Elsevier

Environmental Science & Policy

Volume 124, October 2021, Pages 627-634
Environmental Science & Policy

Localizing the indigenous environmental steward norm: The making of conservation and territorial rights in Peru

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2021.07.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • International initiatives permeated by the indigenous environmental steward norm have helped sustain disarticulated policies.

  • This norm might render invisible the ways conservation agendas reinforce social inequality in indigenous territories.

  • There is a need to rethink this norm to acknowledge potential trade-offs between social justice and environmental outcomes.

Abstract

Indigenous peoples are often presented as natural allies in countering pressing environmental problems. The norm that depicts Indigenous peoples as environmental stewards has allowed international actors with different priorities to become involved in environmental projects that aim at ensuring both conservation and indigenous territorial rights. Previous research has emphasized that whereas this norm has opened up for indigenous participation in environmental governance, it is based on a limited understanding of indigenous needs and rights. This article analyses how the conflicting goals and trade-offs are contested in the localization of this norm in conservation projects in the Peruvian Amazon. Empirically, our findings are based on ethnographic field research, 80 semi-structured interviews, and document analysis. Our analysis reveals how in the localization of the norm, Indigenous peoples’ territorial rights has become marginalized, contributing to reinforce conflicts and inequality, which ultimately undermine both environmental and social sustainability. By analyzing the localization of the environmental steward norm, we contribute to a better understanding of the processes at play in displacing the costs of global sustainability transformations to indigenous actors.

Introduction

Today there is a growing sense of urgency to find effective solutions to some of our times most significant environmental challenges (Biermann and Lövbrand, 2019). Emerging grassroots mobilizations have pressured political leaders to step up their ambitions and foster societal transformations toward sustainability. There is, however, an imminent risk that the transformative processes promoted from the Global North and sustained by large-scale funding schemes displace the costs of these transformations to distant places and marginalized groups, thereby reinforcing existing or creating new forms of social injustice.

The broad consensus within global policy circles about Indigenous peoples’ critical role in countering climate change and ecosystem degradation is illustrative in this regard (e.g. Brondizio and Le Tourneau, 2016; Armitage et al., 2010). From an environmental point of view, Indigenous peoples inhabit large, highly biodiverse territories and contribute to enhanced biodiversity in adjoining areas (Mistry and Berardi, 2016; Garnett et al., 2018). From a social justice point of view, the need to involve Indigenous peoples in conservation derives from international law instruments that protect Indigenous rights, such as ILO Convention 169 (1989), the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992), and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). These different frameworks have reinforced the “rights-based” conservation paradigm, which was consolidated through the 2015 Paris Agreement, and which has resulted in a proliferation of indigenous demands for territorial rights within conservation areas.

Importantly, these frameworks have also contributed to diffuse the global norm that portrays Indigenous peoples as environmental stewards, a norm that dates back to at least the early modern period in Europe and initial colonial encounters (Smithers, 2015), but that today permeates a large number of interventions in indigenous territories under an increasingly multi-actor, polycentric and fragmented global sustainability architecture (Biermann and Pattberg, 2008; Ostrom, 2010). The international climate change agenda deeply relates to this norm as environmental actors and funders engage with it to incorporate Indigenous peoples as allies in the policies and projects they promote to fighting climate change. The diffusion of this norm, however, has allowed a diverse set of international actors to promote different initiatives to include Indigenous peoples in forest conservation, emphasizing either the environmental or social justice aspect. Whereas environmental organizations emphasize the fostering of protected areas and other mechanisms for reducing deforestation, pro-indigenous organizations focus upon ensuring indigenous rights, most significantly their territorial rights. The significant trade-offs between these approaches are manifested in the process of translating the “indigenous environmental steward norm” into concrete policy interventions at the national and subnational level.

