CESR is excited to share two new videos created with our partners Akubadaura, which are the result of a workshop held with indigenous leaders from the Andean and Amazon regions of Peru and Colombia. In the videos, participants from the workshop discuss the importance of including indigenous perspectives in fiscal policy making in the region. This builds on the issues discussed at the workshop in December, where the main goal of the event was to reflect on the most pressing problems faced by indigenous peoples in the region, their relationship with the fiscal policies that the States have been promoting in the post-pandemic recovery, and to collaboratively design potential courses of action.
As their main concerns, participants highlighted issues including the intensification of policies to promote extractive industries' investments in their territories, failures to ensure quality bilingual education for their children, and the increase in school dropouts caused by virtual education, and the lack of effective measures for the restitution of ancestral lands. They also stressed how all these issues are deeply intertwined and rooted in an economic system that clashes with their own view about the relationship between human beings and the environment (what they call "Plan de Vida").
Participants particularly emphasized the importance of investing resources to foster indigenous peoples' ability to participate more effectively in decision-making and “consultation” forums directed at their consultation. Many times these spaces show stark imbalances in access to information and technical “expertise” on the issues at hand and end up legitimizing projects that seriously affect their rights. CESR presented the Principles for Human Rights in Fiscal Policy and the OPERA framework as useful tools to support the claims of indigenous peoples in national and international forums.