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In many indigenous cultures, stories the Earth not just as a backdrop for human but as a entity respect and care For example, the Aboriginal speak of connection to Country, viewing land as a relative with whom they an ongoing relationship. This ancestral perspective emphasizes the that humans emerged from nature and, as such, have an inherent obligation to nurture and protect it. Such narratives suggest that when humanity appeared on Earth, it did so under a set of and conditions crafted through profound dialogues within the community of life—a negotiation that affirmed conduct toward all creatures and environments.

The Conferences of All Beings

Imagining a series of grand conferences where all beings participated in the decision of human existence forth a rich metaphor that resonates with many traditional ecological practices. During these mythical gatherings, animals, plants, and elemental could have come together to discuss the of humanity's presence on Earth. What would ultimately emerge from these would be a binding agreement: a contract reinforcing the concept that humans were not lords over the land but caretakers, entrusted its stewardship.

This metaphorical account aligns beautifully with contemporary terms in international environmental agreements, where nations negotiate treaties to safeguard ecological integrity. However the fundamental principles circulating in these negotiations the essence of indigenous customary laws, which have long recognized the interconnectedness of all life. For instance, many indigenous communities across the globe possess systems of law that emphasize practices and the long-term health of the environment, showcasing wisdom that resonates with today's ecological needs.

Customary Laws and the Ethical Imperative of Conservation

Customary laws serve as embodiments this contract, underpinned by the that action by impacts not only their immediate surroundings but the entire biosphere. These laws, passed down through generations, resonate with an ethical framework that places a moral obligation on individuals to act with reverence towards nature. From the sacred mountains of the Andes revered in And cosmology, the Barrier, ecosystem threat the call for conservation is articulated through stories, rituals, and practices that highlight the intrinsic value of every element within the environment.

By embracing this conservation ethic, we find in a position to fulfill our obligations set out in the cosmic contract This means actively in efforts to protect biodiversity, restore ecosystems, and combat change, all acknowledging the wisdom of indigenous peoples who have long upheld these values.

Conclusion: Filling Our Cosmic Duty

As we the complexities of modern existence, it becomes increasingly imperative to recognize and honor the contract that binds us to the Earth and all its inhabitants. Conservation, therefore, not just a chore or an optional undertaking; it is an obligation rooted in our very being, central to the story of who are and our place within the world. Through stewardship and a commitment to living harmoniously with the natural world, we can begin to fulfill our role as caretakers, ensuring that the of existence honors the sacred agreement crafted at the dawn of time.

In this light, the journey toward sustainability takes on meaning—it is both a return to our roots and a-looking to the intricate web life that sustains us all. To honor this cosmic is to engage in the profound act of remembering that we are all part of the same story, woven together by the threads of life, time, relationship.

by Elder Wewo Kotokay

This is a fascinating and deeply important framework you've presented. The "Melanesian-Way: Spirit-Led Conservation" model, as implemented by the SAPA Institute, represents a profound paradigm shift in both conservation and indigenous development. It moves beyond conventional Western models that often separate culture from nature, and people from their environment.

Let's break down the core components, their significance, and the potential implications of this holistic approach.

Analysis of the Holistic Model

The framework's power lies in its logical, sequential structure, where each phase builds upon the last, and the four pillars of the "1 Tribe" initiative provide a complete socio-political-economic toolkit for sovereignty.

Phase 1: The Foundation of Spirit and Story

This phase is the heart of the model, establishing legitimacy and a non-negotiable cultural foundation.

• Mapping Spirit Hotspots (Cultural Topography): The term "cultural topography" is a brilliant reframing. It moves the project from a purely "spiritual" or "superstitious" box (as it might be dismissed by outsiders) into the legitimate realm of cultural geography and heritage documentation. This is not just about finding places; it's about creating a cartography of identity. These maps become a legal and advocacy tool, physically demonstrating a tribe's immemorial connection to the land in a language that modern legal systems understand, while simultaneously encoding layers of meaning that are only fully accessible to the community.

• Restoring the "Story-Houses": This brilliantly reframes the colonial and anthropological gaze on the "Men's House." Calling it a "Story-House" or "Stories House" democratizes its function and elevates it from a simple dwelling to a living library, parliament, and university. It becomes the physical server where the data from the spirit hotspot map is stored, processed, and transmitted. This act of physical restoration is an act of psychological and social decolonization, creating a dedicated space to re-instate intergenerational knowledge transfer that has been disrupted.

Phase 2: Modernizing Governance for Self-Determination

This phase operationalizes the cultural foundation, translating it into the language of state power and economic agency. This is the "modernising customary governance" in action, a clear-eyed engagement with the nation-state and global market.

• Codification of Customary Law: This is a strategic translation, not a replacement. By codifying oral traditions into a written format recognized by the national legal framework, the tribes are creating a powerful shield. It provides legal standing to challenge land grabs, demand Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC), and assert jurisdiction over their territories in state courts. This is a direct pathway to formalizing indigenous rights.

