Indigenous people and plastic pollution governance

Calls for indigenous people to be more involved in the control and mitigation of plastic pollution are becoming increasingly common; the problem is that “participation” means different things to different people, and the literature contains a range of terms interpreted in a range of ways, as Riley Cotter, from Memorial University of Newfoundland explains…

Riley - One of our goals with the review was to be really scoping in the sense that we gather literature from the news, government reports, academia, blog posts, anywhere we can to try to capture an overarching sense of how indigenous peoples are being involved in plastic pollution governance across the globe.

Chris - Why did you go to such a diverse range of sources to try to get a handle on this?

Riley - I think one of the main reasons is that you can't really capture everything that's going on when you're talking about something as broad as governance if you just stick with academia. I think going to government reports and going to blogs is how you get everything there is, and it's even more crucial to look everywhere when you're dealing with something like indigenous rights and indigenous participation in something because it's a community that's been largely excluded from institutions like government and academia. So I think looking for independent efforts is kind of part and parcel for making sure you get the things you want to get in a review like this.

Chris - But how do you safeguard the integrity of the information? Because obviously if you get information from a science journal, there's an element of trustworthiness built into the source, isn't there? When one goes to a blog post, you don't know that the author of that blog post has the same obligations to the truth, let's say. So how do you make sure that what information you pull into this review is reliable?

Riley - Yeah, well, I think one of the main things that we tried to get with the literature view is that non-academic sources are equally and if not more valid in this case, when you're talking about indigenous participation in plastic pollution governance. One of the things we tried not to do is essentialise academia or the academic process as validating knowledge. Academia as a whole hasn't really in the past done a great service when it comes to capturing indigenous voices and validating indigenous perspectives. So I think looking outside that is how you get the real scope of what's going on. And I think without that we wouldn't have gotten the vast majority of the things we have compiled in the literature review, and I don't think we would've gotten a true sense of what's happening on the community level, which is really what, what we wanted to get at.

Chris - So what were your terms of reference and how did you approach this?

Riley - We went through several rounds of looking for things in different databases on Google and Google Scholar. We looked at all kinds of different terms indigenous, plastic, plastic pollution, governance, government, compared to other literature views of larger subjects. One of the things we noticed was that it was relatively scarce in explicit articulations of indigenous participation in plastic pollution governance. I mean, when you're talking about something as specific as plastic pollution governance, the literature tends to thin out a little bit. But the trends that we saw emerging were things like how participation was enacted in the literature. So based on the authorship, whether the authors or the power holders in the initiative were indigenous or non-indigenous, they enacted participation and talked about participation in inherently different ways, which is the real striking thing we noticed at the onset of the literature review and is really what we kind of ran with, with the entirety of the paper because it informs how we look at indigenous participation in pollution governance in the future. To consider that the type of actors involved in positions of power impact greatly how power, how participation is discussed and enacted.

Chris - How much material did you end up with to start with?

Riley - Probably about 35 to 40 pieces when you consider everything. And then through second and third trials through all the databases and then through expanding literature views where we noticed things getting cited in certain articles or things we already knew of in passing before that didn't come up in the literature view. We ended up with about 70 pieces.

Chris - And what geography is covered. Is this global or is it one particular part of the world?

Riley - It was global. We didn't enact any specific guidelines for what parts of the world we were looking at, but, but we tended to notice that we had a significant bias towards Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia, because they talk about indigeneity in the way that we're used to, whereas places like Africa have a totally different conception of indigeneity. So it was hard to get into the depth of certain places in the world.

Chris - And what messages emerged or what floated to the top a bit like the plastic? What were the, the key take homes when you started to sift through all this literature?

Riley - Well, the really key take homes were that first and foremost, who is acting in positions of power when it comes to indigenous involvement in plastic pollution inherently affect how we talk about and how we enact indigenous participation in plastics pollution governance. So when indigenous people are involved in positions of power, you'll see rights and sovereignty approaches to indigenous participation where indigenous people are at the bases and within the fabric of the methodology, versus when there are settler authors at positions of power that often just enact discursive types of inclusion that tend to tokenise. And even within the methods of the efforts, marginalise indigenous people.