Exploring indigenous peoples' participation within climate solutions through indigeneity narratives: a comparison between Peru and Bolivia

In the global search for alternative development models that are less environmentally
destructive, the incorporation of indigenous peoples' knowledge, sustainable livelihoods, and
their ideas of well-being have become commonplace in the crafting of climate solutions.
Despite this recent trend to include indigenous people's knowledge, the decision-making
capacities of indigenous representatives have remained weak, as they are mostly accorded
only an observer status (Comberti et. al, 2019.) How can we grasp this contradictory
inclusion? To understand how dominant climate development institutions (Somerville, 2021,
Vergara Camus, 2021) delimit the incorporation of indigenous peoples in practice, we need to
recognize which narratives of indigeneity are being used and which effects they have on
climate policy. Considering there is no common conceptualization of indigenous peoples'
attributes (Canessa, 2018; Radcliffe, 2015, Perreault and Green, 2013), it is noticeable that
while indigenous peoples stress legitimacy on forest management and their indigenous
development model (known as Buen Vivir), dominant market-based solutions represent
indigenous people merely as containers of useful knowledge and local stakeholders, usually
ignoring issues of territorial rights and land distribution (Kodiveri, 2021; Borras and Franco,
2018; Franco and Borras, 2021, Fairhead et. al, 2012). I argue that the study of these different
contents of indigeneity allows us to understand the political and cultural tensions within the
collective making of climate solutions. I propose to extend the context-specific and
comparative approaches of studies of indigenous mobilization and social movement theory to
the studies of the integration of indigenous knowledge into "Western" environmental policies
(Hui, 2020) that have a tendency to use abstract, mostly local, and indigenous-isolated
approaches (Petzold et. al, 2020; See Dietz, 2013; Ulloa, 2011, 2012) Moreover, it is also a
relevant contribution for climate justice movement studies, that had engaged with internal
differences of the movement (Della Porta and Sparks, 2013, Dietz and Garrelts, 2013), but
focusing mostly on NGOs and urban social movements (Claeys and Delgado, 2016) with a few
exceptions considering the Bolivian case (Fabricant and Hicks, 2016; Hicks, 2013; Aguirre and
Copper, 2010). I will present a comparative approach between the advocacy practices of two
indigenous members of the climate justice movement in Peru and Bolivia because the scope
of negotiation inside climate discussions of each indigenous people (Comberti et. al, 2019) and
their concepts of indigeneity can vary greatly (Gudynas, 2011) depending on the historical
relationship with their national governments. These two countries, considered priorities to
global conservation goals (Dinerstein et. al, 2020) show two different poles of development
and indigeneity debates: Bolivia's post-development and appropriation of indigeneity by the
State, and Peru's extreme neoliberalism, where indigenous autonomy is constructed on the
margins of the State. The research will draw on data from multi-scale ethnography, interviews,
and qualitative cartography, in order to understand how indigeneity and development
narratives unfold in the discussion around REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and
forest degradation) projects and hydropower energy, as well as in the indigenous proposals of
climate solutions through autonomy and Buen Vivir concepts. Finally, this research offers the
possibility to present academically-informed critiques to failures inside participatory
mechanisms of climate governance. Without a substantial involvement of organized civil
society in climate solutions, we face the risk of continuing superficial top-down policies that
end up excluding the most affected population of the escalating climate crisis.