Blog o’ Burns

(I’ll keep updating my notes as I write them)

“FROM EARLY WARNING AND RESPONSE TO ETHNO-DEVELOPMENT: A STRATEGIC APPROACH FOR ETHNIC CONFLICT REASEARCH AND ACTION”

BY OTTO FEINSTEIN AND ANTHONY PERRY

• The authors argue that “…violent ethno-cultural conflict… is the direct result of the way the modern nation-state was created and its frequent inability to resolve in a non-violent manner the ethnic conflicts which are inherent to its existence”
• The non-violent resolution/management of these conflicts depends on a change in the behavior of the state and the norms of the international system rather than the “de-tribalization of ethnic populations”
• No modern nation-state exists that does not have a multi-ethnic population
• No modern nation-state had universal suffrage at the time of its constitutional origins
• Thus, states did not create an ethno-development infrastructure at their founding
• Ethno-development begins with education; adult educators are involved in activities where the state meet the public; they could be the first hand observers of ethnic conflict, the users of Early Warning information and actual providers of such information and the means of dealing with it
• Adult educators able to analyze the impact of changes brought about intervening variables upon their communities and thus help evaluate conflict resolution strategies
• Volunteer organizations, which include ethnic organizations, humanitarian associations, and community groups, can articulate the needs of their memberships and obtain appropriate state responses; they are the demand mechanisms citizens use when normal political avenues break down
• When volunteer organizations are seen as posing a threat to the state apparatus and not seen as a legitimate form of participation, this can aggravate conflict since these groups are often the fist signal and mediator of an escalating crisis
• An ethnodevelopment strategy requires information from around the world on numerous aspects of ethnicity, culture, conflict, dispute resolution and democratic participation
• Often data sources get duplicated by active researchers of ethno-political conflict; often these data-sets are repetitive, incapable of being reproduced and biased in numerous ways; for effective early warning models to be developed and tested we must gather the best data possible

“THE QUEST AND PRACTICE OF INDIGENOUS DEVELOPMENT”

BY JORGE E. UQUILLAS AND MELANIE A. ELTZ

• This article reviews the main lessons learned from the practice of indigenous development both at the community level and at the national level; it also highlights the significance of the World Bank’s Indigenous Peoples Policy (9)
• The Quest for Indigenous Development
• Political boundaries established by former colonial powers did not adequately recognize ethnic differences; conflicts emerged between ethnic groups attempting to reassert their differences (9)
• The Declaration of Barbados in January 1971 marked the formal beginning of the transnational indigenous rights movement; it criticized indigenist policies for failing to improve the economic well-being of indigenous peoples while also causing assimilation, acculturation, and sometimes ethnocide; from this declaration came the conceptual framework of ethnodevelopment as an alternative to assimilation (11)
• Ethnodevelopment is essentially the autonomous capacity of culturally-differentiated societies to control their own processes of change; basic conditions for ethnodevelopment are that indigenous peoples: 1) strengthen their own cultures; 2) assert their ethnic identities; 3) obtain recognition of their lands for local autonomy, governance, and self-determination; and 4) self-manage their own processes of economic and social development (11)
• Today ethnodevelopment builds upon the positive qualities of indigenous cultures to promote employment and growth; these qualities include a strong sense of ethnic identity, close attachments to ancestral land, and the capacity to mobilize labor, capital, and other resources to achieve shared goals (11)
• In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development redefined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (13)
• Development with identity was considered synonymous with ethnodevelopment in recent past; some basic elements of development with identity (as defined by the Indigenous Leadership Training Program in the Andean Region) are: 1) focus on quality of life rather than economic growth; 2) primacy of common or collective rather that individual interests; 3) emphasis on solidarity, social cohesion, and collaboration; 4) redistribution rather that accumulation of wealth; and 5) forms of collective action (13)

