Nicole J. Wilson

University of Manitoba | UMN · Department of Environment and Geography

Arctic Community-Based Monitoring (CBM) programs occur within complex governance landscapes. Indigenous rightsholders are increasingly significant political actors and where environmental and political injustices related to climate change and resource development motivate monitoring. We draw on a systematic scoping literature review to examine the...

Assumptions of trust in water systems are widespread in higher-income countries, often linked to expectations of “modern water.” The current literature on water and trust also tends to reinforce a technoscientific approach, emphasizing the importance of aligning water user perceptions with expert assessments. Although such approaches can be useful...

While Indigenous peoples have governed their territories for millennia, mainstream climate governance literature underrepresents Indigenous governance roles in climate governance. The objective of this study is to systematically document the extent to which Indigenous governance concepts are incorporated into the climate governance literature. Usin...

Indigenous peoples experience water insecurity disproportionately. There are many parallels between the injustices experienced by racialized and marginalized populations and Indigenous peoples. However, the water insecurity experienced by Indigenous peoples is distinctly shaped by settler colonialism. This article draws on examples from Canada and...

Safe and secure water is a cornerstone of modern life in the global North. This article critically examines a set of prevalent myths about household water in high‐income countries, with a focus on Canada and the United States. Taking a relational approach, we argue that household water insecurity is a product of institutionalized structures and pow...

There exist few examples of functioning water co-governance systems where Indigenous and settler colonial governments work together to share authority for water on a nation-to-nation basis. In this paper I examine the multiple barriers to achieving water co-governance, highlighted by a multidimensional framework including distributional, procedural...

This Special Issue on water governance features a series of articles that highlight recent and emerging concepts, approaches, and case studies to re-center and re-theorize “the political” in relation to decision-making, use, and management—collectively, the governance of water. Key themes that emerged from the contributions include the politics of...

Yukon First Nations and the waters within their traditional territories face a variety of socio-political and environmental pressures including the effects of historical and ongoing settler colonialism, global environmental change and mining activity. These communities are in the process of implementing Self-Government and Modern land claim agreeme...

There is growing acknowledgement that the material dimensions of water security alone are inadequate; we also need to engage with a broader set of hydrosocial relationships. Indeed, more holistic approaches are needed to explain Indigenous peoples' relationships to water including the use of traditional water sources such as mountain creeks and spr...

Social-ecological systems contribute to environmental change and, in turn, face its corresponding shocks and disturbances. As scholarship on resilience and social-ecological transformations grows, researchers from various disciplines continue to debate how major transitions and environmental change can be anticipated, studied or guided towards just...

This paper examines the quality of data collected by the Indigenous Observation Network, a community-based water-quality project in the Yukon River Basin of Alaska and Canada. The Indigenous Observation Network relies on community technicians to collect surface-water samples from as many as fifty locations to achieve their goals of monitoring the q...

Indigenous peoples often view water as a living entity or a relative, to which they have a sacred responsibility. Such a perspective frequently conflicts with settler societies’ view of water as a “resource” that can be owned, managed, and exploited. Although rarely articulated explicitly, water conflicts are rooted in ontological differences betwe...

chapter in Holified et al book

We ask what it would mean to take seriously the possibility of multiple water ontologies, and what the implications of this would be for water governance in theory and practice. We contribute to a growing body of literature that is reformulating understanding of human– water relations and refocusing on the fundamental question of what water 'is'. I...

In the Arctic and Subarctic, the contribution of Indigenous knowledge to understanding environmental change has been established over the last several decades. This paper explores the role of Indigenous knowledge of water in understanding hydrologic change within complex social-ecological systems. Observations of hydrology in the Yukon River Basin,...

Water is fundamental to Indigenous ways of life. Specific Indigenous peoples maintain distinct and multifaceted sociocultural relations to water, yet the legacy of colonialism globally means that communities around the world face similar challenges to protecting these relations. The role of Indigenous peoples and their sociocultural relations to wa...

The concepts of vulnerability and adaptation have contributed to understanding human responses to climate change. However, analysis of the implications of the broader political context on adaptation has largely been absent. Through a case study of the subsistence livelihoods of Koyukon Athabascan people of Ruby Village, this paper examines the impl...