Indigenous Rights in Modern Landscapes: Nordic Conservation Regimes in Global Context

This book examines the diverse use of Indigenous customary rights in modern landscapes from a multidisciplinary perspective. Divided into two parts, the first deals explicitly with Sámi customary rights in relation to nature conservation in the Nordic countries and Russia from a legal and historical perspective. The authors investigate how longstanding Sámi customary territorial rights have been reassessed in the context of new kinds of legislation regarding Indigenous people. They also look at the ideas behind the historical models of nature conservation. The second part deals with the ideas and implementation of new kinds of postcolonial models of nature conservation. The case of the Sámi is compared with other Indigenous people internationally with cases from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and India. The work investigates how the governance of protected areas has been influenced by the principles of equality and positive discrimination, and how it has affected the possibilities of establishing adaptive co-management arrangements for specific areas. How the legal situation of Indigenous peoples has been recognised in an international context is also investigated. The volume provides a multidisciplinary analysis of how the customary livelihood of Indigenous people has adapted to modern industrialised landscapes and also how postcolonial approaches have contributed to global changes of Indigenous rights and nature conservation models.

Lars Elenius (PhD) is Professor of History and Education at Umeå University and Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. His specialist areas of interest are on national minorities and Indigenous people in northern Europe. His research interests generally are on history of education, Indigenous history, historical culture, minoritypolicy, ethnopolicy, nationalism, regionalism, history of northern Europe. He has written widely on these and related topics.

Christina Allard (LLD) is Associate Professor in Law at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden, and at the Faculty of Law, UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Her research interests focus on natural resources use and environmental protection with special emphasis on Indigenous people’s territorial rights as well as comparative legal aspects. She is the leader of the Nordic research network for Sámi and Indigenous people’s law, NORSIL, and has a strong publication record on legal research related to Indigenous rights.

Camilla Sandström (PhD) is a Professor at the Department of Political Science, Umeå University, Sweden. She has a special interest in institutional aspects of natural resource governance and management, including how collaborative governance such as co-management and public private partnerships can be used to handle conflicts and trade-offs between different interests. She is the leader of an interdisciplinary team involved in research on sustainable rural development with a specific emphasis on natural resource management such as protected areas, forests, fish and wildlife.