The vernacularisation of indigenous peoples’ participatory rights in the Bolivian extractive sector: including subgroups in collective decision-making processes

Abstract

One of the most comprehensive collective rights regimes has been developed in the area of indigenous peoples and respective land and resource rights in particular. International legal instruments (ILO C169 and UNDRIPS) and Inter-American jurisprudence (e.g. the Saramaka and Sarayaku cases) significantly safeguard such rights. The latter materialise in the form of prior consultation mechanisms regarding natural resource extraction and ultimately exemplify indigenous peoples’ self-determination. However, practice shows that such collective mechanisms are established without truly taking indigenous peoples’ representative institutions according to their customs and traditions into account. This can be attributed to the fact that the interplay and local dynamics between indigenous communities, leaders and representative organisations are too complex to be reduced to collective wholes. In order to disentangle such dynamics, power relations between the players, issues of legitimacy, representativity and accountability of participatory mechanisms, and the inclusion of subgroups and individuals in collective decision-making are examined. By combining international legal standards and ethnographic research, a legal anthropological perspective informs this piece of research. Firstly, insights are gained by understanding individual or ‘subgroup’ rights in relation to collective claims in international and regional legal standards. Secondly, this relationship is observed by means of two case studies in the Bolivian Lowlands that shall shed light upon the implementation of such standards in the extractive sector. Thereby, specific subgroups are chosen to illustrate participatory exclusion and inequalities, including women (I), different age groups (II), monolingual people and persons with lower education levels (III) and local leaders (IV). Empirical insights draw on a prior consultation process with Guarani people in the hydrocarbon sector and collective decision-making mechanisms in the case of Chiquitano people in the mining sector. Based on such empirical observations, a catalogue of guiding principles will be proposed in order to refine the existing UNDRIPS framework.