Scientific and Indigenous Ontologies in the Amazon
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 May 2026
Chapter 6, “Envisioning a Pluriversal Governance: Scientific and Indigenous Ontologies in the Amazon”, examines the prospects for including scientific and indigenous ontologies in the international governance of the Amazon. The Chapter assesses the different governance models for enlarging ecological democracy and having nature’s interests represented in political spaces. For this aim, it analyzes the most prominent scientific bodies dealing with the climate emergency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), compared to the Science Panel for the Amazon (SPA), the first scientist platform dedicated to the largest rainforest in the world. The Chapter proposes enlarging ecological democracy under a pluriversal governance in which nation-states, scientists, and Indigenous peoples would share the political stage to negotiate their different worldviews and the authority to represent their own natural worlds. This might trigger ontological clashes, but also the possibility of creating ontological coalitions around indigenous rights, the protection of nature, and the appropriate means to deal with the climate crisis in the basin.
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