Call for papers – Special Issue
Indigenous Ecological Knowledge in South Asia – Lessons for Rights of Nature Discourses
Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences
Editor-in-Chief: Teresa Lloro
Deadline for submission of papers: 31 May 2025
Please direct inquiries to special issue editor, Dr. Philippe Cullet: pcullet@nlumeg.ac.in
and pc38@soas.ac.uk Context
Rights of nature have caught up the imagination of all stakeholders, in part because this is seen as a potential alternative discourse to the increasingly discredited framing around sustainable development.[1] On the one hand, rights of nature are framed around the need to give effective priority to nature, reflected through an emphasis on ecocentric perspectives, opposed to the anthropocentricity of sustainable development and (international) environmental law.[2] On the other hand, rights of nature debates offer an entry point for addressing the various shortcomings of environmental policy over the past five decades. One of these is the top-down nature of environmental protection measures framed at the national level, or even international level, and trickling down to the local level. The level of engagement with people’s own nature conservation practices and policies has been on the whole relatively limited, as reflected, for instance, in policies favouring participation as part of a process of consultation rather than actual decision making.
In this context, practices, policies and norms of indigenous peoples have been seen as potential anchors for the new environmental policy that needs to be built to address everything, from local environmental crises to the triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution and biodiversity.[3] In other words, rights of nature could turn out to offer a game-changing discourse by effectively engaging with practices and policies that have proved to be effective in the longer term.
Indigenous environmental knowledge throws a challenge to conventional environmental policy, and also offers an alternative to the ecocentric framing of rights of nature. In this sense, it has the potential to offer a completely different framework for environmental policy of the future. At the same time, one of the reasons why indigenous practices often remain under-researched is because they have not been given the kind of recognition they deserve.
This special issue seeks:
– papers that engage with indigenous ecological knowledge in the broader context of rights of nature in South Asia.
– papers that engage from a variety of disciplines with the policy, law and governance aspects of indigenous ecological knowledge in relation to rights of nature.
– papers that engage with local case studies, national-level framings or South Asia level debates.
– papers that engage with issues related to livelihoods in relation to conservation, collective dimensions of the use and protection of the environment, specific elements of the environment (eg forests, water) are particularly welcome.
[1] eg David R. Boyd, The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution that Could Save the World (ECW Press, 2017); M Davies, EcoLaw: Legality, Life, and the Normativity of Nature (Routledge 2022); Craig M. Kauffman and Pamela L. Martin, The Politics of Rights of Nature – Strategies for Building a More Sustainable Future (MIT Press, 2021).
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