Introduction

With Issue 18-4, we are wrapping up our first year as editors. When we started, we sought to maintain the core focus of Global Environmental Politics – attention to the relationship between global political forces and environmental change – while also seeking to enhance the pluralism of the journal's offerings. This issue exemplifies the kind of enhanced pluralism we sought, in this instance with new work on global environmental and Indigenous politics. Three articles in this issue draw attention to different aspects of Indigenous politics: the role of Indigenous rights in transboundary water negotiations and governance; the importance of multiple knowledge systems; and the role that Indigenous groups play in efforts to codify non-Western understandings of people's relationship to Nature. This collection of articles further highlights increasing attention to several aspects of humans' relationship with nature: non-Western understandings of human-nature relationships and global norm diffusion concerning nonWestern perspectives.

Tying these articles together is a commitment to showing the importance of opening up spaces for Indigenous voices and narratives in global environmental politics (GEP). These articles underscore that Indigenous rights should not be an afterthought when negotiating global environmental treaties; Indigenous communities should have a seat at the table from the beginning of negotiations if policminvestigationyakers are serious about ensuring inclusivity and full participation in global environmental negotiations. Yet, as with the broader GEP field, the authors in this issue point out variations in Indigenous rights, policies, and law, suggesting that research is needed to understand the evolution of Indigenous politics and norms across different domestic contexts. Methodologically, the articles showcase the use of qualitative methods, as these articles leverage narratives and writings of Indigenous peoples.

Alice Cohen and Emma Norman propose a new framework for fostering transboundary river governance along the Columbia River, which is shared by the United States and Canada. Using Indigenous narratives, the authors illuminate the importance of strengthening Indigenous rights in renegotiating the Columbia River Treaty. A multilateral approach rather than a binational or regional approach, they argue, provides an opportunity to not only rethink the relationship between people and the Columbia River, but also to rethink power relationships within a river basin. Their analysis of transboundary river governance highlights the ways in which conventional theory, which has privileged state power, has been ill equipped to allow a space for Indigenous nations within and across states in treaty negotiations. In doing so, Cohen and Norman meticulously show how the Columbia Basin tribes and First Nations were silenced in the original Columbia River treaty and more broadly in the study of global environmental politics.

Cristina Inoue's article on Indigenous voices from the Amazon also tackles the notion of "privileged knowledge" and its impact on the study of GEP. Through the concept of "worlding," Inoue seeks to push scholars of GEP to engage in a broader dialogue with Indigenous ways of knowing and understanding of "Earth politics." Worlding requires recognizing Indigenous peoples' discursive agency. To illuminate what is meant by Indigenous knowledge systems and humans' non-exceptionalism, she focuses on the Yanomani people's relationship with their forests and their struggles to maintain their forest world.

A third article, while not explicitly at the intersection of Indigenous and environmental politics, focuses on an issue (Rights of Nature) and cases where Indigenous peoples and politics have featured prominently in shaping environmental governance. In "Constructing Rights of Nature Norms in the US, Ecuador, and New Zealand," Kauffman and Martin observe a trend in governments seeking to define Nature as a subject with rights, calling this an emergent international norm. After exploring the conceptual foundations of the Rights of Nature norm, they explain how and why this idea is expressed so differently in New Zealand, Ecuador, and the United States, despite being part of the same global trend. They find that differing domestic political contexts do more than make an international norm acceptable or not, they serve as key arenas for the definition of the norm itself. Their analysis thus illuminates a key new legal concept, while also contributing to important debates in the international relations literature around the diffusion of and contestation over international...