Decolonising Environmental Law through Legal Pluralism: Indigenous Tribal Knowledge Practices and the Quest for Environmental Justice in India

Abstract

The tribal community in India and worldwide is recognised and visualised in their unique social and cultural distinctiveness and conducive cultural practices in tune with environmental protection, fulfilling the basic needs of tribal peoples from nature. This aspect is entirely and sharply distinct from the cultural supremacist and economic ideologies that terms social-cultural practices and lifestyle of tribal people as dirty, rustic, undeveloped, illiterate, uneducated, lawbreakers, and by birth criminals, and is attuned with supremacy and hegemony of a development and cultural ideology which promotes its economic interests through formal and unitary law, modernization and urbanization inspired narrative, and discouraging and subjecting the parallel indigenous customary cultural practices as antagonistic and anti-development. The universalist and unitary logic constantly threatens the diverse and distinct customs and practices that differ from the dominant ideology and worldview.

The Academic writing and reports from all corners of the world show the real motive of development narratives and its subsequent effects on environmental degradation, unsustainable exploitation of ecological resources, deprivation and displacement of indigenous tribal communities from their homeland, poverty, and unemployment, which are seriously affecting the life possibilities of tribal community enshrined and protected under Article 21 of the Constitution of India (OXFAM Report 2024).  

This paper will use legal pluralism as a doctrinal research method and framework to examine the prospect of Tribal Indigenous Knowledge Practices (ITKP), in distinction to global and dominant narrative, and environmental practices, as an alternative, complementary, and viable model of law and legal practices for adequate protection of the environment and ecological resources for all.