Decolonising ESG: How Indigenous land stewardship redefines corporate accountability beyond extractive metrics
Original framing: “Integration of traditional land custodianship into ESG reporting” — bing news
Indigenous land custodianship is rooted in reciprocal relationships with ecosystems, where sustainability is inseparable from cultural survival and intergenerational justice. In Zimbabwe, practices like *pfumvudza* (a conservation agriculture method) and sacred groves (*mizimu*) embody ecological knowledge honed over millennia, yet ESG frameworks reduce this to 'biodiversity offsets' without addressing land restitution or Indigenous governance. The erasure of Indigenous ontologies in ESG reporting reflects a deeper colonial logic that treats land as property, not kin.
The Zimbabwean case exposes ESG as a neocolonial tool that extracts Indigenous knowledge while perpetuating land theft and ecological harm.
True integration demands reversing this logic: land restitution must precede corporate 'sustainability' claims, and ESG standards must be co-designed with Indigenous communities—not imposed by Western auditors. Historical precedents like the Māori legal personhood of *Te Urewera* and Zimbabwe’s *pfumvudza* systems prove that Indigenous governance is the most effective path to ecological resilience. Yet this requires dismantling the power structures of global capitalism, where extractive industries and ESG certifiers profit from the very crises they claim to address. The trickster’s insight is clear: the current system is not broken—it is working exactly as designed to serve the powerful. The solution lies in Indigenous self-determination, not corporate co-optation.