(This page is a test, Hekia presented in a previous edition of GradFest)
Property is not sovereignty: indigenous rights and market-environmentalism in Aotearoa/New Zealand’s fisheries
My research examines how resource governance that incorporates or excludes people and places from market exchange impacts the distribution of environmental and economic burdens and benefits. In particular, I ask how property and governance rights allocated to aboriginal groups, through treaty negotiations and aboriginal title claims, effect where, for whom and for what economic and ecological development occurs.
My analyses start from the perspectives of community members historically left out of resource governance decision making to understand drivers of inequities and opportunities for progressive alternatives. Methodologically, I use grounded ethnographic research methods, in addition to policy analysis and archival research, to “study up.” In doing so, I examine governing systems, rather than community dynamics, as variables that can be changed in order to locate responsibility distributional equity at the level of policy makers who have access to resources to implement changes, rather than already disadvantaged community members.
My work is informed by theoretical considerations from the fields of political ecology, indigenous studies, feminist science studies, and queer theory. I draw insights from political ecology to examine who and what benefits from resource governance initiatives. I employ contributions from indigenous studies feminist science studies, and queer theory to investigate how particular categorizations as eligible, or not, for market exchange.