This project aims to explore Western and non-Western (decolonial) practices for multi-sovereign decision-making and understand how these approaches can be adapted and applied to offshore wind projects in the North Coast’s ancestral waters.

To meet research objectives, a mixed-methods approach will be used involving policy inventory and analysis, along with document analysis and semi-structured interviews. This will allow us to identify policy initiatives and legal frameworks that have been utilized by governments at local, state, and federal scales aimed at increasing coastal resilience. Additionally, this can show how these governments interact, define, or avoid tribal sovereignty goals. The project will also apply nonwestern, decolonizing decision-making frameworks to support the exertion of tribal sovereignty over ancestral waters leased for offshore wind off California’s North Coast. These frameworks can include ecosystem-based approaches versus Western methodologies; anthropological approaches; Rights of Nature arguments and legality; Inter-Tribal Councils; Consensus-based decision-making, Aboriginal laws; etc. 

Based on the findings of this research, the primary outcome is to produce a Master’s thesis informed by the impact of colonial histories on tribes that can be used as a resource for tribes, as sovereigns, interested in asserting sovereignty as a strategy of building coastal resilience in the face of offshore development of ancestral lands and unceded waters.