Rethinking Climate Governance: Amazonian Indigenous Climate Politics and Integral Territorial Ontologies

This paper analyzes the Amazon Indigenous Initiative to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation (RIA), a climate change mitigation strategy created by the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin. Critical geographers have argued that neoliberal climate governance can commodify nature and perpetuate extractive development. In the context of Amazonia, they have centered on struggles over the resources and meanings of the territories. But analyses of Indigenous-led transnational and interethnic climate strategies are scarce in the literature. To analyze RIA, I further engage with the literature on ontological politics, which allows an understanding of politics that emerge from diverse lifeways and incorporate more-than-human agency. I argue that RIA is founded on what I call integral territorial ontologies, or common conceptions of territories as indivisible entities or lifeworlds that encompass multiple relationships not only between humans and nature, but also among more-than-human beings. By incorporating these ontologies and more-than-human agency, RIA effectively introduces a form of radical alterity to global climate politics. As such, RIA is tied to territorial defense and challenges understandings of forest/territorial vitality and ordering; as well as the processes that facilitate the commodification of nature. I conclude by reflecting on the possibility of decolonizing what we understand as global politics and practices to respond to climate change.