Indigenous and traditional communities’ ways of knowing and being in planetary justice

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the recent discussion on planetary justice by analyzing two environmental justice struggles around mining projects that impact indigenous peoples and traditional communities in Brazil and South Africa. Though locally based, these ecological distribution conflicts are connected to global chains, impacting the whole planet. We focus on peoples’ demands and to what extent their ways of knowing and being were considered in public consultation and litigation. Moreover, we reflect on what we can learn from these struggles. Our argument goes beyond distributive or procedural justice claims as these peoples are resisting the ontological erasure of their worlds, demanding to be consulted and participate in their own terms. These cases teach us that a deeper understanding of planetary justice entails diverse considerations of time, space, and the relations between human and non-humans. Assessing these struggles offer concrete ways to reimagine just relations, for many worlds in one planet.

KEYWORDS:

• Planetary justice
• political ontology
• ecological distribution conflicts
• indigenous peoples
• traditional communities

Introduction¹

Throughout the world, mining, logging, agro-industrial, and infrastructure projects have threatened peoples’ ways of knowing and living and the environment surrounding them. These enterprises are frequently connected to states’ national development plans in coalition with private actors, national and international financial organizations, development banks, and foreign governments.

While these cases seem very local and dispersed worldwide, they have been considered as ecological distribution conflicts and part of a global environmental justice movement (Temper et al. 2015, 2018, Martinez-Alier et al. 2016, Scheidel et al. 2020). Ecological distribution conflicts are a window to a broad and placed-based understanding of planetary justice. They entail delving into the roots of the planetary crisis and radical reconsideration of social, political, and economic structures, systems, and enabling conditions for sustainability transformation (Scoones et al. 2020). Local socio-environmental struggles evidence governance processes and marginalized local networks of actors that seem disconnected and dispersed but, in reality, are linked through different nodes or stages in commodity chains – extraction, transportation, production of goods, and final disposal (Temper et al. 2018, p. 575). Their aggregate impacts are causing global environmental change affecting several planet’s systems.

Moreover, many of these struggles involve people(s) in their complex relations to land, sea, rivers, mountains, forests and plants, animals, and other beings. We take a relational approach to suggest that these conflicts and people involved in such struggles are also resisting attempts against their ways of knowing and living and against other-than-human beings (Blaser 2009, Escobar 2016, de la Cadena and Blaser 2018). To Escobar (2016, p. 20), ‘within relational worlds, the defense of territories, life, and the commons are one at the same.” In this direction, assessing these struggles also offer concrete ways to reimagine just relations, bridging society and nature, and adding fundamental contributions to a deeper understanding of planetary justice (Biermann and Kalfagianni 2020, p. 2).

This article analyzes two cases involving indigenous peoples and traditional communities in emerging countries. More specifically, we started from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice and analyzed two mining projects selected according to the fit between their characteristics and our research goal of assessing to what extent peoples’ ways of knowing and being were considered and what we can learn from these socio-environmental struggles (Koivu and Hinze 2017, p. 1026). We follow Koivu and Hinze’s (2017, p. 1026) threshold rule for what constitutes a good case given our research goals. The first case is in the Brazilian Xingu basin by the Canadian company Belo Sun mining and a subsidiary company in Brazil, and the second is the Xolobeni coast in South Africa by Mineral Sand Resources (MSR), a subsidiary of the Australian company Mineral Commodities Ltd (MRC). Both cases have a shared legacy of colonialism, the foreseen socio-environmental impacts, and the actors’ conflict of interests and views. In both cases, public consultation attempts failed and were followed by litigation. The two projects were halted by judicial decisions but still represent a fragile and unpredictable future.

Through an interpretivist epistemology for the content analysis of reports, technical notes, and other primary and secondary sources from public consultations in both countries, we aimed to understand indigenous peoples’ and traditional communities´viewpoints (Bryman and Bell 2019). The cases show similarity in the encounter of different worlds/reals and that public consultations, although considered a lawful procedure, do not necessarily guarantee/assure justice in this encounter, because they can be conducted in a pro forma manner, with consequences in the recognition of which worlds are perceived as existent, and which knowledges and procedures are considered in the processes.

The paper is organized into four sections. Firstly, we introduce our guiding concepts and emphasize the need to expand the planetary justice framework considering: a) the global society’s metabolism driven by increasing resource and energy demands, resulting in unequal distribution of costs and impacts on humans and non-human beings worldwide; b) the contribution of decolonial lenses and political ontology to the traditional notions of distributive and procedural justice, encompassing diverse epistemologies and ontologies; and c) that struggles for environmental justice may involve the recognition of different ways of living and being in the territory. In the second part, we present two case studies that illustrate the resistance against mining projects in South Africa and Brazil. In the third part, we analyze how these cases involve ontological struggles about the territory. In conclusion, we argue that the struggles behind these cases go beyond procedural or distributive justice as they also show resistance to the ontological occupation of their worlds. In this sense, they have much to teach us about planetary justice through diverse considerations of development models, time, space, intra and intergenerational relationships, and the relationship between human and non-human and sentient and non-sentient beings.

