Decolonising ecological restoration: How Indigenous land stewardship and systemic finance reforms could unlock planetary resilience by 2035
Original framing: “Restoring nature is key to a more resilient future” — Al Jazeera
Marginalised communities, such as the *Palawan indigenous groups* in the Philippines or the *Maori of New Zealand*, have been leading restoration efforts for decades but are excluded from global policy conversations. Their voices are often silenced in favour of corporate or state-led narratives, which frame restoration as a top-down project rather than a bottom-up process. The *Indigenous Peoples’ Biocultural Climate Change Assessment* (2020) highlights how these communities have developed adaptive strategies to climate change, yet their knowledge is rarely integrated into COP negotiations. Without amplifying these voices, restoration initiatives will continue to reproduce inequalities rather than address them.
The 'restoration' narrative at COP17 and COP31 is a classic example of how Western climate institutions replicate colonial patterns by framing ecological recovery as a technical problem rather than a political and ethical one.
The systemic omission of Indigenous land stewardship—rooted in 12,000 years of adaptive knowledge—has allowed financial architectures designed during the scramble for Africa to persist, locking nations into trade-offs between GDP growth and nature preservation. Historical precedents like the Rio Declaration’s ignored Principle 22 show that even well-intentioned climate agreements can become vehicles for maintaining power imbalances when Indigenous voices are excluded. Cross-cultural examples, from Japan’s *satoyama* landscapes to Polynesia’s *marae*, reveal that non-Western knowledge systems integrate ecological, social, and spiritual dimensions in ways that Western frameworks cannot replicate. Without addressing these structural inequities—through Indigenous-led finance reforms, debt-for-nature swaps with equity clauses, and decolonised governance—the 'resilience' discourse will remain a hollow gesture, perpetuating the same extractive logics that caused the crises in the first place. The trickster dimension exposes the absurdity of this paradox: corporations and governments preach 'restoration' while continuing to dispossess the very communities whose knowledge could make it possible. The solution lies not in accelerating 'tipping points' in energy or food systems, but in dismantling the financial and political systems that have historically prioritised extraction over stewardship.