Adapting Conservation Governance Under Climate Change: Lessons from Indian Country

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change is increasingly causing disruptions to ecological communities upon which Natives have relied for millennia, raising existential threats not only to ecosystems but to Native communities. Yet no analysis has carefully explored how climate change is affecting the governance of tribal ecological lands. This Article closes this scholarly and policy gap, examining the current legal adaptive capacity to manage the effects of ecological change on tribal lands.

The Article first considers interventions to date, finding them to be lacking in even assessing—let alone addressing—climate risks to tribal ecosystem governance. It then carefully explores how climate change raises distinctive risks and advantages to tribal governance as compared to federal and state approaches. Relying in part on the review of publicly available tribal plans, the paper details how tribal adaptation planning to date has fared.

In particular, the Article delves into the substantive, procedural, and structural aspects of tribal governance, focusing on climate change and ecological adaptation. Substantively, tribal governance often tends to be considerably less wedded to conservation goals and strategies that rely on “natural” preservation, and many tribes focus less on maximizing yield in favor of more flexible objectives that may be more congruent with adaptation. Procedurally, like other authorities, many tribal governments could better integrate adaptive management and meaningful public participation into adaptation processes, yet some tribes serve as exemplars for doing so (as well as for integrating traditional ecological knowledge with Western science). Structurally, tribal ecological land governance should continue to tap the advantages of decentralized tribal authority but complementing it through more robust (1) federal roles in funding and information dissemination, and (2) intergovernmental coordination, assuming other governments will respect tribal sovereignty. The Article concludes by identifying areas in which tribal management might serve as valuable exemplars for adaptation governance more generally, as well as areas for which additional work would be helpful.