Ecological distribution conflicts and decolonial environmental justice: ontological conflicts

The notion of planetary justice is under construction. It speaks to the planetary scope of our current socio-ecological challenges, the time scale that goes much beyond historical times, and the complexity encompassed under the notions of Anthropocene and Capitalocene (Moore 2016). Global political-economic processes have significantly changed planetary systems like climate, ocean, freshwater, forest, and soil. However, the changes are place-based, affecting local peoples and ecosystems. In this direction, the social metabolism concept highlights how sustainability depends on the interactions and the material and energy exchange processes of socio-economic systems with the environment and its biogeochemical cycles (Scheidel et al. 2018, p. 586). The current global society’s metabolism is geared towards unlimited growth, supported by values and institutions that govern modes of appropriation, production, distribution, and disposal of material and energy that socialize or shift costs, resulting in resource over-extraction, waste, pollution, contamination, but also dispossession and violence (Scheidel et al. 2018, p. 587).

Ecological distribution conflicts refer to social conflicts that emerge from diverging interests, values, and norms related to unequal access to natural resources, land, ecosystem services, or costs and burdens of pollution or waste (Martinez-Alier and O’Connor 1996, Scheidel et al. 2018). In addition, new directions in environmental justice (EJ) studies have considered not only physical but also emotional, spiritual, and cultural violence related to ecological conflicts, as well as the role of states and companies in perpetuating resource extraction and waste disposal dynamics that cause disproportionate harm, and land and resource conflicts in peripheral regions around the globe. These studies have also highlighted alternatives to these systems of violence emerging from scholars and activists who propose transformative frameworks (Kojola and Pellow 2021, pp. 108–111 and 113).

Temper et al. (2018) map current socio-environmental conflicts related to land grabbing, large-scale mining, and infrastructure development that affect indigenous peoples and traditional communities worldwide. The focus has not been on the conflict per se, but on resistance and the potential these struggles have as forces for sustainability, considering them as part of the global environmental justice movement mapped in the Global Environmental Atlas (Temper et al. 2018, Scheidel et al. 2018).

EJ literature from the global South has emphasized the struggles against mining, dams, roads, land grabbing, and exploitation of nature, linking these enterprises to the hegemonic model of development and social-metabolic growth and denouncing the impacts of these enterprises on indigenous groups and local communities (Martinez-Alier 2002, Martinez-Alier et al. 2016, 2016, Temper et al. 2018, Scheidel et al. 2020). As mentioned, many of these conflicts go beyond distributive justice, challenging the idea that what is at stake are simply resources (Blaser 2013) and that people can be financially compensated or given another piece of land somewhere.

Escobar (2016, p. 13) makes reference to ontological struggles. These entail the possibility of recognizing different modes of living that reject the Western development project (Esteva 1992, Sachs 1992). Nonetheless, traditional theorization about the dimensions of EJ – distributive, procedural, capabilities, and recognition – is permeated by a Western perspective of equity and an individualist claim for justice. Conventional concepts and references from the Global North do not emphasize the colonial and epistemic roots of injustices in the Global South (Rodriguez 2020), which often result in formal procedures of recognition that do not substantially recognize different ways of knowing and being (Álvarez and Coolsaet 2020, p. 62). Recognition has been reduced to formal, asymmetrical, and nonreciprocal procedures forms of recognition imposed by the State.

In this sense, decolonizing EJ involves acknowledging the inadequacies and incompletion of justice frameworks and tools based on a Western perspective of environment and justice (Álvarez and Coolsaet 2020) and proposing different possibilities to encompass (more of the) Global South contexts and knowledges. A decolonial gaze to environmental/planetary justice points to the importance of taking into account colonialism’s psychological and epistemological effects to understand how power is exerted through economic, political, and epistemological means. Decolonizing power and knowledge involve moving away from a unitary model of citizenship and civilization to one that acknowledges and respects different local economies, politics, cultures, forms of knowledge and being (Escobar 2016, de la Cadena and Blaser 2018, Álvarez and Coolsaet 2020, p. 63).

Epistemic justice, then, is key to avoiding the coloniality of knowledge and implies that planetary justice should embrace the idea that a variety of knowledge configurations exist (…) (Álvarez and Coolsaet 2020, p. 63). For Escobar, we should learn at least as much from these knowledge(s) as from the academy. Beyond that, multiple epistemes refer to multiple worlds, or ontologies (Escobar 2016, p. 13). Such is a claim for the pluriverse, a heuristic proposition, ‘an experiment on bringing itself into being’ (Blaser 2013, p. 552). This is not a more ‘accurate’ picture of how things are ‘in reality’. Political ontology suggests that ‘reality’ is done and enacted rather than observed (Blaser 2013, p. 554). It is meant to imply 1) a type of political sensibility, or commitment to the pluriverse, 2) a space in which different ways of worlding sustain themselves, while interacting, interfering, and mingling with each other, and 3) a mode of analysis.

