CLEAR’s new review paper looks at the ways different author groups understand Indigenous “participation” in divergent ways, and what this does to how plastic pollution itself is understood.

“Review of participation of Indigenous peoples in plastics pollution governance,” by Max Liboiron and Riley Cotter was commissioned for the new journal Cambridge Prisms: Plastics in the context of the new UN Plastics Treaty. While calls for Indigenous participation in plastics pollution governance are increasingly common, including those associated with the Treaty, exactly what participation means remains unclear. Our review of 70 texts (roughly half of which were peer-reviewed and a third of which were non-governmental or intergovernmental organizations) showed some clear trends.

Figure 1. Map of locations discussed in the corpus. Indigenous authors (individuals and organizations) are dark orange, mixed author lists where the first author is not Indigenous but at least one author is Indigenous are pale orange, and all non-Indigenous authored texts (individuals and organizations) are blue. Texts about the Global South, the entire Arctic, or with a global scope are not included (n = 19). Some points of the map are specific locations (e.g. “Aamjiwnaang First Nation”), while others occur in the middle of a much greater area (e.g. “Labrador Sea” or “Greenland”). You can begin to see how certain voices, and thus terms of participation, are skewed geographically.

First, we found that “participation” ranged greatly, from “gathering data from Indigenous people” (traditional extraction relationships) to Indigenous-led decision-making. This range is clustered into three types:

  1. Inclusion: Indigenous people, representatives, or knowledge are added to existing processes or organizations.
  2. Rights and sovereignty: framed participation in terms of rightsholder status and & the right to Indigenous self-determination and self-governance; and
  3. Indigenous Environmental Justice (IEJ), which overlaps with rights and sovereignty but it also foregrounds Indigenous traditional, decolonial, anticolonial, and Indigenous theories, obligations, law, and cosmologies in land relations, including governance. IEJ almost always changed core understandings of how plastic pollution causes harm and what the forces behind it are. We cover these in detail in the last section of the paper.

As we moved through our initial analysis, one thing really stood out: the author list of each text heavily determined the type of participation imagined and recommended. For instance, texts without Indigenous authorship advocated for inclusion, the most common of which was collecting data from Indigenous people. The diagram below shows the most common definitions or descriptors of Indigenous participation based on authorship.

Figure 3 in the paper. Frequency of participatory terms used by author type. Treemap of most frequently used terms to describe Indigenous participation in plastics pollution governance, arranged by author/actor type. The larger and darker the section, the more frequently the term was used. Relative size of each segment for an actor group is independent of the others, meaning that the largest, darkest section does not always represent the same frequency across groups. The top count is noted in the corresponding segment

Texts with one or two (usually one) Indigenous authors somewhere in the middle or end of the author list spoke of both involvement and rights, but we noticed that the core frameworks for talking about plastics didn’t shift to those used when Indigenous people were first authors. Nor did the type of participation advocated for (Indigenous decision-making, rights) extend to who was first author or contact author.

Texts with Indigenous first, solo, or team authors significantly shifted how plastics were characterized, moving from technological framings to Land relations and obligations, and linking colonialism to industry and policy, for instance. As scientists fluent in discussions on plastic pollution and environmental change, we find that Western, non-Indigenous, and elite research has overdetermined and restricted what plastic pollution is, and thus, how it might be governed. We conclude our review by outlining some of the characteristics of how plastic pollution is understood in texts that foreground an Indigenous Environmental Justice approach to the issue:

  • Relationships first: Plastic pollution disturbs relationships and obligations
  • Colonialism at the source: There are global trends of colonial power in plastic pollution
  • Pollution, knowledge, and governance must be Place-based: Specificity and locality is essential in the face of global trends
  • Problem definition is different for Indigenous communities: Community-based and holistic definitions of health and harm alter what counts as plastic pollution
  • Holism matters: “Plastics” pollution includes a range of extraction, production, and disposal activities and related root causes
  • Agents of a polluted status quo include the settler state and industry capture: complicating the science to policy pipeline
  • There is a wariness of Western science and the call for more research
  • Intersectionality matters: Attention to the intersections of indigeneity and other social locations, especially gender and generation
  • Cultural resurgence is central to change: The role of plastic pollution interventions are evaluated in terms of their ability to strengthen cultural revitalization
  • Togetherness is required for governance: Collectives, coalitions, partnerships, and sharing are required

The full paper is available free and open access here.

Figure 2 in the paper. Terms of participation arranged by frequency of use and authorship in the corpus. The number of times a term was used to describe Indigenous participation in the corpus, colour coded by which actor group authored the text that used the term. The graph includes only terms used two or more times. For a full list of terms, see Figure S1 in supplementary material. Usage is colour-coded by the type of actor who authored the text. Dark orange includes Indigenous organization authors as well as news stories that cover Indigenous organizations. Light orange indicates an Indigenous first author. Grey includes mixed author lists where Indigenous people were not first authors. Light blue denotes non-Indigenous authors and those for whom no introduction or biography indicated their indigeneity. Dark blue indicates authors were non-Indigenous institutions such as state governments or NGOs.
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