• The Practice of Indigenous Development
• The World Bank and the University of Pittsburgh published a report in 1997 citing 42 specific cases of indigenous development in Latin America; of the 42 cases, 28 were considered successful, 8 unsuccessful, and 6 unclear (14)
• Problems related to the legal framework necessary for development contributed to the failure of 75% of unsuccessful projects; security over land and natural resources contributed to the failure of 63% of unsuccessful projects (14)
• The most common feature of successful projects was the presence or creation of indigenous organizations both at the local level and multi-community level as a mechanism for representing indigenous peoples in the development process (14)
• Development is more likely to occur when indigenous peoples have: 1) access to basic resources such as food security and basic health; 2) a high degree of social organization and political mobilization; 3) the ability to preserve their cultural identities (particularly language); 4) strong links with outside institutions; and 5) production patterns that allow both subsistence and the earning of cash incomes (14)
• The World Bank’s Indigenous Peoples Policy (OD 4.20) incorporates three elements: 1) capacity building by strengthening self-managed sustainable development of indigenous leaders and their organizations; 2) creating a learning partnership among indigenous organizations, national governments, and international donor agencies to share experiences and best practices; and 3) financing specific operations in the areas of education, health, rural development, natural resource management, biodiversity conservation, and cultural heritage (15)
• Main goal of World Bank’s Indigenous Capacity Building Program in Lain America is to strengthen indigenous organizations and willing governments to help indigenous peoples build their own capacity for identifying needs, selecting development priorities, and formulating strategies and proposals (15)
• PRODEPINE I was the World Bank’s first stand-alone investment operation that focused exclusively on indigenous peoples and Afro-descendant populations; helped encourage the democratic inclusion of Afro-Ecuadoran and indigenous peoples in the state; this participatory approach has proven important for decentralization and social empowerment (16)
• In January 2003, the World Bank’s Operational Evaluation Department published a review of OD 4.20, which was applied in 55 of 89 World Bank projects between 1992 and 2001 that could have affected indigenous peoples; the report found that the program has positively influenced Bank assistance in many countries in focusing on the marginalized poor (16)
• The report also highlighted the fact that the program hasn’t been applied in a consistent manner; it also found no clear understanding of the term “project that affects indigenous peoples” (which triggers OD 4.20), whether that effect is direct or indirect, negative or positive (16)
• Confusion remains in understanding OD 4.20 and its requirements and some task team leaders stated that they lack adequate resources to implement it (16)
• Non-World Bank Donor Agencies
• The International Fund for Agricultural Development (FAD) funded the Regional Program in Support of Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon Basin (PRAIA); lessons from Phase I and Phase II of PRAIA: need to support economic initiatives with cultural components, recognize traditional cultural knowledge, recognize indigenous peoples as beneficiaries and partners, strengthen technical and budget management capacities, acknowledge capacity building as a key element for indigenous people to interact directly among themselves and with international agencies, government authorities, private institutions, and national/international market agents (17)
• Need to strengthen ability of national and local government to enforce laws and develop appropriate legislation for indigenous peoples (17)
• Cooperation demands greater flexibility from donors in their implementation conditions; all indigenous communities are different and projects vary, making flexibility necessary for success (17)
• The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) developed a strategy to address the concerns of indigenous peoples in the face of globalization; addresses challenges such as integration and globalization of markets and reduction of their poverty levels, while also maintaining ethnic and cultural identities (17)
• The IDB’s model is based on 3 reinforcing elements: 1) strengthening the traditional subsistence economy—protect land and natural resources while improving productivity in order to have food security and provide space for cultural reproduction; 2) reducing segregation and discrimination in labor markets and in the sale of products—increase capacity to compete under equal conditions with other groups through improved access to education, financial services, labor regulations, and reduced discrimination; and 3) using the comparative advantages of the heritage of indigenous peoples—coordinate indigenous knowledge and ancestral practices with a focus on business, marketing, and production technologies and seek niches in highly demanded goods/services such as ethno-tourism, medicinal plants, management of protected areas, craftsmanship, and forestry (18)
• Elements of a Revised Conceptual Framework for Indigenous Development
• Economic indicators have historically measured development but many factors cannot be quantified with respect to indigenous communities; poverty cannot be defined only by modern economic criteria, such as the value of a basket of goods or monetary income (18)
• When working with indigenous peoples, new criteria must account for the fact that: 1) the concept of reciprocity exists among indigenous communities; 2) indigenous peoples work communally when placing value on goods; 3) indigenous peoples often refrain from accumulating goods; and 4) indigenous peoples are often in harmony with the environment (18)
• Preconditions before multilateral institutions can fully support the development of indigenous communities
  • National policy frameworks that recognize the collective land rights, human rights policies, and linguistic/cultural characteristics of indigenous peoples (19)
  • National and international policy frameworks that give indigenous communities some autonomy in terms of development planning and implementation (19)
  • when secure tenure to communal territories exists, development is easier to achieve (19)
  • multilateral institutions must invest heavily in strengthening the capacity of indigenous organization and communities to plan and manage their own development initiatives (19)
  • social capital refers to institutions, relationships, networks, and norms that shape the quality and quantity of a society’s interactions; key to improve this is participation; local participation in project design, implementation, and evaluation ensures that projects and policies make sense within the local context, helping to sustain the project once development workers have left (19)

“ETHNODEVELOPMENT: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, CREATING EXPERTS AND PROFESSIONALISING INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE IN ECUADOR”