Protocols and legal actions can serve as expressions of a pragmatic clash of ontologies (de Almeida 2013), as these communities use an exogenous tool and language to introduce the necessity of taking into consideration other beings and purposes. Ontological conflicts are struggles for the right to exist, and this existence is a diverse experience for different peoples, with the potential for one side to annihilate the other. As Almeida indicates, “In ontological conflicts, coalitions and alliances are possible. Let us not be mistaken: these are not merely cultural conflicts, but ontological wars, as what is at stake is the existence of entities in a pragmatic sense. It is a matter of life and death for Caipora, for tapirs and monkeys, for true people, and for stones and rivers (2013, 22 - free translation).

However, during these conflicts, interactions can lead to different outcomes. This does not mean ignoring the effects of capitalism, the development model, or the impacts of globalization. Instead, it highlights the need to examine the effects and results of these interactions from a different perspective, acknowledging the possibility of alliances and coalitions forming amidst the conflict. For Tsing (2015, 292) While most scholars use ontology to segregate perspectives, one at a time, thinking through world making allows layering and historically consequential friction . In this sense, ontological justice can be related to resistance and to defense of territories or ‘spaces’ for diverse ways of worlding and it is profoundly attached to a broader and more profound notion of recognition, related to how different agents, ideas, ways of knowing and being and cultures are respected and valued in interpersonal encounters and public discourse and practice (Martin et al. 2016, p. 255).

Moving towards an ontological expansion of planetary justice means expanding the ‘repertoire of assumptions about what exists’ (de Almeida 2013) and considering that some environmental justice struggles reveal ontological conflicts or the existence of relational worlds (Escobar 2016). The analytical challenge of uptaking epistemic and ontological justice involves considering the struggles for freedom, justice, and emancipation on their own terms. This conception often implies a different consideration of the subjects of justice, and the reconfiguration of the relations between human and non-human entities. Furthermore, it invites us to ask what we could learn from and with them about equity, relationality, and planet integrity.

The right to say no: struggling against mining projects in South Africa and Brazil

Since 1990, Latin America, Africa, and Asia have suffered strong pressures related to natural resource exploitation, most of which are located in traditional territories. Our two cases, one in South Africa and the other in Brazil, come from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (Temper et al. 2018, Scheidel et al. 2018), an inventory of more than 3,877 socio-environmental conflicts in 2023, which configures a reliable source of cases with similar characteristics. Regarding mineral ores and building material extraction, the Atlas reported 709 cases globally in 2023, 241 cases in South America, and 74 cases in Africa. Mining is inserted in the commodity chain of extraction and processing.²

We performed what Kurowska and Bliesemann de Guevara (2020, p. 1218) define as casing, in which characteristics define their significance instead of case selection. The cases illustrate an institutional tension that reproduces coloniality, a failure of public consultations, and a choice by communities and their supporters to submit claims to local and national courts requesting the recognition of their rights and the projects’ suspension. Moreover, they involve ontological struggles over territories, with epistemological and procedural implications, taking note that not all cases in the EJ Atlas, both in the Global North and the Global South, entail conflicts between worlds. Finally, the researchers have more familiarity with these cases, which is, according to Koivu and Hinze (2017), a logistical – organic and human – element and constraint of this research.

Consequently, based on an interpretivist epistemology for content analysis (Bryman and Bell 2019, Kurowska and Bliesemann de Guevara 2020) the research tried to bring up the indigenous and local people’s stories and struggles through the narratives in primary sources such as letters, technical reports from governmental institutions and civil society organizations listed in litigation processes, legal decisions, protocols, and secondary sources – academic articles, news, and reports from civil society organizations. Therefore, we did not resort to a coding book or procedures. Instead, we seek the viewpoint (Bryman and Bell 2019) of the Umgungundlovu community and Juruna people.

Case 1 - Umgungundlovu community in South Africa: pursuing the right to say no

Throughout South African history, mining has been considered a synonym for development. Similarly to other Southern countries, the idea of extractive activities – mining for coal and minerals such as gold and diamonds – as a bridge to a prosperous future has captured the dominant narrative of development and legitimized the emergence of the mineral-energy complex in South Africa (Fine and Rustomjee 1996). South Africa is one of the leading countries in titanium mining (U.S. Geological Survey – USGS 2022), but it exports most of the titanium slag before processing it to Global North multinational companies (Roux et al. 2020) for various end-use industries (from aerospace to chemical and energy).

