The Indigenous World 2026: Just Transition and Indigenous Peoples: From a Green Transition to a Security Imperative
The moment we’re in
The global green transition has entered a new and far more dangerous phase. What was once framed as a response to climate change is now being driven by geopolitical rivalry and national security imperatives. Over the last two years, critical minerals have been reclassified from environmental resources into strategic assets, and governments increasingly justify extraction in the language of resilience, defense supply chains, and strategic autonomy.
In this shift, Indigenous rights are being quietly weakened and procedurally narrowed; Indigenous lands are transformed into corridors for minerals, energy, and logistics; participation is increasingly reduced to consultation, and consent is compressed into accelerated timelines. Even more concerning, engagement with international institutions, once encouraged as a peaceful and legitimate means of advocacy, is increasingly viewed as a security liability.
What is unfolding is the result of a security-driven political economy in which priorities shift, and urgency overrides climate. When confrontation escalates, rights protections weaken first. This regression is documented across major economies and confirms that, without clear rules and legal safeguards, the green transition is extremely vulnerable to geopolitical reversal.
And once again, the Arctic is the testing ground.
Its strategic visibility, geopolitical relevance, and concentration of critical resources make it an early warning where patterns now visible are already replicating globally.
This moment is not defined by the erosion of Indigenous rights but by a far more consequential shift: who decides when those rights matter. While the global transition is being reorganized around geopolitical planning and competition, Indigenous Peoples are increasingly positioned not as political actors but as variables to be managed within strategies defined elsewhere.
This report documents what has changed since the 2024 Indigenous Peoples' Summit on a Just Transition, what Indigenous Peoples are losing, and why the current trajectory threatens not only Indigenous rights but the legitimacy of the green transition itself.
This article is part of the 40th edition of The Indigenous World, a yearly overview produced by IWGIA that serves to document and report on the developments Indigenous Peoples have experienced. Find The Indigenous World 2026 in full here
Introduction
In October 2024, the first Indigenous Peoples' Summit on a Just Transition was held in Geneva. Indigenous Peoples once again voiced concerns that were already familiar: that the green economy was advancing at a pace that outstripped the recognition and implementation of Indigenous rights; that Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) was being reduced to a formality; and that extractive projects branded as “green” were reproducing old patterns of dispossession under a new name. These concerns were not new. Indigenous Peoples have raised them for more than a decade.
What is new is the political environment in which these concerns now unfold.
Since the Summit, the global context has moved from one of contested sustainability to one of open geopolitical confrontation. The green transition is no longer negotiated as a normative project—grounded in multilateral commitments, climate justice and international law—but as a strategic necessity shaped by security competition and power realignment.
Justified by war and geopolitical rivalry, the security turn has changed the “operating system” of governance.
The war in Ukraine has transformed energy, infrastructure, and critical minerals into instruments of geopolitical survival. Governments no longer speak primarily of decarbonization timelines but of strategic autonomy, national interests, and resilience against hostile actors. In this environment, urgency has become the dominant political currency.
At the same time, the multilateral system that Indigenous Peoples have relied on for visibility and protection has weakened. The return of the Trump administration to the center of U.S. politics—and its explicit hostility toward multilateral institutions—has accelerated this erosion.
Cuts to UN funding in January 2026, withdrawal from 31 UN entities, open skepticism toward international law, and the prioritization of transactional bilateralism have reduced both the authority and the protective capacity of UN mechanisms. This is significant for Indigenous Peoples because, when multilateralism weakens, so does one of the few platforms where Indigenous voices can challenge state power.
Parallel to this, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expansion and heightened military posturing have further securitized vast territories, particularly in the Arctic and sub-Arctic. What was once framed as a fragile ecological space and a site of cooperation has quietly receded from policy memory. The region is now governed as strategic infrastructure machinery where minerals, shipping routes, ports, and military mobility are considered together, and Indigenous homelands have conveniently been folded into security maps.
This is where the shift becomes decisive.
Two years that changed everything: geopolitics, war, and the green economy
Shift 1 — Minerals have become security assets
The period from 2022 to 2025 has fundamentally reshaped the political environment guiding the green transition. First, the securitization of critical minerals has accelerated. The war in Ukraine did not just disrupt energy markets—it reordered global priorities. Climate commitments did not disappear, rather they were incorporated into a broader framework of power competition and strategic planning.
The war and its prolonged impact on global supply chains has highlighted that access to critical minerals is a matter of national and allied security. Governments race to secure supplies of lithium, nickel, cobalt, rare earths—not as inputs for renewable energy but as essential elements of defense industries, digital infrastructure, and geopolitical preparedness. “Secure supply chains”, “strategic reserves”, “friend-shoring”, and “national interest” are now increasingly referenced in the strategies to address economic security concerns.
Across the Arctic, renewed resource nationalism and skepticism toward multilateral dependency have re-emerged as central narratives, reinforced by NATO’s post-2022 security framing, which increasingly links Arctic infrastructure, mobility, and resource access to alliance readiness and deterrence.
