Collaborative care in environmental governance: restoring reciprocal relations and community self-determination

From communities rooted in place to transnational coalitions, this special feature applies concepts of collaborative care rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems to the field of environmental governance. We highlight restorative, liberatory practices rooted in caretaking ethics and reciprocal human-nature relations. Our approach also centers decision making by those most connected to a given resource and the sustenance it provides. Despite global extraction, dispossession, and other colonial legacies, these efforts build toward collective action and community self-determination, both through formal policy change and informal practices. Three facets of collaborative care in environmental governance are threaded through the special feature: (1) care in place, (2) care in power, and (3) care in commoning. These themes connect both Indigenous-led and allied scholarship from the United States to the Netherlands, Japan to Madagascar, and Aotearoa to Canada. Though diverse in their interests and challenges, the authors and communities featured in this research build toward collective action and community self-determination in caring for the places that are the source of collective abundance.

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