Epistemic Justice in Environmental Decision-Making

Sor Juana's vindication of women's intellectual capacity challenged centuries of epistemic injustice—the dismissal of certain people's knowledge and voices as inherently less authoritative. Environmental decision-making processes routinely commit epistemic injustice against Indigenous peoples by treating their knowledge as anecdotal, unscientific, or supplementary to expert opinion. Epistemic justice in this context means recognizing Indigenous land managers, knowledge keepers, and community members as legitimate authorities whose testimony, observations, and expertise carry equal or primary weight. It challenges the hierarchy that elevates Western scientific knowledge while marginalizing Indigenous ecological understanding refined over generations. Applied to land justice, this means Indigenous peoples lead environmental assessments, determine research methodologies on their territories, and make binding decisions about land use without requiring validation from external experts. It means government and corporate projects cannot proceed without genuine free, prior, and informed consent from Indigenous communities—not as a procedural box to check but as recognition of Indigenous epistemic authority and sovereignty over territorial knowledge.