Indigenous Relational Thought and Climate Crisis Response: Rethinking Human‐Environment Relations Beyond Technocratic Governance

ABSTRACT Climate change is frequently framed as a technical problem of emissions, risk, finance, adaptation planning, and institutional coordination. This critical integrative review, supported by scoping‐informed searching and transparent eligibility and synthesis procedures, examines how selected Indigenous relational literatures can deepen climate crisis response by rethinking human‐environment relations beyond narrow technocratic models. The review does not treat Indigenous relational thought as a universal or homogeneous worldview; rather, it develops a minimal transversal synthesis of recurring, place‐specific emphases on land, water, kinship, reciprocity, responsibility, authority, and intergenerational continuity across a predominantly English‐language corpus. It argues that the climate crisis is not only a biophysical emergency but also a crisis of relations produced through colonialism, extractivism, human exceptionalism, and the conversion of living territories into objects of administration and accumulation. The analysis distinguishes narrow managerial and carbon‐centered governance from transformative adaptation, just transitions, co‐production, legal pluralism, and Indigenous‐led approaches that already contest technocratic assumptions. Drawing on Indigenous studies, environmental ethics, decolonial theory, political ecology, relational values, and climate governance, the synthesis develops an operational framework organized around relationality, reciprocity, responsibility, justice, and ecological humility. Situated vignettes from Sápmi, Fiji, and Kenya illustrate how climate action may reduce emissions or exposure while damaging territorial, cultural, and more‐than‐human relations. The findings indicate that climate action should be assessed not only by carbon reductions, adaptation outputs, and resilience indicators but also by the authority it recognizes and the relations it repairs, sustains, or disrupts.