Description
Despite growing attention to equity and inclusion, global conservation governance continues to reproduce colonial and capitalist hierarchies under the guise of environmental protection. This paper examines how contemporary institutions—from UNESCO's World Heritage natural sites to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework—perpetuate colonial legacies in how nature is valued, managed, and protected.
Drawing on critical discourse analysis of key policy documents and institutional practices from 2010-2025, including World Heritage Committee decisions and CBD COP proceedings, the paper reveals how concepts of "pristine wilderness" and "Outstanding Universal Value"
systematically erase Indigenous presence and knowledge systems. These framings position
Western scientific expertise as the arbiter of legitimate conservation while rendering local
communities as threats to—rather than stewards of—biodiversity.
The paper argues that conservation's institutional legitimacy crisis stems not from insufficient enforcement, but from its foundational entanglements with extraction, dispossession, and epistemic violence. By tracing how "fortress conservation" models persist even within ostensibly participatory frameworks like the GBF's Target 3 (30x30), it demonstrates that procedural inclusion often masks substantive exclusion.
This analysis contributes three interventions to debates on decolonizing environmental
governance: first, it reveals how institutional isomorphism embeds colonial logics across scales; second, it challenges nature-based solutions discourse that commodifies ecosystems while displacing communities; third, it offers criteria for evaluating genuine epistemic pluralism in conservation governance. Ultimately, the paper calls for reimagining global environmental legitimacy beyond Western property regimes and toward Indigenous-led governance architectures.
