A major issue globally revolves around the urgent need to reshape our education system, aligning it with the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set to transform the world by 2030. These goals, comprising 17 distinct objectives and 169 targets, form an ambitious agenda that seeks to recalibrate the global landscape across social, economic, and environmental dimensions. Inclusivity and Indigeneity in Education for Sustainable Development stands as a catalyst for fostering dialogue on the interconnected realms of education, indigeneity, and sustainable development. It explores the relationships between these pillars and offers a comprehensive understanding of their transformative potential. The book emphasizes the essence of inclusivity, echoing the 'No one left behind' SDG agenda, which goes beyond mere academic discourse to foster fairness and justice. Additionally, it delves into the invaluable resource of indigenous knowledge, transmitted orally across generations, and its profound connection to sustainable development. By advocating for a shift in education, the book calls for an approach that ensures no one is left behind in the teaching and learning process. This paradigm shift is envisioned as a broad civilizational project, connecting with marginalized communities and tapping into their distinct cultural resources for crafting resilient and sustainable strategies.

This is the first scholarly book to examine the UN Sustainable Development Goals from an indigenous perspective and, specifically, with reference to the right to self-determination. It refers to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and domestic instruments such as New Zealand’s Tiriti o Waitangi to suggest how the goals could be revised to support self-determination as a more far-reaching and ambitious project than the goals imagine in their current form. The book primarily draws its material from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to support analysing the goals’ policy relevance to wealthy states and the political claims that indigenous peoples make in established liberal democracies.

This book states that whilst academic research has long been grounded on the idea of western or scientific epistemologies, this often does not capture the uniqueness of Indigenous contexts, and particularly as it relates to the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs were announced in 2015, accompanied by 17 goals and 169 targets. These goals are the means through which Agenda 2030 for sustainable development is to be pursued and realised over the next 15 years, and the contributions of Indigenous peoples are essential to achieving these goals. Indigenous peoples can be found in practically every region of the world, living on ancestral homelands in major cities, rainforests, mountain regions, desert plains, the arctic, and small Pacific Islands. Their languages, knowledges, and values are rooted in the landscapes and natural resources within their territories. However, many Indigenous peoples are now minorities within their homelands and globally, and there is a dearth of research based on Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies. Furthermore, academic research on Indigenous peoples is typically based on western lenses. Thus, the paucity of Indigenous methodologies within mainstream research discourses present challenges for implementing practical research designs and interpretations that can address epistemological distinctiveness within Indigenous communities. There is therefore the need to articulate, as well as bring to the nexus of research aimed at fostering sustainable development, a decolonising perspective in research design and practice. This is what this book wants to achieve. The contributions critically reflect on Indigenous approaches to research design and implementation, towards achieving the sustainable development goals, as well as the associated challenges and opportunities. The contributions also advanced knowledge, theory, and practice of Indigenous methodologies for sustainable development.

This book presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation in critical areas in the Americas. An important contribution to evolving studies on conservation of sacred natural sites (SNS), the book elucidates the complexity of development scenarios within cultural landscapes related to the appropriation of religion, environmental change in indigenous territories, and new conservation management approaches. Indigeneity and the Sacred explores how these struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reconstituted as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.

This book highlights the representation of the interface between nature and culture in literary texts, and argues that bioregional exegesis of indigenous literatures sensitizes us to place-based cultural nuances, and can contribute to alleviating the eco-cultural apartheid of the modern era. Though the bioregional concept has been in vogue since 1970s, it has not been adequately adopted into the field of literary criticism. This book is a comprehensive study on the concept of the bioregion, and is distinctive in three ways. Firstly, it argues that the bioregional concept, hitherto used as a socio-political tool, can be theorized as an ecocritical tool to employ when reading literary works. Secondly, it provides a detailed analysis of the concept of bioregion, marking out its characteristic features. Thirdly, in choosing to deal with Aboriginal plays, the book again exhibits its distinctiveness, in demonstrating how ecocritical concepts, which hitherto have focused primarily on prose fictional works, can be extended to magnify the scope of plays and performances.