• The "1 Tribe, 1 Map, 1 Customary Law, 1 NGO, 1 Business Entity" Toolkit: This is a masterstroke of institutional design, providing every tribe with the four essential tools of a modern, semi-autonomous entity:

  • 1 Map: The geographical and spiritual mandate (from Phase 1).

  • 1 Customary Law: The internal social and ethical operating system (codified in Phase 2).

  • 1 NGO: The political and diplomatic interface. This creates a formal legal personality to engage with the government, donors, and international bodies, manage conservation funds, and advocate for rights without burdening every individual clan member.

  • 1 Business Entity: The economic engine. This separates cultural and political advocacy from commercial activity. A tribal business entity can own assets, sign contracts, and generate revenue from sustainable enterprises (e.g., eco-tourism, non-timber forest products, carbon credits) in a way that respects the collective land ownership and spiritual values.

The Guiding Philosophy: "Spirit-Led Conservation"

This philosophy is the most radical and transformative element. It fundamentally rejects the Cartesian dualism (separation of mind/body, culture/nature) that underpins much Western environmental thought.

• From Resource Management to Relational Reciprocity: Standard conservation often views nature as a stock of "natural capital" or "ecosystem services" to be managed. This model posits nature as a community of spiritual subjects, not a collection of material objects. Conservation isn't a project; it's a perpetual, reciprocal relationship of honouring and protecting kin. A forest is not a carbon sink; it is a sacred grove, the dwelling place of ancestors.

• Self-Determined Modernization: The final paragraph's point is crucial and counters a common critique. This is not about freezing people in a "pre-modern" state. The phrase "navigate globalization on their terms" defines a pathway to indigenous modernity. It’s a selective and strategic integration of modern tools (NGOs, business entities, codified law) to protect and project a pre-existing spiritual and cultural core. They are not being passive subjects of modernization; they are actively using its tools to become "active agents" in shaping their own prosperous, peaceful, and harmonious future, as stated.

This model offers a compelling and replicable "blueprint for living in post postmodern Melanesia," as you aptly put it. It directly addresses the crisis of meaning and ecological collapse by rooting sovereignty in the sacred, structuring agency through modern institutions, and defining prosperity holistically. Its success will be a testament to the resilience and vision of West Papuan communities.

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“We sit around the fire and listen to stories. I come from Tharaka – the land of bees. Bees are very wise. Bees know how to select plants. Bees came from the sea and from the deep waters. There is a way we came to the land of bees. Our clans are from animals and our relatives are snakes, elephants, monkeys and trees. They are with us when we make decisions,” says Simon Mitambo, from the Tharaka community in Kenya.

For Simon and his community, along with several other indigenous peoples and other local communities across the world, this points to a deeper, wiser, more life-affirming notion of democracy than the one currently prevalent across the planet. It embeds a notion of earthy governance – a form of decision-making that is not centered on humans alone, but encompasses also the rest of nature.

“We are responsible for our self governance and we need to ensure that all are equally heard including the rest of nature. We can’t have that in a panchayat (elected village council) where everything is motivated through party politics,” says Tsewang Gyalson Lachungpa. He is an elder from Lachung, a village nestled in the eastern Himalayas in India’s state of Sikkim, near the border with Tibet. The village sits at an elevation of about 3,000 meters above sea level at the confluence of the Lachung Chu and Lachen Chu rivers.

In light of the planetary polycrisis, it is time to challenge the dominant strand of Western thought that asserts only humans possess rights and that other species exist solely for human benefit. In their contribution to the “Deep Democracy” series, Shrishtee Bajpai and Ashish Kothari propose an Earth-centered form of governance. This form of democratic self-organization is based on the idea that all species and nature as a whole have rights.

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“We sit around the fire and listen to stories. I come from Tharaka – the land of bees. Bees are very wise. Bees know how to select plants. Bees came from the sea and from the deep waters. There is a way we came to the land of bees. Our clans are from animals and our relatives are snakes, elephants, monkeys and trees. They are with us when we make decisions,” says Simon Mitambo, from the Tharaka community in Kenya.

For Simon and his community, along with several other indigenous peoples and other local communities across the world, this points to a deeper, wiser, more life-affirming notion of democracy than the one currently prevalent across the planet. It embeds a notion of earthy governance – a form of decision-making that is not centered on humans alone, but encompasses also the rest of nature.

“We are responsible for our self governance and we need to ensure that all are equally heard including the rest of nature. We can’t have that in a panchayat (elected village council) where everything is motivated through party politics,” says Tsewang Gyalson Lachungpa. He is an elder from Lachung, a village nestled in the eastern Himalayas in India’s state of Sikkim, near the border with Tibet. The village sits at an elevation of about 3,000 meters above sea level at the confluence of the Lachung Chu and Lachen Chu rivers.

