Above photo: Chief Jimmy Lulua drilled a spot big enough to offer tobacco and gratitude, and pull some water from the lake to take to court on Friday. Emilee Gilpin.
A sweeping analysis of academic research shows that Indigenous peoples are increasingly asserting influence over water governance systems around the world.
Published in Nature, the study reviewed 226 peer-reviewed articles and drew from 183 case studies across 15 countries to assess how Indigenous communities engage with dominant, often colonial-era, water governance frameworks.
Among the study’s central findings is that Indigenous peoples are increasingly asserting influence in water governance globally, through legal action, resistance, partnerships, and their own forms of engagement.
However, the study also makes it clear that this influence is frequently partial or constrained by dominant governance structures that are unwilling to meaningfully incorporate Indigenous law and knowledge.
Nevertheless, the trajectory points toward change that is largely driven by Indigenous nations themselves. Whether that change leads to genuinely equitable and effective water governance will depend on whether states are willing to move beyond consultation and recognize Indigenous peoples as rights-holding governments with authority over their waters.
Persistent Colonial Barriers
The majority of case-studies stemmed from Western settler-colonial states like Australia, Canada, the United States and New Zealand, where legal and policy frameworks have long treated water as property.
In these contexts, Indigenous participation often takes shape through litigation, protests, legal challenges and other avenues that compel communities to defend their own basic water rights. In many cases, the researchers explain, “Indigenous peoples are forced to participate or respond to these processes in order to defend their rights and interests.”
One strong example is the Tŝilhqot’in nation’s “spiritual war” to defend Teztan Biny (Fish Lake) from a Canadian mining company, but there are countless other cases where Indigenous nations had to carve out their own avenues for engagement.
In some instances, communities established parallel or independent spaces to assert their voices and authority, often in direct response to government or corporate actions that threatened their water rights, such as the creations of the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) Watershed Declaration (2011) and the Heiltsuk Oceans Act (2019).
“In other instances, ‘created’ participation was a result of inadequate or ineffective ‘invited participation’. For instance, the introduction of the Safe Drinking Water for First Nations Act in Canada was met with opposition from First Nations, due to a lack of adequate consultation and concerns around treaty rights,” the researchers write.
Global and Transboundary Engagement
At international arenas like the World Water Forum, Indigenous participation has only just begun to gain visibility.
The study found that engagement at this scale is “poorly represented in the literature.” Where it does occur, Indigenous nations have often forged their own paths by developing independent declarations, mobilizing transnational alliances, and bringing water-related grievances before international human rights bodies. In doing so, the researchers explain, Indigenous peoples are actively “reframing dominant narratives around water governance and justice.”
Some clear examples of this work include the Garma International Indigenous Water Declaration (2008), the Kyoto Water Declaration (2003), and the Tlatokan Atlahuak Declaration (2006).
Yet the researchers warn against mistaking visibility for influence. As the study underscores, “participation does not inherently lead to authority or control over water resources,” particularly when Indigenous nations are treated as stakeholders rather than rights-holding governments. We saw a good example of how this translates during the recent COP30 summit in Belém.
Still, the findings point to a broader shift. Rather than seeking accommodation within colonial systems alone, the study suggests that Indigenous nations are advancing “alternative water governance approaches rooted in Indigenous values and self-determination,” signaling a growing challenge to the foundations of global water governance itself.
For instance, a variety of Indigenous nations have established marine protected areas as a continuation of Indigenous-led conservation and stewardship. Examples include the Gitdisdzu Lugyeks (Kitasu Bay) Marine Protected Area, the Gwaii Haanas National Marine Conservation Area Reserve, the Seal River Watershed Protected Area and the Ts’udé Nilįné Tuyeta Protected Area.
A worldwide water crisis
This growing challenge is unfolding amid a rapidly intensifying global water crisis that is reshaping ecological, political and social realities across the planet.
Climate change is accelerating hydrological extremes — deepening droughts, intensifying floods and destabilizing seasonal water cycles that many societies have long depended on. At the same time, industrial pollution, mining, large-scale agriculture and fossil fuel extraction continue to contaminate rivers, lakes and aquifers, often irreversibly.
