Beyond Ownership: Indigenous Stewardship as Framework for Post-Scarcity Constitutionalism

AbstractThis paper reframes debates about Indigenous sovereignty and constitutional legitimacy in post-colonial nations by examining the functional obsolescence of European ownership models in emerging post-scarcity conditions. Drawing on Ostrom’s (1990) Nobel Prize-winning principles of commons governance and the formal repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, 2023; UN Human Rights Council, 2021), we contend that Indigenous stewardship frameworks represent not historical artefacts but sophisticated legal systems optimally suited for abundance management. Quantitative evidence demonstrates that Indigenous-managed lands exhibit superior ecological outcomes compared to protected areas (Fa et al., 2020; Schuster et al., 2019). Constitutional recognition of Indigenous sovereignty is presented as a positive-sum transition from the failing logic of the scarcity-based Extraction Paradigm (market/state binary) to the proven effectiveness of the Stewardship Paradigm. This analysis shows that legal continuity arguments cannot resolve foundational legitimacy deficits when the underlying dominant epistemic architecture actively obstructs human flourishing in conditions of technological potential and ecological urgency.Keywords: Indigenous sovereignty, constitutional legitimacy, post-scarcity economics, commons governance, Doctrine of Discovery, stewardship frameworks, Ostrom.