Provocative and original, The Politics of Indigeneity explores the concept of indigeneity across the world - from the Americas to New Zealand, Africa to Asia - and the ways in which it intersects with local, national and international social and political realities. Taking on the role of critical interlocutors, the authors engage in extended dialogue with indigenous spokespersons and activists, as well as between each other. In doing so, they explore the possibilities of a 'second-wave indigeneity' - one that is alert to the challenges posed to indigenous aspirations by the neo-liberal agenda of nation-states and their concerns with sovereignty. Timely and topical in its focus on global indigenous politics, and featuring a variety of first-hand indigenous voices - including those of indigenous activists, scholars, leaders and interviewees - this is a vital contribution to an often contentious topic.

Emerging out of the Renaissance and the industrial revolution, the set of disciplines that got institutionalised as the social sciences were fashioned in Europe. However, what were areas of scholarly inquiry responding to specifically Western problems and concerns, laid claim to universality in course of time and were uncritically accepted as being so until they began to be challenged by non-Western thinkers in the second half of the twentieth century. Bringing together 18 essays by distinguished social scientists, this volume is a major contribution to the debate on the indigenisation of the social sciences. It addresses two central questions from a primarily Asian perspective: - Are the social sciences that originated in the West, and are essentially indigenous to it, universal for the rest? - Can the universal explain the particular, unless the universals in the particulars of different cultural contexts contribute to the construction of the universal? Some of the issues explored in this twin framework are: - The de-parochialisation of Western social science. - The concept of the ‘captive mind’, which fails to fathom its captivity. - The limitations of Western social sciences on crucial issues such as modernisation, economic liberalisation and structural adjustment. - The validity and potential of indigenous models of development as demonstrated by Bhutan’s concept of Gross National Happiness. - Oral traditions and their potential for universal knowledge.

This volume focuses on the fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), education, to look at sustainability from various angles with the purpose of challenging preconceptions about what sustainable education might entail and how it should be conducted. To this end, the book assembles scholars from various research fields and disciplines, who are willing to be at the cutting edge regarding sustainability and education on all levels with students in the ages of 6-15. Through this approach, the text points towards a “wild pedagogy” in line with post-sustainable thinking. This involves agency and the role of nature itself as a co-educator, and promotes cultural changes, and explorative processes of finding “the wild” – the unknown, and complexity in nature – and thus of challenging the human need for control. This approach is also, in line with the 2030 Agenda, an attempt to move from advocating predetermined behavioural change to embracing a pluralistic perspective on sustainability, based on holistic views on education. Such views include curiosity, wonderment, compassion and agency as guiding lights. The book is structured into three sections, based on three interrelated strands. These strands are, in various ways, dependent on one another and further engaged with bringing education theory and practice together. These strands are 1) Belonging and sensing, 2) Critical thinking, social justice and action competence, and 3) Creating hope in a vanishing world. These strands aim to increase our access to and understanding of the ways in which sustainability can be integrated into education and why. The purpose of the text is to encourage educators of all kinds and levels, as well as scholars in different fields, to explore new perspectives on education for sustainable development. The book examines probes in diverse academic fields and focuses on how to combine different approaches and content, and therefore everyone interested in interdisciplinary and cross-curricular teaching and learning should find this work enlightening.

A number of UN conventions and declarations (on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions and the World Heritage Conventions) can be understood as instruments of international governance to promote democracy and social justice worldwide. In Indonesia (as in many other countries), these international agreements have encouraged the self-assertion of communities that had been oppressed and deprived of their land, especially during the New Order regime (1966-1998). More than 2,000 communities in Indonesia who define themselves as masyarakat adat or “indigenous peoples” had already joined the Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago” (AMAN) by 2013. In their efforts to gain recognition and selfdetermination, these communities are supported by international donors and international as well as national NGOs by means of development programmes. In the definition of masyarakat adat, “culture” or adat plays an important role in the communities’ self-definition. Based on particular characteristics of their adat, the asset of their culture, they try to distinguish themselves from others in order to substantiate their claims for the restitution of their traditional rights and property (namely land and other natural resources) from the state. The authors of this volume investigate how differently structured communities - socially, politically and religiously - and associations reposition themselves vis-à-vis others, especially the state, not only by drawing on adat for achieving particular goals, but also dignity and a better future.