In this context, a recent report from United Nations University (UNU) declared that the world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy.”
The metaphor is deliberate and unsettling. Rather than framing water scarcity as a future risk, the report argues that many societies are already living beyond their hydrological means.
“Expressed in financial terms,” UNU explains, “many societies have not only overspent their annual renewable water ‘income’ from rivers, soils, and snowpack,” but have also begun drawing down long-term ‘savings’ stored in aquifers, glaciers, wetlands and other natural reservoirs. Once depleted or contaminated, these reserves can take decades, centuries or even millennia to recover, if they recover at all.
The report also warns that the dominant global water agenda — with its focus on efficiency gains, infrastructure expansion and market-based solutions — is proving inadequate in the face of these compounding ecological pressures.
A Paradigm Shift?
At the heart of all these findings lies a deeper question — not just who governs water, but how water itself is understood. For many Indigenous leaders and thinkers, that question demands nothing less than a fundamental reordering of humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
In the Indigenous Waterviews Anthology, Renee Gurneau (Chippewa) and Tom B.K. Goldtooth (Navajo/Dakota) argue that the global water crisis cannot be resolved within the same frameworks that created it.
“There is a need for a new paradigm in this world, on how it defines its relationship to Mother Earth and water. This paradigm requires a change in the human relationship with the natural world from one of exploitation to a relationship that recognizes the sacredness of water,” they write.
“As a crosscutting issue, the agenda of addressing this water crisis must fully embrace the reality of the global crisis affecting our local communities. The social, ecological, economic and political systems, nationally and globally are on the verge of catastrophic change. Very few societies are prepared for this change.”
Against this backdrop, Gurneau and Goldtooth emphasize that sustainability cannot be achieved through further centralization. “Global sustainability can only be reached if we seek greater local and regional self-sufficiency, not less. Building our economies on local watershed systems is the only way to integrate sound environmental policies with peoples’ productive capacities and to protect our water at the same time.”
Equally central is the need for greater dialogue between Indigenous peoples, policymakers, and civil society as well as legal frameworks that recognize the inherent rights of water, animals, plants, and ecosystems.
The Rights of Nature
Such a body of law has begun to trend through the “the rights of nature” movement that recognizes elements of the natural world as rights-bearing entities rather than objects of ownership.
For instance, the Māori iwi succeeded in having the Whanganui River recognized in 2017 as a legal person under Aotearoa (New Zealand) law. This outcome did not emerge from a standard consultation processes. Like in many other instances, it stemmed from sustained Indigenous-led governance grounded in an Indigenous understanding that the river is a relative.
However, this framework risks becoming symbolic if it is not grounded in Indigenous governance, consent, and lived relationships to place. Without that grounding, nature’s rights can be absorbed into the same systems that have long marginalized Indigenous authority.
Even so, the movement represents a profound challenge to dominant water governance paradigms. By recognizing water as a rights holder rather than a commodity, rights-of-nature frameworks unsettle extractive economies and force a reckoning within the limits of colonial law.
The rights of nature also align with the call for a watershed-based governance system that is organized around natural boundaries and rooted in local responsibility. In this way, the rights of nature are not an abstract legal innovation, but a part of a broader re-imagining of how societies relate to water.
From Participation to Authority
Taken together, the findings trace a clear throughline that Indigenous water governance is not a peripheral experiment unfolding at the margins, but a response forged through survival, stewardship and resistance.
Across the world, Indigenous nations are stepping forward not merely to be consulted, but to reassert responsibilities that long predate modern states.
At the same time, the global water crisis is narrowing the distance between Indigenous warnings and planetary reality. As watersheds collapse under the combined weight of climate change, pollution and over-extraction, the limits of commodified, centralized water management are becoming impossible to ignore.
The challenge is whether existing institutions are willing to relinquish control, confront their colonial legacies, and support Indigenous self-determination before it is truly too late.
