FPIC as Indigenous Peoples' empowerment tool

Abstract

Since the United Nations’ passage of its “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” in 2007, the global development institutions have increasingly adopted the demand of Indigenous Peoples’ Organizations for the Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) of local communities to be required for all projects materially affecting the lives and livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples (IPs). Yet, there have been few efforts to actually implement this new and potentially game-changing financing requirement. Feared as a potential veto power over development projects, FPIC challenges companies, nations and development institutions to readjust both the power equation and governance models that have ruled for a generation and more. The experience of implementing the first successful FPIC processes in the private sector, in the hydropower industry, and in South Asia and in Russia, however, has shown that FPIC can not only be implemented as a win-win-win for local governments, indigenous communities and projects, but it can also serve to institute a new type of stakeholder engagement that can institutionalize the FPIC principle into project-community relations. Yet for such a serendipitous outcome to be achieved, companies, projects and governments must be willing to make a wider space for effective collaboration for a new participation and partnership paradigm.