Peasant and indigenous transnational social movements engaging with climate justice

ABSTRACT

This article offers a comparative account of the engagement of two key transnational social movements, the agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC) and the International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC), in global climate discussions, particularly the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Since 2007 these movements have each developed their own framing of climate justice and sought political and legal opportunities to advocate rights-based policies. LVC has advanced a development paradigm grounded in food sovereignty and agroecology, and IIPFCC has sought to increase indigenous participation in United Nations climate schemes and regain control over ancestral territory.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article présente un compte rendu comparatif de la participation de deux mouvements sociaux transnationaux clés, le mouvement agraire La Via Campesina (LVC) et l’International Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change (IIPFCC), aux débats mondiaux sur le climat, notamment à la Convention-cadre des Nations Unies sur les changements climatiques. Depuis 2007, ces mouvements ont développé leur propre formulation de la justice climatique et cherché des opportunités politiques et légales afin de promouvoir des politiques axées sur les droits. LVC a mis de l’avant un paradigme de développement fondé sur la souveraineté alimentaire ainsi que l’agroécologie, et IIPFCC a cherché à accroître la participation autochtone aux dispositifs des Nations Unies liés au climat de même qu’à reprendre le contrôle du territoire ancestral.

KEYWORDS:

• Peasant
• indigenous rights
• social movements
• land use
• climate justice

Notes on contributors

Priscilla Claeys is a Senior Research Fellow in Food Sovereignty, Resilience and Human Rights at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) of Coventry University, UK. She holds a PhD in political and social sciences from the Université Catholique de Louvain. In 2008–2014, she was Senior Advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter. Her latest book is Human Rights and the Food Sovereignty Movement: Reclaiming Control (Routledge, 2015).

Deborah Delgado Pugley is an Assistant Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She holds a PhD in Development Studies and Sociology from the Université Catholique de Louvain and the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales of Paris. She has wide experience in both multilateral and national environmental politics, including extensive fieldwork with indigenous communities in Bolivia and Peru.

Notes

1. Deborah Delgado Pugley participated in 13 UNFCCC meetings and followed discussions within the IIPFCC between 2010 and 2015. She also conducted fieldwork for a total of six months in indigenous territories in the Amazon Basin of Bolivia (Moxos, Yuracaré, Tsimanes) and Peru (Ashaninkas, Aminahuas, Huni-kuy) to study the action of indigenous organisations in relation to climate change and in reaction to public interventions by the state.

2. Priscilla Claeys conducted 115 interviews with food sovereignty and right to food activists, and participated in more than 80 meetings attended by LVC activists, either at the national level or at the UN, between 2008 and 2014. For the most part, she conducted fieldwork with a view to understand how human rights were mobilised by peasant activists in defence of food sovereignty. The legal mobilisations around climate change were the specific focus of additional interviews conducted in 2014. She wrote this article while a postdoctoral researcher at the French Institute of Pondicherry.

3. For more information of the IIPFCC and its structure, see https://iipfcc.squarespace.com/

4. LVC also includes organisations of agricultural workers and indigenous peoples from Panama, Honduras, Paraguay, Peru and Malaysia.

5. For more information on LVC, see http://viacampesina.org/en/

6. At the time of writing (February 2016), the status and composition of the farmers’ constituency is still provisional and is in the process of being validated by the UNFCCC.

7. These are mostly developing countries.

8. The farmers’ constituency convinced the SBSTA at its June 2014 session in Bonn to undertake scientific and technical work on agriculture, which will focus on contingency plans in relation to extreme weather events, risk and vulnerability assessment, identification of adaptation measures and assessment of agricultural practices and technologies to enhance productivity in a sustainable manner.

9. Interview with indigenous representatives of the Kuna Yala in Bonn during SBSTA meetings, 2012.

10. Interview with Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, Copenhagen, 13 January 2009.

11. Interview with LVC international support staff, Brussels, 15 July 2014.

12. Interview in La Paz, Bolivia, in October 2010.

13. Efforts to integrate climate change in those organisational frames can be characterised as “frame bridging”; that is, the “linkage of two or more ideologically congruent but structurally unconnected frames regarding a particular issue or problem” (Snow et al. 1986, 467).

14. Skype interview with French peasant woman activist from LVC, 12 September 2014.

15. The PAFO includes small-scale farmers’ organisations such as the Network of Farmers’ and Agricultural Producers’ Organisations of West Africa (ROPPA), the Eastern Africa Farmers Federation (EAFF), Plateforme Sous-Régionale des organisations Paysannes d’Afrique Central (PROPAC) and others.

16. Skype interview with international climate justice activist, 11 September 2014.

17. Skype interview with French peasant woman activist from LVC, 12 September 2014.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Gustave Boël Sofina Fellowship.