In March 2023, the European Commission presented the Critical Raw Materials Act, explicitly classifying lithium, rare earths, cobalt, and nickel as “strategic” for Europe’s economic security and defense industries.
In 2024, the U.S. Department of Defense expanded funding under the Defense Production Act for domestic processing of critical minerals, explicitly citing risks posed by dependence on foreign suppliers in a context of “great power competition”.
Greenland has moved to the center of the Arctic security discourse, not only because of its resources but because of its strategic position linking North America, Europe, and the Arctic. Renewed U.S. interest in the country’s geopolitical role, and Chinese and European interest in its reserves has intensified pressure to align resource development with security priorities.
Russia, under conditions of sanctions, has increasingly pursued Arctic development via bilateral and security-oriented channels, often in alignment with Asian partners.
These shifts have been further reinforced by the erosion of climate commitments at the highest political level. The withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Agreement in 2020 and 2026, and the subsequent uncertainty surrounding U.S. re-engagement, sent a clear signal that climate obligations remain politically reversible when security priorities intervene.
In this environment, the green economy is no longer just about decarbonization. It is about control, speed, and geopolitical positioning. As minerals become strategic assets, governance shifts away from deliberation toward execution. Rights remain referenced but their practical weight diminishes under the pressure of urgency.
Shift 2 — Fossil fuels return as security tools
In securitized realities, the green transition does not replace extraction—it layers it. Over the past four years, oil, gas, and coal—previously considered as industries in managed decline—have been reclassified once more as tools of geopolitical leverage alongside critical minerals and renewable infrastructure. In the name of energy independence and military readiness governments have reopened plants, expanded oil and gas leasing, and justified new extraction.
What was presented as a temporary adjustment today resembles a structural step backward. The return of fossil fuels as strategic assets since 2022 demonstrates how quickly climate commitments become negotiable when security pressures rise.
In Germany, coal-fired power plants scheduled for decommissioning were reactivated in 2022–2024 under emergency energy security measures following the war in Ukraine.
Norway has expanded oil and gas licensing rounds in the Barents Sea while publicly maintaining its leadership role in the green transition.
The U.S. has approved new oil and gas leasing sales off the coasts of California, the Gulf of Mexico, parts of Florida, and large areas of Alaska.
Shift 3 — As minerals go strategic, rights become negotiable
For much of the past decade, Indigenous Peoples were sidelined by development agendas justified in the language of sustainability and growth. These challenges were familiar, and were contested through established tools: law, consultation, participation, and international advocacy.
What has changed is how those rights are treated, weighed, and operationalized. In the current security-driven environment, Indigenous rights increasingly function within compressed timelines and narrowed political space, where any disagreement becomes an obstruction. Projects linked to critical minerals, infrastructure, and energy security are framed as urgent, strategic, and time sensitive. Decisions are justified as necessary responses to external threats, supply disruptions, or geopolitical uncertainty. The formal language of FPIC remains intact but its practical meaning shifts. Within this framing, consent is not removed—it is accelerated. When urgency drives decisions, Indigenous rights become more a procedural obstacle than a substantive condition. This subtle shift transforms participation into risk management. In this context, Indigenous rights are not just inconvenient—they are increasingly incompatible with speed and national interests.
The layering of old and new extractive pressures compounds this effect. When a just transition is being pursued as a strategy instead of a commitment, it will always keep fossil options open. In the end, Indigenous lands carry the cost of the old extractive economy and this new one. This dual burden exposes something far more profound: without binding governance and rights protections, the green transition is not self-enforcing. It can stall, retreat, or be repurposed entirely.
The risks extend beyond domestic governance. For decades, participation in UN mechanisms provided Indigenous Peoples with a crucial platform to raise concerns beyond national constraints. Now that space is growing tighter. As geopolitical tensions sharpen, some states increasingly view international Indigenous advocacy, won through decades of struggle, through a security lens and are tempted to use Indigenous participation in multilateral forums strategically, making international engagement more politically fraught.
Indigenous representatives, particularly those operating in highly restrictive political environments, now face a greater risk. Indigenous leaders who speak openly face intimidation, surveillance, and criminalization. International engagement is no longer viewed as routine cooperation but as potential interference. As a result, Indigenous representation and Indigenous advocacy remain legally possible, yet politically unsafe.
In December 2025, Indigenous leaders in the Russian Federation who had participated in UN mechanisms—including climate and Indigenous rights forums—were subjected to house searches, confiscation of electronic devices, arrests, and terrorism-related charges. These measures followed engagement with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP), and UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues processes and effectively transformed international participation from a protected right into a high-risk act.
This report argues that the decisive change is not the loss of Indigenous rights but their growing conditionality under security-driven governance. The legal recognition persists but the practical significance of Indigenous protections becomes secondary to strategic and security considerations and is thus being administratively neutralized. It is precisely for that reason that it is difficult to contest—and dangerous to ignore.
Why the Arctic matters: what happens in the Arctic today signals what will become normalized globally tomorrow
No place showcases this transformation better than the Arctic. The Arctic is no longer “securitized”—it is security-governed.
