alternative water relations. Estos
conﬂicts reveal the possibilities for disrupting colonial assumptions and power
systems through engagement with the state, revealing that appeals to state struc-
tures need not always fall into the problematic politics of recognition.

Offering a bridge between the challenges of colonial entanglements and
alternative relational approaches, Norman turns to ways in which Indigenous
communities can circumvent unresponsive government processes. With a focus
on the US West Coast, she documents efforts by the Lummi Nation (Coast Salish
gente), with concerns about water quality for shellﬁsh harvesting, to work

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directly with upstream farmers to reconnect rights to responsibilities for water in
the Salish Sea. To convince those upstream communities to participate in negoti-
ations, Lummi leaders ﬁrst invoked legal action against farmers for contaminating
shellﬁsh beds. Sin embargo, the nation quickly shifted its focus away from colonial
litigious practices to relationship-building efforts that better reﬂect the nation’s
valores. The relational focus of this work, both social relationships across Lummi
and settler communities and place-based relationships between communities
and water, highlights the transformative potential of rejecting settler state practices
of negotiation and regulation. Norman’s work asks us to further consider the
ontological assumptions underpinning governance practices and possible futures,
considering relational alternatives to mitigating and repairing the damage wrought
by industrial activities on social economies.

We end the Special Issue with a policy-oriented intervention. In their
Forum piece, Arsenault et al. point to the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from
full and meaningful participation in environmental impact assessments for de-
velopment projects in Canada, highlighting the “substantive inequities” that
persist in the process. Acknowledging the historical roots—and contemporary
re-entrenchment—of Indigenous peoples’ mistrust in these government pro-
cesses, the Forum authors turn to the ways in which more serious engagement
with traditional knowledge by Western scientists could transform impact assess-
ment and decision-making. By considering pathways for enhancing Indigenous
voices within planning and development, the Forum offers a pragmatic route
forward for amending existing colonial governance practices.

Readers might consider whether the Forum authors’ proposal for Indigenous
participation in state-led processes of environmental assessment (Arsenault et al.)
creates openings for more radical transformation of the state, as considered by Diver
et al. regarding the use of TAS provisions and in line with Curley’s account of the
power of Indigenous interpretation and deployment of treaties, sovereignty, y
agua. Still, such integration into colonial processes might further entrench the pol-
itics of recognition, and perhaps Norman’s account of Lummi relational approaches
would be more instructive for changing negotiations over landscapes and develop-
mento. Tomados juntos, these articles demonstrate how the industrial and extractive
logics of settler states have disrupted and obscured the pre-existing economies of
Indigenous peoples, yet they also reveal how Indigenous practices, legal systems,
and water relations are reshaping settler states—with varying consequences for
the independence and sovereignty of Indigenous nations.

Spaces of Engagement: Indigenous Political Thought and Global
Environmental Politics

Hasta la fecha, notable silences remain in the space between GEP and Indigenous pol-
itics, especially Indigenous political thought in contemporary settler colonial
estados (the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia). Some articles
in this journal have addressed Indigenous peoples and movements, por ejemplo,

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10 (cid:129) Transformative Water Relations

with respect to environmental justice at national and international levels (p.ej.,
Kauffman and Martin 2014; Marion Suiseeya 2014; Schlosberg and Carruthers
2010) and in relation to knowledge systems and worldviews (p.ej., Eisenstadt
and Jones West 2017; Long Martello 2001), as well as by disrupting state-led
accounts of transboundary agreements to center Indigenous histories and
narratives (p.ej., Cohen and Norman 2018). Still, there has been little sustained
work on Indigenous politics contributions to GEP studies of governance, sover-
eignty, and political economy.

Yet the themes of GEP are familiar to scholars of Indigenous politics, y el
articles in this Special Issue highlight these intersections, joining existing conversa-
tions within the journal. They follow directly from work on environmental justice.
Newell (2005, 72) describes an intersection between global institutions and struc-
tures of power and “the consequences of organized inequality and the strategies
adopted by marginalized groups to contest their fate as victims of environmental
injustice.” These active strategies of resistance are seen in Curley’s account of Navajo
and Hopi citizens’ appeal to rights encoded in US federal laws and conﬁrmed by a
Supreme Court ruling and in Diver et al.’s description of Native American tribes that
have assumed authority under the Clean Water Act to regulate water quality and
limit toxins. Such efforts recall social movement strategies and civil society
organizational capacities beyond nongovernmental organizations (Vado 2003),
with the tensions identiﬁed by Hochstetler (2002), where external pressure on states
coordinated by groups within the state leads to ongoing domestic negotiation.

GEP themes of multiscale and regional governance also shine through in
this collection of papers. Norman’s discussion of downstream Indigenous and
upstream farmer partnerships to reduce agricultural pollution in the Salish Sea
region echoes Conca’s (2012, 127) claims about the possibilities enabled by
regional governance, where he argues that regions “offer hope for political prog-
ress where global efforts have stalled” and “superior conditions of scale for
common property resource management.” In line with GEP research, but with
less optimism about potential environmental and social justice outcomes, Behn
and Bakker’s mapping of BC’s regional economy and global climate goals
uncovers similar tensions to other regions with multilevel governance and
multi-issue decision-making. Their account of the Site C dam project under-
scores that multiple layers of political jurisdiction and conﬂicting incentives
across issue areas can lead to counterproductive commitments.

