Climate governance as care: Towards an Indigenous Environmental Justice approach

Within international climate governance, anthropogenic climate change is predominantly framed through the lens of harm. While this framing has been instrumental in advancing mitigation, adaptation and accountability mechanisms, it remains limited in its capacity to capture the structural, relational and historically embedded nature of the climate crisis. Drawing on insights from urban political ecology (UPE) and Indigenous Environmental Justice (IEJ), this article argues that dominant approaches to climate governance rely on forms of abstraction that render complex socio-ecological relations governable while obscuring the colonial, capitalist and uneven processes through which climate change is produced and experienced. In particular, prevailing legal frameworks privilege calculable harms, individualised responsibility and market-based solutions, marginalising the slow, cumulative and differentiated forms of environmental violence that shape lived realities. To address these limitations, the article reorients climate governance scholarship towards a care-centred perspective. It examines how a focus on care challenges the epistemological foundations of mainstream climate justice, including the construction of ‘climate harms’, ‘climate subjects’ and ‘climate solutions’. By foregrounding interdependence, reciprocity and responsibility, care offers an alternative framework for understanding climate change as a crisis of disrupted socio-ecological relations rather than discrete, compensable harms. The article concludes by examining the Indigenous paradigm of Caring for Country as a form of relational environmental governance, demonstrating how care-based approaches can inform more just and sustainable climate futures.