Indigenous governance and climate change adaptation : two native title case studies from Australia

Climate change has generated interest in the roles and responsibility of Indigenous peoples in adapting to and mitigating change, as their culture and social organisation is deeply embedded in land and water. At the same time, the remoteness and socio-economic disadvantage that many Indigenous peoples experience has meant that Indigenous communities are presented in a position of vulnerability in climate change adaptation discourses (Cameron 2012; Veland et al. 2013). This framing of Indigenous peoples as vulnerable, combined with the often-held presumption that ecological, physical, economic and technological perspectives are culturally neutral (Adger et al. 2009; Dovers 2009), disables productive collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous institutions for climate change adaptation.