Previous research has revealed that Indigenous peoples are often portrayed as “ecologically noble savages” (Reimerson, 2013) and marginalized in international environmental negotiations in which norms are defined and policy interventions are designed (Schroeder, 2010; Suiseeya, 2014). Global conservation organizations have, despite attempts to empower indigenous communities, only allowed for limited influence (Schwartzman, 2010; Slater, 2000; Paulson et al., 2012). In many cases, Indigenous peoples have been excluded at the national level were global norms are translated into domestic politics (Dawson et al., 2018), and only included in implementation processes at the local scale where the opportunities to influence the norms are limited (Keskitalo et al., 2016). Local-level processes are often prone to capture by different elites (local or national), which prevents the most marginalised communities form taking part of the benefits of conservation, ultimately resulting in the reproduction of power asymmetries and inequality (Calfucura, 2018). However, Indigenous peoples have sought to influence the norms and policy interventions in their territories according to their needs and interests by lobbying international negotiations and domestic policymaking (Wallbott, 2014; Wallbott and Florian-Rivero, 2018; Kauffman and Martin, 2014; Leifsen et al., 2017). To do so, Indigenous peoples are increasingly using rights frames that prove more flexible than environmental ones for achieving cultural, political, and economic goals (Haalboom, 2011; Pieck, 2006). Still, few studies have analysed the localization of the indigenous environmental steward norm. Drawing on theoretical debates on norm diffusion and localization, we contribute with an in-depth analysis of how the localization of this norm enables and constrains indigenous territorial rights.

We examine this issue in the context of conservation projects in the Peruvian Amazon. Protected areas covers 23 % of the Peruvian Amazon, whereas 24.5 % belong to Indigenous peoples, although a much larger portion has not been legally recognized (Aidesep and FPP, 2014; IBC, 2016). Consequently, in recent years indigenous territorial claims within protected areas has grown. In our analysis, we focus on two conservation initiatives in which international actors –in their approach to the indigenous environmental steward norm– have contributed to sustaining disarticulated environmental policies that are used by national and local actors to advance conflicting agendas of social justice and conservation. Because these types of norm conflicts are likely to increase as demands for commodities, conservation, and indigenous rights grow with different policy interventions on the ground, there is a need to gain a better understanding of the global and local dynamics surrounding these conflicts.

The empirical material consists of 80 semi-structured interviews with representatives from state agencies, international actors, civil society organizations (see Appendix A in Supplementary material), and written primary sources, including material produced by multilateral organizations, international cooperation agencies, and indigenous organizations that have advanced different approaches to the global norm under scrutiny. To analyze the data, we developed a coding scheme that was focused upon how a global environmental norm was translated in conservation initiatives and negotiated in the two cases (for more detail of the methodology see Appendix B in Supplementary material).

The paper is organized as follows. The next section introduces our theoretical points of departure and provides background on debates about territorial rights as a tool for achieving both conservation and social justice. Section three presents our analysis of the two cases and is followed by the broader implications of the study.

Section snippets

Norm localization in a fragmented sustainability architecture

Norms are typically understood as standards of appropriate behavior that embody shared moral assessments and a sense of “oughtness” and justifications for action (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998). Norms can differ substantially in their strength and specificity. International norms are often intentionally imprecise, as international actors with divergent interests often have difficulties to agree upon more specific norms. Vague norms can, besides, more easily diffuse in the international system as

The localization of the indigenous environmental steward norm through conservation and territorial rights in Peru

Peru had received around US$613 million in climate funding by 2016. The main part (73 %) consists of bilateral funding (mainly from Norway, the United States, Germany, and Japan), whereas the main multilateral contributors are the World Bank’s Forest Investment Program (FIP), the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) (Che Piu et al., 2016). A good portion of this funding is used to create and manage protected areas, which are of three types in

International actors and the making of conservation and territorial rights

In both cases, international actors different interpretations of the indigenous environmental steward norm have contributed to legitimize divergent national and local actions. State officials, environmental NGOs, indigenous organizations, and pro-indigenous NGOs all frame Indigenous peoples as environmental stewards that are critical for countering climate change and forest degradation, but have ultimately used this norm to serve either conservation or social justice goals. Environmental

Conclusions

This paper has analyzed the localization of the global norm that portrays Indigenous peoples as environmental stewards in the Peruvian Amazon. International initiatives enabled and permeated by this norm have helped sustain disarticulated environmental policies that are used by national and local actors to advance conflicting agendas of social justice and conservation, ultimately undermining both environmental goals and social justice.

The first lesson to be learned is that the quest for

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors report no declarations of interest.

Acknowledgement of funding sources

The authors thank Universidad del Pacífico (Lima, Perú) for funding the fieldwork of this research.

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