- Full Text
- Magazine
REDD: Development Opportunity or Neoliberal Threat? Indigenous Organizations Take Opposing Views
Full text preview
AS INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN LATIN AMERICA increasingly gain title to collective territories, they enjoy a new degree of security in terms of their future access to land. They also face new challenges. The residents of indigenous territories are expected by outsiders to act as a unified political entity, almost like a small nation-state. They must collectively negotiate relationships with external entities spanning national ministries and a wide variety of NGOs to international corporations wanting to exploit natural resources within their collective land title. These negotiations often require creating and enforcing internal policies regarding what can and cannot be done within their borders. Carrying out these governance tasks is expensive, at the very minimum involving sustaining the infrastructure for communicating with the outside world and with residents living across sometimes vast areas.
Yet, as Richard Stahler-Sholk argued in the NACLA Report, most indigenous territories have been granted "autonomy without resources."1 Often unable to tax or collect annual dues from their residents, the leaders of indigenous territories must seek funds to support their governance tasks by working with outsiders. The need for money often pushes them into collaborative development activities with NGOs, government ministries, and even corporations. Ironically, then, territorial titling - presumably pursued as a way to allow indigenous peoples to continue traditional livelihoods - often pressures residents into new entanglements with capital, state bureaucracies, and foreign organizations.
Savvy indigenous leaders must therefore continually assess development trends and determine whether programs associated with these trends present opportunities or threats to their constituents. Contrary to what many non-indigenous people expect, indigenous leaders often sharply disagree with one another on their assessments, spurring heated controversies within and among indigenous federations. One particularly heated controversy revolves around Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Degradation (REDD), one of the United Nations' central programs in combating carbon...