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Globalized Conflicts, Globalized Responses. Changing Manners of Contestation Among Indigenous Communities

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Hunter-gatherers in a Changing World

Abstract

In a globalized world, environmental conflicts affecting indigenous communities (including hunter-gatherer groups) have intensified and grown in their transnational character. These changes have affected the choice of manners of contestation of these groups, favouring in some cases the emergence of alternative responses based on the use of new technologies and scientifically gathered evidence. In this chapter, we examine these interlinked changes, describing also –through two case studies- an emerging methodology of scientific enquiry that aims to enable indigenous communities to lead scientific activities and confront conflicts through a truly bottom-up approach. The chapter ends discussing how, despite the potential of such new manners of contestation, the power imbalances that currently underpin many indigenous conflicts are first to be addressed.

Martí Orta Martinez is co-author only to Sect. 13.3.1.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to DANIDA, Danmission and IFRO-KU for funding the project “Prey Lang – it’s our forest too” (104.N.491.IP).Thanks are due to the PLCN for their brave work conserving the forest and to Ernst Jürgensen, Ida Theilade, Søren Brofeldt, Dimitris Argyriou, Christina Dahl Jensen, Narith Nou, Sithuan Chin and the rest of the team for coordinating the project. The Peruvian participatory monitoring programme presented in this chapter was designed and implemented by the Achuar and Kichwa communities of the Corrientes and Pastaza river basins, their environmental monitors and their legitimate representative organizations (Federation of Native Communities of the Corrientes River -FECONACO- and the Kichwa Indigenous Federation of the Pastaza River -FEDIQUEP-). M.C.S. holds a predoctoral fellowship awarded from the Government of Catalonia (FI-DGR 2016). M.O.M. benefited from the financial support of the ‘Conflict and Cooperation over Natural Resources in Developing Countries’ program of The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) - www.iss.nl/nebe- and the ‘International Initiative for Impact Evaluation’ (3ie).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Petra Benyei, Martí Orta-Martínez & Mar Cartró-Sabaté

  2. Department of Food and Resource Economics, Faculty of Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Nerea Turreira-Garcia

  3. International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Martí Orta-Martínez

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  1. Petra Benyei
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Correspondence to Petra Benyei .

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    Victoria Reyes-García

  2. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

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Benyei, P., Turreira-Garcia, N., Orta-Martínez, M., Cartró-Sabaté, M. (2017). Globalized Conflicts, Globalized Responses. Changing Manners of Contestation Among Indigenous Communities. In: Reyes-García, V., Pyhälä, A. (eds) Hunter-gatherers in a Changing World. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42271-8_13

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