Seeking procedural equity in global environmental governance: Indigenous participation and knowledge politics in forest and landscape restoration debates at the 2016 World Conservation Congress

The importance of meaningful participation of Indigenous Peoples in global environmental governance is widely recognised. Yet, debates persist on the extent to which Indigenous perspectives and interests are included in environmental decision-making, including concerns about what constitutes procedural equity, issues of participation asymmetry, and hierarchies in forms of knowledge. While these questions have been extensively explored at the local governance level, the ways in which current structures of decision-making at the global level shape Indigenous participation and knowledge remains under-examined. The IUCN, World Conservation Congress (WCC) is a key site of global environmental decision-making. This paper examines how prevailing structures of power at the most recent (2016) WCC shape Indigenous participation and use of Indigenous knowledge, and thus procedural equity in this policy context. We examine participation and knowledge in relation to debates and discussions about forest and landscape restoration (FLR). We applied Collaborative Event Ethnography (CEE) methodology to collect data over 10-day intensive period. This included i) semi-structured interviews with 17 Congress participants, including Indigenous Peoples' representatives, international non-governmental organisation (INGO) and non-governmental organisation (NGO) specialists, and state agency representatives and ii) participant observation at 27 events relating to forest and landscape restoration. Our findings show that the structure of the WCC upheld prevailing power relations among actors and more powerful actors hold limited views about what constitute meaningful participation and pervasive view of Indigenous knowledge as a supplementary knowledge form in FLR debates. This study makes visible the ways by which prevailing structures of power within global environmental governance shapes access, consideration of different knowledge forms and thus procedural equity in the context of FLR debates.