Yet, this narrative has silenced different views held by native people who much earlier and, for long, lived in what later became known as the South African national territory and has not reverted to the well-being of most South Africans due to the racial segregation and the concentration of profits from mining in the hands of the whites throughout the apartheid. The community of Umgungundlovu consists of 70 to 75 households, totaling around 600 individuals, organized under the Amadiba traditional authority and inhabiting the area of Xolobeni, in Mbizana Local Municipality, OR Tambo District in South African’s Eastern Cape region (Sebola 2017, Meyer 2020). Duduzile Baleni is the head of the community, organized through the Umgungundlovu iNkhosana Council, a traditional authority recognized by customary law (Meyer 2020). The Umgungundlovu practice agriculture and livestock raising and have been in the area since the 1800s (Meyer 2020).

In the late 1990s, mining companies started to prospect the area for mining potential informally; at that point, the community had already voiced their opposition to mining on their land for potential disturbance of their way of living. In particular, they argued that they were content with their way of life, and mining would change it by dislocating many families, taking up soil and water they used for agriculture and livestock raising, and contaminating the area (Rosa Luxembourg Foundation 2020).

In 2003, Mineral Commodities Ltd., an Australian-listed multinational mining company, formed a local mining joint-venture through its South African subsidiary Transworld Energy and Mineral Resources (TEM) with Xolobeni Local Communities (XolCo) (Sebola 2017, Huisenga 2019). Since the end of the apartheid, Black Economic Empowerment Schemes were in place in South Africa, requiring mine-community partnerships, as well as social and labor plans for mining enterprises (Huisenga 2019). According to the agreement between TEM and XolCo, XolCo would have 9% of the shares of the joint-venture (Sebola 2017).

In 2007, TEM applied for a license for open-cast titanium mining before the Department of Minerals and Energy (DME) (Sebola 2017, Huisenga 2019, Meyer 2020). The Umgungundlovu community formed the Amadiba Crisis Committee (Sebola 2017). The DME granted the mining license to TEM in 2008, and the Committee was not notified of the license by DME, becoming aware of it after almost three weeks when a notice was listed on the Australian stock exchange (Centre for Environmental Rights CER 2011). The Amadiba Crisis Committee appealed against the license. The Committee argued that the community had not been adequately consulted about the project since it had received inaccurate and incomplete information and had not consented to the project since its decision-making procedure for consent had not been respected (Sebola 2017). In addition, it argued that XolCo did not represent the community’s interests (Sebola 2017), and the conflict escalated. Violent acts started taking place in the region, among them the community blocking TEM’s access to their land in 2015, followed by incidents of beating and shots in the community, and the death of the then chairman of the Amadiba Crisis Committee, Sikhosiphi Bazooka Rhadebe, in March 2016 (Sebola 2017). To halt the violence, in September 2016, the DME placed an 18-month moratorium on mining applications in the area (Sebola 2017), and in the same month, the Umgungundlovu community decided to go to Court.

In the legal procedure, the community focused their case on two stances. First, the community had the legal right to the land it occupied under the 1996 Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights nr. 35 (IPILRA) and customary law of South Africa. According to it, the community had the authority to give or not consent to any project to be developed on the land. Second, consent must be free and informed. Therefore, the community had the right to receive detailed information about the operations and impact of any project to be developed on their land promptly. The respondents, on the other hand, also offered a two-fold argumentation. First, the 2002 Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development nr. 28 (MPRDA) required consultation with interested and affected persons about mining projects, not their consent. Second, TEM conducted consultations with the community after the mining application was issued and served, fulfilling the requirement.

In 2018, the High Court of Gauteng issued its decision on the consent vs. consultation dispute. According to the Court, the IPILRA and MPRDA legal pieces must be read together and in tandem with the principles of the Constitution of South Africa, enacted after the apartheid with the key mission of redressing the history of economic and territorial dispossession and marginalization of traditional communities. While MPRDA applies to proposed mining projects in general, IPILRA applies to the specific cases in which the projects are to be developed on land occupied by traditional communities; therefore, if IPILRA applies, consultation is not enough: consent is required. In 2020, the Court issued its decision related to the timely access of detailed information about the project by the community. The Court concluded that the community had the right to be given complete information about the mining project to be developed on the land it occupies prior to the consultation for consent, without being denied access or going through time-consuming and unsatisfactory procedures to obtain it.

The legal case was restricted to an almost technical dispute about the requirements of access to information and consent related to mining projects to be developed on land occupied by traditional communities, but the stances refer to a much broader debate. On the one hand, the Umgungundlovu community requested that, on top of being given the right to consent and receive all the information it needs to be informed before doing so, its own procedures for consent should be respected. If for the Umgungundlovu all members affected by the project must give consent, and not only the head council of the community, then consent must be pursued as such. So, consultation should have been conducted on their own terms (ways of knowing).

On the other hand, they requested the right to have its own definition of development upheld (ways of being). Since the beginning of the case, it became clear that the community was not only demanding the right to be consulted about a mining project to be developed on land it traditionally occupies. Neither they seemed to be willing to participate in the joint-venture, and to receive part of the profits, or to receive compensation for damages that the mining activities would cause. They asked for the right to consent, even if it meant saying no to the project, no matter how timely and advantageous other actors consider it. In fact, the Umgungundlovu were requesting the right to continue to live on the land they have traditionally occupied according to their own practices (Rosa Luxembourg Foundation 2020).

