Creating a Cosmopolitics of Climate Change: How Indigenous and "Other" Worlds can shift Climate Discourse and Strategies

Addressing climate change, unprecedented in scale and extension across all human beings and their environments, requires communication across cosmologies in a 'cosmopolitics'. This collection seeks to complement modern accounts of climate change with indigenous and Other understandings, exploring how cosmology shapes strategies for conceptualising, confronting and surviving environmental upheaval. We explore how contrasting perceptions and worldviews encounter each other. We seek to highlight examples of egalitarian conversation and articulation with scientific discourses, and whether knowledge hierarchies that marginalise Indigenous voices can be overcome to create a genuinely egalitarian cosmopolitics.

This Research Topic explores the how Indigenous and marginalised worlding practices challenge and re-shape global discourse of climate change. Its cornerstone is the proposition that effective climate action requires engaging with, without subsuming, indigenous worlding practices in academic, scientific and policy making circles. We employ a 'cosmopolitics of climate change' to explore how Indigenous understandings can contribute to shifting the frontiers of scientific understanding and planetary discourses, and enabling sustainable climate solutions. We explore how indigenous and marginalised actors are constructing and adapting sustainable and resilient environmental strategies, and the role of cosmology in shaping their actions.

The collection welcomes contributions that explore climate change from indigenous perspectives. We seek to move beyond modernist accounts that explore how Indigenous actors are caught up in what 'we' consider climate change to be, to embrace perspectives stemming from non-modern worlds and cosmologies on what climate change and adaptation constitute. We welcome contributions exploring accounts of climate change within 'more than human' worlds. Contributions may explore to which extent indigenous worldviews and actors are able to articulate their perspectives within global climate conferences and climate science, and what they can offer global climate debates. We seek to address how social sciences and in particular anthropology can contribute to the construction of cosmopolitical relations where Indigenous communities can legitimately and authoritatively take part in world forums, climate action, and scientific research.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Indigenous, Climate, Cosmology, Cosmopolitics

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.