Addressing the Justice Gap in Global Biodiversity Governance

Attention to the everyday experiences of global environmental governance has steadily increased in recent years. At the Belém Climate Summit (COP30), for example, the Land Rights Now! movement echoed their calls to the international community to recognize the ways in which climate change treaties imprint on the daily lives of Indigenous Peoples. An allied protest of Indigenous leaders disrupted the summit and demanded land rights. Yet climate talks simply do not take on land rights as a potential climate solution. Instead, climate summits increasingly focus on finance as the core solution. By structuring international climate agreements almost solely around distributive justice norms, climate treaties further subjugate Indigenous Peoples to nation-state assertions of sovereignty, limiting Indigenous Peoples’ wellbeing pursuits and opportunities as well as their broader expressions of lifeways. As the global biodiversity regime seeks to measure progress and success through the Global Biodiversity Framework, policymakers and practitioners seem likely to reproduce similar injustices. By isolating ecological factors from social, political, and cultural factors in biodiversity governance—and neglecting the latter—the GBF threatens to reduce biodiversity conservation to a series of transactional, rather than transformational, relationships. In doing so, it rolls back decades of global efforts to redress injustices in conservation. This paper critically evaluates how the GBF constrains the landscape of justice possibilities in biodiversity conservation by leveraging a critical institutional theory of environmental justice to demonstrate how ‘good’ norms, such as those that underpin GBF indicators, do harm.  Through three case studies in Southeast Asia, we identify the risks and opportunities the GBF Framework introduces for Indigenous and local communities as they actively steward and conserve biodiversity in their lands. To address these constraints, we propose a novel set of relational environmental justice indicators that can strengthen monitoring and advance progress towards justice for those Indigenous and local communities stewarding global biodiversity.