Without land, we are nothing (…). There are guava and banana trees. We fish in the sea. Traditional healers find their muthi there. Sometimes I find plants there for my stomach or menstrual cramps. If they build that mine, all that will be destroyed. - Bekeni Danca, Xolobeni village woman, South Africa

(Steyn and Damba-Hendrik 2021)

Hence, the community claimed their right not to have their ways of living materially reshaped and despoiled by the titanium supply chain. While the administrative procedures failed to acknowledge these rights, the Courts did. The South African Judiciary has a long tradition of independence. Since the end of the apartheid, it has offered decisions that push for a change of the status quo in which the privileges of a minority trumped the rights of other groups, or the interpretation of development is one-sided. Doing so has helped advance debates that are key to reducing the exclusion of traditionally marginalized groups in decision-making. Yet, transformation requires that such advances are not merely Judiciary-bound for at least three reasons. First, the Courts can only apply the law. IPILRA is still an interim document, renewed yearly since it became into force in 1996. If it is not in force or replaced by a permanent legal piece protecting the rights of the communities by the time a decision is requested, the judgment could be different. Second, different Courts can have different interpretations of the law due to their independence. Third, Courts decide specific cases. They are not a substitute for the Legislative or the Executive. A transformative stance requires embedding different development views and many more voices into democratic decision-making processes and regulations.

Case 2: free, prior, and informed consent and the Belo Sun mining project

The Volta Grande mining project (also known as the Belo Sun), officially submitted in 2012, aims to establish the largest open-pit gold mine in Brazil, comprising an open-pit, a gold recovery process facility, water, and tailings management, and supporting infrastructure.³ The mining facilities are located within Senador José Porfírio municipality in Pará. They are less than 50 km from the Belo Monte Hydroelectric main dam, a project itself with devastating social and environmental impacts, relocation of people, and a history of conflictive relationships with affected indigenous peoples. Volta Grande is an iconic 130-km long stretch of the Xingu River, famous for its unique ecosystems and indigenous and traditional riverine populations.

The state of Pará has the largest gold mines in Brazil, and although Brazil is not one of the top gold exporters⁴ This commodity is the second most exported mineral and the country’s 12th among the most exported products in 2020, much of it illegally extracted (Risso et al. 2021). The gold goes mainly to Canada, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Belo Sun Mining Corp, a Canadian company, may deepen the role of Brazil as a supplier in the global gold supply chain, increasing even more the socio-environmental impacts that result from the activity.⁵

Several environmental and social risks and impacts are associated with Belo Sun’s project. Vast amounts of earth and rocks will be taken from deep digs and placed up into two piles as high as 200 meters. The tailing dam will have a storage capacity of 35.43 million cubic meters, configuring an increased risk of collapse situation.⁶ Besides, gold processing will use cyanide, which is highly toxic and whose effects last even after the mine is closed. Another concern is the great demand for water in all the stages of gold extraction. Belo Sun will build two wells for drinking water and capture water from the Itatá River during the implementation phase. When in operation, water demand will be equivalent to the supply of a 45-thousand-inhabitant town (Gomes 2017, pp. 4–8).

Belo Sun’s mining project affects different groups, such as small farmers, miners, and semi-rural workers. It also threatens the livelihoods and survival of traditional communities and indigenous people who depend on fishing, hunting, family agriculture, and artisanal extractivism, activities that are related to seasonal floods and droughts.⁷ Moreover, three indigenous lands will be affected by the Belo Sun project – the Paquiçambá, from the Yudjá (Juruna), located less than 9,5 km far, the Arara from Volta Grande do Xingu, and the Ituna/Itatá, which is home to indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation.⁸ Furthermore, indigenous people that live in the urban area and other rural settlements (non-demarcated IT) and the Mêbengôkre-Xikrin of Trincheira Bacajá have also claimed that they will be affected (Gomes 2017, Movimento Xingu +⁹). The case involves acquiring legal and illegal property in land reform settlements, buying other plots of land, lobbying the federal and state governments, and promises of gains to the municipality and several irregularities. Consequently, the case is broad and complex with environmental, social, economic, legal, and political impacts. We focus on how it has affected indigenous peoples and their demand for recognition of their lands and ways of being.

According to the Brazilian Federal Constitution (article 231), indigenous peoples have the right to be consulted and give their free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) to the operation of a mining project if it affects them. This process must also be followed according to the ILO Convention #169. Moreover, Brazilian law requires that the environmental impact report (EIR) must consider the ‘Indigenous Component’ (IC), a detailed assessment of the impacts on indigenous peoples, but it does not specify at which stage of the project licensing this study must be presented.

