How Collaborative Approaches to Environmental Problem Solving View Indigenous Peoples: A Systematic Review

Collaborative approaches to environmental problem solving are becoming commonplace around the world. These processes often occur in the traditional territories of Indigenous peoples. Hence, how Indigenous peoples are viewed in the collaboration literature is important because of the distinctive position they hold in many societies. In this article we conducted a systematic review of the collaboration literature that focused on environmental concerns and referred to Indigenous peoples. The goals were to identify how Indigenous peoples are discussed in this literature, and to reveal the assumptions that are made about the roles and views of Indigenous peoples and nations. The Indigenous governance literature was used to highlight the contrasting perspectives of Indigenous peoples. The systematic review revealed discordant assumptions about the roles of Indigenous peoples between these two bodies of literature. Implications for the theory and practice collaborative environmental problem solving are identified.