The Power of Legitimacy in the Land for Climate Mitigation Discourse: Indigenous & Local Community Knowledge, Participation, and Agency

International and intergovernmental institutions are influential in setting global policy-making agendas. As such, they are driving actors in shaping the discourse on land management to mitigate climate breakdown. The report will be a key scientific input into forthcoming climate and environment negotiations. Global governing bodies are social entrepreneurs of mitigation strategies and have the power to legitimize actors in the land management for climate change discourse. In August 2019, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change published a seminal report on the nexus of land use for climate mitigation directed at policy makers globally. The Report was highly praised in the subsequent months for what many called ‘groundbreaking’ advocacy of indigenous and local community knowledge incorporated into the scientific discussion of climate mitigation strategies. In response, Indigenous and community organizations and networks (representing 42 countries spanning 1.6 billion hectares of land customarily used or managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities and accounting for over 76 percent of the world’s tropical forests) issued a statement emphasizing the long-awaited recognition of the role of forest peoples in protecting forests.

This research examines the legitimacy-making discourse surrounding the inter-governmental report of the media and the perceptions of indigenous and local knowledge for land use for climate mitigation in the context of the global discourse. 

Objective: To investigate how the international media and the land sector discourse-entrepreneurs portray indigenous voices, actors and knowledge within the land use for climate mitigation scientific discourse.

We use an underlying assumption that the practice of top-down legitimization holds power over Indigenous knowledge and voices, which is concerning twofold: (1) the Western-constructed governing bodies’ conceptualization of the very nature of climate change “masks alternative voices that fundamentally challenge Western ways of knowing, being, doing [...] by highlighting indigenous voices, the climate change discourse becomes far more complicated” (Smith 2007: 198). Globally, states have served to displace local communities and degrade native lands. The state-centered orientation of global bodies conceptualizes Indigenous as victims of climate change, while simultaneously ignoring (or silencing) the agency of indigenous and local communities. (2) Not only do legitimacy mechanisms marginalize Indigenous groups, but also global institutions’ conceptualizations of climate mitigation do not include local land tradition within the governing institutions. “Responses to climate change threaten Indigenous people's rights” (Jones 2019: 73). Political marginalization of these peoples allows for the mis-conceptualization of climate mitigation, due to a lack of knowledge and perspective coming from these communities’ practices and history.