In 2014, Pará’s Environmental and Sustainability Office (SEMAS) issued a Provisional License for the project, suspended in 2014 by the Federal Justice of Altamira. Following that, SEMAS issued the Implementation License in 2017, which was also suspended due to the inadequacy of the IC. Moreover, the 1^st Federal Judicial Region confirmed in December 2017 that the license was suspended because Belo Sun did not undertake the FPIC with the affected indigenous peoples. It also determined that the FPIC had to be carried out under the indigenous peoples’ Consultation Protocols.¹⁰

From 2013 to 2021, seven different lawsuits were filed in various courts, and judicial decisions have suspended the project. In 2020, the company presented three ‘Indigenous Component Studies’, which were considered adequate by the federal government. The pandemic turned the situation even more complex as there were proposals to carry on online consultations, to which the Juruna people from the Paquiçambá IT objected because it violated their consultation protocol provision of in-person consultation at a place of their choice. Furthermore, other affected groups of indigenous peoples presented claims, but the current legislation does not support them, as it considers only a certain distance from the mining site and not the extent of the impact.

In 2021, the consultation processes were halted due to a strong recommendation by the Federal Public Defender that pointed to the risks of infection of indigenous peoples¹¹ and to the fact that the indigenous consultation protocols had not been observed. The FPIC must be based on the indigenous peoples’ own protocols, which have specific rules and provisions for when, how, who can take part, and where the process will be conducted.

This case goes beyond the demand to be heard. Indigenous peoples are demanding to be heard on their terms, respecting their respective Consultation Protocols, as each people have their own protocol. For instance, the Juruna (Yudjá) from the Paquiçamba Indigenous Land (IL) demands that everyone should be consulted, including leaders, women, older people, and children. They define where and how consultations occur, consisting of information and deliberative sessions. For them, the process needs to be collective and should respect their own rules, times, and manners, as already stated in their Consultation Protocol. They do not allow pictures or the use of their graphism in government or private companies’ publications without their prior approval. Also, they request transparency and the use of simple and clear language. Finally, no security people or police force are allowed in the collective talks (Yudjá Consultation Protocol ILO #169 Convention 2017¹²).

Other indigenous peoples like the Arara from Volta Grande do not have their Consultation Protocols yet, or do not live within an IL but will be affected.¹³ The Mêbengôkre-Xikrin also demanded to be consulted but were turned down by The Indigenous Peoples National Foundation (FUNAI), which alleged that these people live more than 10 km from the projected mining, so they do not have the right to be consulted.

On top of all that, there is a contentious issue of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation who inhabit the Ituna/Itatá IL. These peoples have voluntarily decided to have no contact with ‘civilization’. Being in voluntary isolation is a legally recognized status for indigenous peoples who do not want to be contacted. In this direction, they have the right to remain silent (presumably no consent) and not to be affected by development projects. However, deforestation has already been detected close to their land, and there is evidence of pressure related to agriculture, roads, and small-scale mining.¹⁴

The Implementation License was only suspended, not revoked, and the consultation processes to approve the ‘Indigenous Component’ studies were suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the judicial decisions focus on procedures that were not followed and formal inadequacies but not so much on content. As with the Umgungundlovu, Indigenous peoples demanded to be consulted on their own terms (ways of knowing), but their demands go beyond that. According to the indigenous peoples’ ways of knowing, what is at stake is their way of being, their worlding spaces, or territories where there are other subjects of rights, spirits, animals, lands and rivers, and entanglements between humans and non-humans. As stated by the Yudjá (Juruna) people, our lives matter, so the lives of turtles and fishes.¹⁵ These entanglements between humans and non-humans make it hard not to think of the pluriverse and relational worlds.

In their consultation protocol, they state that they hold an essential relation to the Xingu River (Protocolo de Consulta Juruna Yudjá da Terra Indígena Paquiçamba da Volta Grande do Rio Xingu 2017, p. 7). Gilliarde Juruna, the chief of the Mïratu village, located in the Paquiçamba Indigenous Land stated that ‘The river is our mother and father. We survive through it. The river for us is everything, it is our lives (…). The river is everything for us … while Xingu exists, we will fight … when it dies, we will die together’.¹⁶

Bekeni Danka, from South Africa, and Gilliard Juruna, from Brazil, according to the previously quoted claims, do not demand a better distribution of risks and harms from a development project. Instead, they resist projects that threaten their ways of being and knowing. These projects are part of a model of development that involves land grabbing, large-scale mining, infrastructure building, and increased violence in traditional territories, their spaces of worlding. This development model has been affecting indigenous peoples and traditional communities around the planet. From a political ontology perspective, they claim their right to exist by representing the world as their own and on their terms. As an example, the Juruna people Protocol state that their right to be heard involves existing in their traditional territory:

We do not accept any project that relocates us away from the Xingu River or makes our continued living by the river impossible. (…) We do not know what will happen to the river, animals, forest, or even ourselves from here on. We are worried about our children and our continued existence in our land.