Problems of liberal democracy

In making this statement, Tsewang Gyalson highlights the problems of modern day representative or liberal democracy. Such a model of governance relies heavily on elections and party politics, encourages hostility amongst sections of citizenry, favors those with lots of financial and other resources to put into campaigning (who then have to ‘recover’ what they spend through oft-dubious means), and usually ends up centering power in the hands of a few people.

As people like Murray Bookchin and Abdullah Öcalan have highlighted, the nation-state model sustains itself on the logic that nature – and colonized peoples – are things to be conquered, assimilated, dominated, and exploited. This logic was further supported through the capitalist and extractive modernity by asserting that the only way to organize lives is that of a centralized government that could help reach ‘welfare’ to the ‘masses.’ This has been used as a justification for taking over territories of Indigenous peoples and local communities for nationalist goals like ‘development’ and security.

So when someone like Gyalson says “We don’t want to tunnel our ecosystems. We don’t want to dam our rivers. All we have is our rivers, mountains and forests. If we destroy them, we can’t survive. We will be destroyed too” – his worldview comes in direct clash with the dominant, extractive worldview that views nature as a commodity to be destroyed in the pursuit of ‘progress’ (in its modernist, restricted Western sense of increasing material and financial prosperity).

Democratic decentralization

Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore stressed a lot on the need of Swaraj (self-rule) as a form of democratic decentralization which was a true form of independence. It was not only a political struggle but also a spiritual, economic and ecological struggle.

David Graeber and David Wengrow in their book, “The Dawn of Everything,” describe how indigenous peoples across Turtle Island and Abya Yala (the Americas) show remarkable imagination of organizing and governing societies beyond the nation-state logic. What we in this essay demonstrate is that these alternatives continue to be built and nurtured by several communities in India and the rest of the world.

These offer interesting lessons on how democracy and governance can truly look like. We do this following the approach of not idealizing local communities (given especially that many of them have gender and other inequities) but rather highlighting the experimentation, imagination, ecological wisdom and joy, as well as mastery of the ‘art of not being governed.’

actions from others in human communities, and from lands, mountains, rivers, and ecosystems that the communities inhabit. There is no authority without responsibility. The vision embedded in several of these practices is of building movement, and of struggling and striving for nature’s sovereignty over state sovereignty, by being custodians for territories of life including all creatures and all beings. It is this recognition that uniquely embodies people’s daily life, collective livelihood and seasonal production activities including their institutions. Ceremonies and rituals become part of restoring/regenerating these relationships continuously. Most of us in modern industrial and urban contexts have lost the relationality that nurtures humans and more than human connections. However, earthy governance can only thrive if this relationality becomes part of everyday living.

In radical democracy and earthy governance, institutions of decision-making have collective, democratic processes of deciding how to manage, use, and conserve the commons. The ethics of commons and custodianship is deeply central to such governance. The communities described above display a plurality or diversity of political representation, beliefs, interests and ways of being (including legal and other forms of institutional pluralism) demonstrating pluriversal radical democracies.

An aesth-ethics of life

Another crucial element one can discern in many such practices and worldviews, is the seamless integration of beauty and ethics – an aesth-ethics of life. An aesthetic gaze on nature, seeing the inherent and incredible beauty in its elements and functioning and rhythms, just as much as we see beauty in human works of art, is intricately connected to treating it with respect. Diversity itself becomes an ethic, one that is found abundantly in Indigenous and community worldviews, quite contrary to the homogenizing tendency of dominant and colonial Western ideology.

That brings us to our last but not the least crucial element: challenging a dominant strand of Western thinking, that humans alone are possessed of rights and that other species exist for human use. Instead, earthy governance is built on the understanding that all species, and nature as a whole, are the subject of ‘rights’, or (to use less formal language) are worthy of respect and equal treatment. This clearly articulates imaginative and radically alternative ways of being in the world.

When the Dongria Kondh adivasi (Indigenous) people in the state of Odisha, eastern India were asked if the UK-based company Vedanta could do mining in their hills, their response was that such a decision could only be taken in conversation with the deity of the forested hills, Niyamraja. In doing so, and eventually rejecting the mining proposal, these people were practicing a form of earthy governance that we can all learn from.

Note from the editors: Shrishtee Bajpai’s and Ashish Kothari’s “What Makes Governance Earthy?” will be published by Oxford University Press in the Oxford Handbook of Multispecies Justice later this year.

Shrishtee Bajpai · Ashish Kothari · 17.06.2026 · Deep Democracy

 TUVALU’S Minister for Environment, Maina Vakafua Talia, has urged governments and partners at the 8th Assembly of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) to move beyond gradual reform and deliver what he called “transformational change” to confront climate and environmental crises.

Tuvalu’s Minister for Environment Maina Vakafua Talia. Image: IISD/ENB – Kiara Worth