Reclaiming Indigenous Rights: Decolonial Pathways to Climate Adaptation

Reclaiming Indigenous Rights offers a transformative rethinking of climate adaptation by centering Indigenous knowledge systems, land-based relationships, and decolonial methodologies. Moving beyond dominant technocratic and policy-driven approaches, this book foregrounds climate crisis as a relational, cumulative, and historically embedded process shaped by land dispossession, structural inequality, and epistemic marginalization.

Drawing on long-term, community-engaged research with Garo, Marma, Rakhine, Khyeng, Munda, and Santal Indigenous communities, the book presents a multi-sited and deeply relational analysis of how climate change is lived, understood, and responded to across diverse ecological contexts in Bangladesh. Rather than framing Indigenous communities as passive victims, the book positions them as knowledge holders, theorists, and leaders of climate adaptation. Through decolonial conversations, land-based inquiry, storytelling, and intergenerational engagement, it reveals how climate impacts are experienced through interconnected disruptions to land, food systems, health, culture, and knowledge transmission.

The book advances an integrated theoretical framework combining political ecology, decolonial theory, and Indigenous land-based epistemology. This framework challenges the dominance of Western scientific paradigms and calls for a fundamental transformation in how climate knowledge is produced, valued, and mobilized. Importantly, the book demonstrates that meaningful climate adaptation cannot be separated from the reclamation of Indigenous rights-particularly land rights, knowledge sovereignty, cultural continuity, and self-determination.

Bridging empirical research, theoretical innovation, and ethical commitment, this work contributes to global debates on climate justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and decolonizing research methodologies. It offers not only a critique of existing adaptation models but also practical and community-led pathways for building resilient, just, and relational futures.

This book will be essential reading for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners working in climate change, Indigenous studies, development studies, environmental justice, and decolonial research.