(Protocolo de Consulta Juruna (Yudjá) da Terra Indígena Paquiçamba da Volta Grande do Rio Xingu (2017, pp. 13–14 - free translation)

Discussion

The Umgungundlovu community and the Juruna people are struggling against the global mining industry affecting their territories. These conflicts are rooted in the social metabolism growth pattern linked to global production and consumption chains and in the power relations that produce and reproduce inequalities and coloniality. Furthermore, their environmental justice conflicts instigate us to think of planetary justice taking into consideration the global implications of a system based on the illusion of infinite extraction and disposal.

The cases evidenced that litigation, public consultations, and formal participatory mechanisms may be significant instruments for local communities to deal with environmental conflict situations. Protocols of prior consultation, for example, play the important role of informing State representatives about the rules they must respect if they intend to carry out consultation processes with indigenous peoples and other traditional communities and guaranteeing security and legitimacy to processes that usually are unequal and conflicting.

Nonetheless, as pointed out, these instruments may be insufficient and inadequate in conflicts, especially in the Global South, considering the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being (Rodriguez 2020). Sometimes, it is not a lack of participatory processes. The exclusion from decision-making may arise due to institutional barriers to equally respecting peoples’ interests, perspectives, and mainly ways of knowing. In both cases, there was no prior consultation, no adequate information, and neither consent. Despite having legal rights over the territories, the states failed to address the communities’ claims to be heard and recognized at all administrative levels. Both cases had to be taken to the courts to halt the projects. However, judicial decisions are always on a case-by-case basis. While reflecting on some rights that have been granted, litigation reveals that these rights can be contested. Therefore, broad transformations are needed to uptake their ways of being and knowing. In the cases analyzed here, the legal situation is precarious. Consequently, tensions will probably grow again in the Xolobeni area while they have never ceased at the Xingu basin.

The communities’ claim to be heard cannot be reduced to having formal procedures accomplished: indigenous peoples and local communities have the right to be heard on their terms. As knowledge-holders, both communities contested the notion of formal representation about who should be listened to regarding the project’s impacts. For example, in their petition, the Umgungundlovu claimed that their procedures for consent should be respected, and the Consultation Protocol of the Juruna people of Volta Grande do Xingu stated that the consultation process should include the elderly and children. They present their local categories of the territory, resources, risks, and alternative views of the future (Rodriguez 2020). Furthermore, they insist that the projects will affect ways of being, or their worlding spaces. In both cases, they have resisted and claimed their rights to make decisions, be heard, have their views uptaken, and exist on their own terms. They are fighting against these projects so that their histories, identities, and existence are not erased.

The conflicts also reveal diverse views about the territory, land uses, and, more broadly, development. The One-World-World reproduces dualities such as culture and nature. Mining was labeled as development, in opposition to the traditional use of the territory, considered primitive, inadequate, or inefficient. Since Brazil and South Africa are counting heavily on mineral extraction to push their economies, the Umgungundlovu and Juruna’s resistance is framed, at some level, as opposed to the national interest or national development.

Indigenous peoples have been denied the possibility of refusing ‘development’ (as we understand it) and of keeping their ways of knowing and being in their territories. The two cases demonstrated crude violence and the psychological, spiritual, and cultural impacts of ecological violence that erases peoples’ relations with lands and rivers, an heritage of colonialism in these two countries. According to Kojola and Pellow (2021, p. 108), mining is a form of ecological violence – literally tearing apart the earth - thus, environmental injustices produced by settler colonialism are inherently violent, and people experience it far beyond the physical manifestations on the body, as many indigenous peoples relate to ecosystems and waterways which have cultural, spiritual, and emotional meanings for them. In fact, they reveal struggles for planetary justice in relational terms. The Juruna people have expressed their relationship with the Xingu River through generations, while the Umgungundlovu complained that the mining in their lands would disrupt their way of life (High Court of South Africa 2020, p. 6 paragraph 15.7).

Final remarks

The cases analyzed here, and a significant proportion of the socio-environmental conflicts inventoried in the Global EJ Atlas, occur in Latin America, Africa, and Asia rural areas. They embody justice struggles and forces for sustainability (Temper et al. 2018, Scheidel et al. 2018). These conflicts are local but connected to global production and consumption chains that operate at a planetary scale, impacting the atmosphere, the biosphere, and Earth’s systems and cycles involving land, freshwater, climate, and ocean.

In dialogue with decolonial thought and political ontology, we considered a notion of epistemic and ontological justice that recognizes indigenous peoples and local communities’ agency, knowledge, voices, and their spaces of worlding.

What do these two environmental justice struggles in the Global South teach us? What do these indigenous peoples and traditional communities teach us as agents resisting socio-environmental injustices?

Firstly, a grounded planetary justice framework should identify the drivers of planetary injustices, recognizing the global social metabolism based on growing demands for resources and energy and consequent waste generation, and the unequal distribution of costs and impacts on humans and non-humans around the planet. The basis of participatory processes tends to overlook the structural violence that constantly threatens the existence of indigenous and traditional communities and ecosystems in their territory, for which a decolonial perspective offers relevant insights.