Over the last four years, the region has moved from being discussed as a potential hotspot of strategic competition to being actively governed as one.
Greenland’s mineral reserves, Russia’s Arctic infrastructure, and the opening of northern shipping routes are no longer discussed separately but as interconnected elements of a broader security landscape. Military exercises and infrastructure planning in the Arctic have expanded significantly, with ports, airstrips, and transport corridors increasingly discussed alongside mineral extraction and energy infrastructure.
The question has quietly changed from whether development should proceed to how quickly it can be aligned with security priorities. In a climate of competition among Arctic states over minerals, shipping routes, and infrastructure, governments increasingly treat Indigenous involvement as risk management, sidelining shared decision‑making and governance.
Multilateral Arctic governance frameworks—most notably the Arctic Council and its system of Permanent Participants—have historically provided Indigenous Peoples with structured, institutionalized access to decision-making processes. However imperfect, these mechanisms provided at least some institutional protection for Indigenous participation. And yet, in a context of sustained geopolitical confrontation, these institutions were structurally unprepared for a security rupture and were quickly outpaced—with Indigenous participation among the first casualties.
As cooperation fractures, decision-making becomes more centralized, transparency is reduced, and Indigenous input is less systematically integrated. Indigenous voices become easier to bypass, easier to reframe, and easier to defer. As a result, rights are deprioritized, and shared governance—already fragile—has been dramatically weakened.
The same dynamics are unfolding across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, where critical minerals and geopolitical interests intersect. What is being tested in the Arctic is not only infrastructure or military readiness but a model of governance under pressure. The region reveals the future early because the Arctic is where these narratives—resource competition, strategic visibility, and geopolitical rivalry—collide in one place, with fewer institutional buffers to slow the shift. It is not exceptional. It is predictive.
Conclusion: why this is a global Indigenous rights crisis and what is being decided now
The global green transition has not stalled. It has been reoriented.
Since the Summit on a Just Transition, just one year ago, the world has moved decisively away from the green transition narrative to a security-driven resource frontier. This shift has not eliminated Indigenous rights but it has altered the conditions under which they are exercised and, critically, who determines when they apply.
Security is no longer one policy sector among others, it becomes the organizing principle that quietly overrides environmental, social, and Indigenous governance. When rivalry dominates, speed outranks deliberation. In the end, rights logic becomes increasingly trumped by security logic in political decision-making.
If rights are treated as variables, the transition becomes another extractive project: strategic, and ultimately unsustainable.
And if the green economy can be set aside when security demands it, then its legitimacy (and its claim to justice) erodes. The return of fossil fuels, the rollback of environmental safeguards, and the withdrawal from international climate commitments together have revealed a structural weakness at the heart of the green transition, demonstrating that the transition itself is not only extremely fragile but remains conditional on political stability, security calculations, and power. Across the Arctic and beyond, the new phase of green transition can now easily replicate the injustices of the past at greater speed and scale.
When security pressures rise, whether due to war, energy shortages, or strategic rivalry, long-term commitments yield first. Indigenous rights are experiencing the same pattern.
When consent is compressed, participation is instrumentalized, and international engagement becomes dangerous. Indigenous self-determination is undermined through implementation rather than weakened by law. This does not eliminate rights but it narrows their practical scope. These changes rarely announce themselves as violations. Framed as minor adjustments, emergency measures, or strategic necessities, these changes will accumulate over time, reshaping governance while preserving the language of inclusion. Security achieved at the expense of rights does not produce stability. It produces resistance, fragility, and long-term failure.
The greatest risk of the current trajectory is not confrontation but normalization. When we advance transition by limiting Indigenous consent, tolerating participation only when it is consistent with strategic priorities and treating Indigenous governance as negotiable, Indigenous rights become roadblocks rather than accelerators, and institutions meant to secure order become battlegrounds.
The main question now is who decides when those rights matter.
In an increasingly securitized world, great powers are no longer asking how to uphold Indigenous rights but how much Indigenous presence they can tolerate without slowing their strategic ambitions. This shift—from rights as foundations to rights as variables, or worse, risk factors—is bound to undermine not only Indigenous rights but also the very legitimacy of a just transition.
The lesson is not that the green economy has failed but that it has no future in the absence of binding governance and enforceable rights.
Indigenous Peoples are not asking the world to slow down. They are asking it to remain accountable while it moves.
A transition that cannot survive rights is not a transition—it is a takeover.
Liubov Sulyandziga, PhD is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and an Affiliate of the Belfer Center's Arctic Initiative.
Rodion Sulyandziga is the Chairperson of the Just Transition: Indigenous Peoples’ Perspectives, Knowledge and Lived Experiences Summit (2024) and the Indigenous Peoples Global Coordinating Committee (IPGCC).
This article is part of the 40th edition of The Indigenous World, a yearly overview produced by IWGIA that serves to document and report on the developments Indigenous Peoples have experienced. Find The Indigenous World 2026 in full here
Notes and references
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Tags: Global governance
