Ph.d.-profil: Christine van der Horst

At the COP15 meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity in December 2022, over 100 countries (including Norway and the EU) pledged to protect 30% of the Earth's land and ocean areas by 2030. While this ’30 by 30’ agreement represents an important global effort to fight the climate and nature crises, it also poses a great threat to the rights of Indigenous Peoples worldwide. Due to their sustainable use and stewardship, Indigenous Peoples' lands contain around 80% of the planet's remaining biodiversity. Paradoxically, this makes that Indigenous territories are common targets for conservation efforts - which in turn, on the local level, tend to restrict Indigenous self-determination and the traditional practices that maintained these areas in the first place. There appears to be a clash between local and Indigenous rights and perspectives on the one hand, and the governance of environmental protection on the other.

My PhD project is a comparative case study that explores these issues in the context of conservation governance on the Norwegian and Swedish sides of Sápmi. In recent decades, political developments in both countries point at increased attention for both Sámi rights and healthy ecosystems. Still, Local and Sámi livelihoods as well as biodiversity are threatened by increased industrial development in the Arctic region (mines, wind power plants, roads, etc.). Environmental conservation efforts are also restricting local and Sámi use of the lands, increasing national control of protected areas, while leading to increased traffic as tourists come to enjoy the 'wilderness' in national parks. This project departs from the idea that local and Indigenous knowledge (ILK), rooted in generations of sustainable interactions with nature, can play a key role in governing conservation areas in a way that protects both biodiversity and Sámi rights and culture. Using a decolonial methodological framework, a combination of collaborative ethnographic methods and political document analysis is used to understand both the complex local and larger structural conditions that shape these issues.