Secondly, focusing on local communities and indigenous peoples’ resistance, their agency, and their voices shows that we need a broader notion of recognition, diverse institutions, and new ways of comprehending planetary justice. In this matter, political ontology, the notion of pluriverse, and relationality complement the mainstream notion of distributive and procedural justice.

Thirdly, listening to Umgungundlovu and Juruna voices made us realize that, despite the limitations of formal participation mechanisms and litigation, indigenous peoples and traditional communities, in both cases, adapted and reframed their claims to fit the formal procedures to be heard. Therefore, self-recognition in participatory processes may be related to the effort of building a bridge, opening a window for other worlds to interact. In addition, dialoguing with other worlds opens the possibility of learning other notions of time, space, territory, animals, plants, and relationships with forests, rivers, mountains, and the land.

In sum, many Indigenous and traditional communities struggles can be seen as a call for expanding justice frameworks to encompass different epistemologies and ontologies – ways of knowing and being, recalling the harms of an unequal and exclusionary system, escaping the One-World World narrative (Escobar 2016), and contributing to new senses of planetary/environmental justice. The ‘planetary’ of planetary justice allows us to consider the planet’s systems like the atmosphere, the biosphere, ocean, freshwater, geological and outer spaces within a non-linear time frame that goes beyond the present generation of humans and non-humans, while decolonizing justice allows us to take a historical gaze to uncover colonial legacies and how injustices are produced and reproduced. Analytically, it means delving into the causes of planetary injustices related to the development mode and its social metabolic growth that has driven resource overexploitation and waste excess on a planetary scale. It also means looking at how they affect places and populations differently. In this sense, adding an ontological and epistemological perspective in planetary justice uptakes the struggles of indigenous and local populations to keep their ways of knowing and being, recognizing a pluriverse world in which many worlds exist on one planet.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior .

Notes

1. This is a contribution to a Special Issue on Planetary Justice.

2. See https://ejatlas.org/conflict/pondoland-wild-coast-xolobeni-mining-threat-south-africa and https://ejatlas.org/conflict/belo-sun-mining-project-brasil. Access on March 6th, 2022

3. See https://ejatlas.org/conflict/belo-sun-mining-project-brasil. Access on March 6th, 2022

4. See https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/gold/reporter/bra. Access on June 25th, 2023.

5. See https://reporterbrasil.org.br/2021/11/with-revenues-of-1-point-4-billion-reais-the-largest-exporter-of-gold-from-wildcat-mines-has-its-supply-chain-contaminated-by-illegal-metal/Access on June 25th, 2023.

6. If it collapses, the disaster would be similar to or worse than the Mariana dam in Minas Gerais, where the dam had a storage capacity of 2.65 million cubic meters. This dam broke in November 2015, causing the most significant environmental disaster registered in Brazilian history and more than 200 deaths.

7. See http://mapadeconflitos.ensp.fiocruz.br/conflito/pa-projeto-de-mineracao-volta-grande-belo-sun-ameaca-modos-de-vida-e-sobrevivencia-de-povos-indigenas-ribeirinhos-e-outras-comunidades-tradicionais/#contexto_ampliado, Access March 8th, 2022.

8. See https://terrasindigenas.org.br/#pesquisa. Access on March 6th, 2022.

9. See https://xingumais.org.br/obra/mineracao-volta-grande-belo-sun, access March 11th, 2022.

10. See https://xingumais.org.br/obra/mineracao-volta-grande-belo-sun, Access March 11th, 2022.

11. See https://ox.socioambiental.org/sites/default/files/ficha-tecnica//node/218/edit/2021–03/OFICIO_145%20SESAI.pdf. Access on March 14th, 2022.

12. See http://www.mpf.mp.br/atuacao-tematica/ccr6/documentos-e-publicacoes/protocolos-de-consulta. Access on March 6th, 2022.

13. See letters from Communities of São Francisco, of I Jericoá, and of Iawá, Gleba Paquiçamba, available at https://xingumais.org.br/obra/mineracao-volta-grande-belo-sun, access on March 13th, 2022.

14. See https://xingumais.org.br/obra/mineracao-volta-grande-belo-sun. Access on March 15th, 2022.

15. Free translation, Letter from the Juruna to FUNAI, December 23rd, 2020. Available at https://ox.socioambiental.org/sites/default/files/ficha-tecnica//node/218/edit/2021–03/Carta%20Juruna%20TI%20Paqui%C3%A7amba.pdf, Access March 13th, 2022.

16. Available at Mapa de Conflitos. Injustiça ambiental e saúde no Brasil. https://mapadeconflitos.ensp.fiocruz.br/conflito/pa-projeto-de-mineracao-volta-grande-belo-sun-ameaca-modos-de-vida-e-sobrevivencia-de-povos-indigenas-ribeirinhos-e-outras-comunidades-tradicionais/#contexto_ampliado. Access 03 July 2023