Indigenous peoples and nature conservation: Lessons from 25 years of Australian biodiversity strategy

Indigenous peoples play a central role in Australian national biodiversity conservation, even as they continue to resist marginalization and dispossession by the settler colonial state. Foucauldian discourse analysis of national strategic documents on biodiversity conservation from 1999 to 2024 reveals changes in government discourses, ambitions, and mechanisms for inclusion. Our analysis identifies an emergent process within biodiversity strategy of enrolling Indigenous peoples into a collective citizenry tasked with conserving biodiversity within shared and standardized epistemological and managerial frameworks. At the intersection of scientific, managerialist, capitalist and nationalist discourses, such strategy recognizes Indigenous peoples as distinct and essential custodians of nature. However, the price of such recognition is subtle reordering of Indigenous identities, knowledge systems, and relations to Country. Thus, biodiversity strategies claim to honour and continue Indigenous peoples’ historical conservation roles but simultaneously reposition Indigenous knowledges and territories as assets of the settler colonial state. In the process, these strategies reframe Indigenous knowledges as integral to a distinctively and authentically Australian national identity. This study shows how new forms of Indigenous empowerment and recognition are entangled with contemporary forms of settler colonial extraction and state-led ordering, with ambivalent results for Indigenous peoples and Country.