Alongside social movements and multilevel governance, the political
economy analyses in this Special Issue point to the hidden inequalities and
damage caused by industrial systems of production and consumption—a topic
of ongoing attention in GEP (p.ej., Conca et al. 2001; Dauvergne 2010). Curley,
por ejemplo, highlights the demand for water for agricultural production and
urban expansion that continues to shape water law and allocation in the
western United States, despite the high costs to Indigenous communities. Interro-
gating the foundations of colonial property and ownership structures, Whetung
documents the erasure of Indigenous systems of governance and pre-existing treaty

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Kate J. Neville and Glen Coulthard

(cid:129) 11

relationships by colonial authorities focused on resource access and extraction.
Scholars of local–global linkages also consider scale in their work, both in governance
and impacts. In the ﬁeld of GEP, Aksoy (2014, 29) considers the “plurality challenge,"
writing of patterns that lead to the destruction of the resilience of human–
environment systems, especially through “ignoring interactions between and within
escamas, mismatches between human and ecological systems, and not acknowledging
the plurality of ways in which actors comprehend and value scales.” Aksoy takes on
a different set of mismatches than does Whetung, but both highlight the damage
that results from not acknowledging relationships between human and other-
than-human beings (p.ej., a plurality of relations, a plurality of nationhoods) y
mismatches between colonial and other systems (p.ej., Anishinaabe legal systems).
GEP scholars, many of whom engage in critical geography and sociology,
are acutely aware of the need for more attention to the relational elements of hu-
mans and place. Adger et al. (2011, 2), por ejemplo, make an argument that “the
symbolic and psychological aspects of settlements, lugares, and risks to them” are
often missing from climate policy and science and hold the position that the so-
cial interpretation of place is central to community and individual identities and
provides meaning to material conditions. In this Special Issue, Whetung takes
such positions even further: she not only considers the material and symbolic
values that are undervalued in land use decisions and economic development
plans but also identiﬁes the social, legal, political, and economic systems that
are overwritten and destroyed by those decisions and trajectories. As with Adger
et al. (2011)—and asking readers to follow these ideas even further into other
forms of governance and kinship—Whetung considers what is ignored by colo-
nial powerholders and how these dominant worldviews and consequent actions
supplant existing relations, legal orders, and political economies.

Indigenous nations are reshaping land and resource politics across the
Global South and North, with signiﬁcant implications for global political econ-
omies. By inﬂuencing energy and resource extraction, ﬁsheries and food produc-
ción, and water governance and access, Indigenous approaches to reclaiming
sovereignty from settler states are challenging the economic foundations of
nation-states and their domestic and international exchange relationships. Within
the settler states of the Global North—where reparations and restitution for
Indigenous nations remain nominal—these changes are being forced through
strategic legal channels, creative negotiation tactics, powerful resistance efforts,
and layered local and transnational campaigns. Through modern treaty relations,
Indigenous nations are revising authority over lands and waters, embedding self-
governance, co-governance, and other models of layered decision-making into
state practice. Some of these shifts echo the rewriting of property relations in post-
colonial countries of the Global South, including complex arrangements of
customary and statutory land rights in many African countries (Lund and Boone
2013), while others reﬂect the speciﬁc constitutional arrangements of settler states
and the contemporary contexts of urban populations, land development, interno-
tional and trade relations, and other state-speciﬁc dynamics.

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12 (cid:129) Transformative Water Relations

An Agenda for GEP: Indigenous Political Economies and Transformative
Possibilities

Around the world, Indigenous scholars and activists are at the front lines of
environmental research mobilization—putting ideas and bodies on the line
for the sake of people and the planet. From a scholarly perspective, centering
Indigenous politics in studies of these political economic conﬂicts has largely
been left to journals of development, critical geography, and Indigenous studies
(p.ej., Tercer Mundo Trimestral, Journal of Peasant Studies, Geoforum, Antipode). Todavía
these movements are embedded in and responding to political economies that
are premised on particular constellations of ecological systems and resources—
economies of extraction, sacriﬁce zones in production, shadow effects of
consumption. Además, Indigenous politics offers radically different possi-
bilities for future political economic organization, providing examples of social
economies that have persisted alongside and despite the dominance of transac-
tional economies (Kuokkanen 2011), operating on different premises than a
contemporary capitalist economy.

Indigenous resource governance strategies are reshaping global and local
political economies. In the settler states of the Global North, these changes hold
deep implications for environmental and social justice, particularly by unsettling
the locus of authority for decision-making, questioning the logic of resource
extraction and capital accumulation, and recognizing relational dynamics in
human–environment interactions, with obligations of reciprocity and respect.
The articles in this issue consider the relationships of power that have developed
over several centuries of colonization and the changing nature of those relations
as a result of Indigenous resurgence and movement building at multiple scales. Por
documenting and detailing the interplay between multilevel economic pressures
and industrial-sector incentives, the Special Issue articles place current territorial,
extractive, and riparian disputes in historical and economic perspective.

The work makes visible the complex and often obscure chains that link
upstream and downstream practices, local and distant producers and con-
sumers, and historical and future landscapes. In light of the intersection of con-
tested resource extraction with global ecological change, y el consecuente
urgency of economic transformation for ecological integrity and social justice,
this is a striking moment for GEP to engage with scholarship and thought on
alternative political economies and Indigenous resistance and resurgence.

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