BY NINA LAURIE, ROBERT ANDOLINA, AND SARAH RADCLIFFE

• This article analyzes struggles over knowledge production and established cultures and traditions in new forms of governance
• Emphasis on how notions of self-regulating citizenship, combined with increased national and international recognition of indigenous collective rights, is opening opportunities to influence ways that political decision making and development are managed (471)
• Neoliberal measures to open markets in land, water, and new commodities have huge impact on rural well-being; indigenous response to these pressures include alternative law proposals, nationwide protests, coalition building with other social actors, and creating a unified identity in order to achieve common goals (472)
• Indigenous movements have been involved with transnational development networks in Ecuador for over a decade; these networks provide influential arenas for debate over the meaning and tools of “development with identity” (472)
• Neoliberal social development policies include strengthening institutions and civil society organizations, including previously marginalized groups, recognizing social diversity, and gaining the participation from all stakeholders in project decision-making and execution (473)
• The authors argue that “…while neoliberalism is increasingly setting the social development agenda, in some contexts this occurs in ways that open up spaces for indigenous challenges to, and participation in, local and regional policy implementation.” (473)
• Social capital is defined as the norms and social relations within the structures of society that allow people to coordinate action and achieve goals (474)
• Ethnodevelopment interprets culture and indigenous identity in ways that make it compatible with neoliberal social policy, but this can limit the perception of indigenous culture as simply as a means of allocating resources and recognizing beneficiary groups of development projects (474)
• This article highlights the power relations involved in knowledge production, specifically in the contests over emerging notion of ethnodevelopment (474)
• Deborah Yashar—“neoliberalism… has become synonymous with the culpable state, and has enable the indigenous movement to target the state for retribution, justice and guarantees” (475)
• To what extent are governable spaces of indigeneity being established in Ecuador through multiple scales and overlapping geographies via ethnodevelopment professionalization? (476)
• Ethnodevelopment: Changing Development Experts and Expertise
• Development experts fail to deliver results that lessen inequality and improve living standards; experts are part of these failures, because the knowledge that allow people to create and implement their own programs get devalued as experts are created (476)
• “In contrast to a development industry populated by expatriate consultants, in recent years, the shift towards neoliberal social development models has placed more emphasis on stakeholder participation and developing human and social capital that is ‘indigenous’ to a particular area.” (477)
• Contemporary development workers are generalists, valued for the generic tools they can apply anywhere; thus, local specialist knowledge detracts from development expertise (477)
• Indigenous movements have long demanded culturally appropriate education that reflects indigenous realities and needs; culturally appropriate professionalization recognizes indigenous values and knowledge, seeking to strengthen their political structures, organization, and leadership; this type of professionalization equips communities with the tools to produce their own development projects without relying on outside experts and technicians (478)
• Andean Popular Education and Indigenous Movements
• No longer the case in Ecuador that popular education is more informal than university courses
• The ECUARUNARI training school for women (3-year program) awards a diploma, has exams, requires coursework and participation; it comprises distance learning, workshops, seminars and short residential courses (479)
• As opposed to highly structured university programs, flexible training programs are often more appealing to women due the burdens of doing both domestic and paid work (479)
• Their curricula are shaped by the agendas of indigenous movements; they involve engaging with the latest development thinking, strengthening indigenous identity, and empowerment (480)
• Instead of focusing on technical training in agriculture and production, new indigenous training courses try to strengthen civil society by promoting strong citizenship and leadership training, as well as fortifying the role of poor and indigenous communities in decentralized development planning (480)
• The first seminar at ECUARUNARI comprised traditional topics such as local sustainable development, but this was with a focus on participation, gender, culture, and ecology (480)
• The teaching methods were interactive, problem-solving, and focused on debating the historical genealogies of indigenous movements; use life histories of great historical leaders and aboriginal peoples to recoup oral traditions an the role played by women in indigenous uprisings (480)
• An intimate relationship exists between professionalization and indigenous agency through re-working authoritative histories and knowledge (481)
• Courses link professionalization with activism by incorporating the experiences of indigenous political action into the curricula; for example, featuring indigenous leaders and advocates as guest speakers to inform students of everyday struggles of indigenous movements (481)
• At a university indigenous professionalization program in Bolivia, one of the session focused on analyzing the success of protest tactics such as marches and road blocks in indigenous and peasant mass mobilization (482)
• Professionalization: Spatializing and Scaling Indigenous Knowledge
• Advances in international human rights, the recognition of indigenous people in international law and greater interest from donor agencies, NGOs, and the corporate world have given indigenous knowledge a new level of importance with respect to development (483)
• Respect for indigenous knowledge is essential for fulfilling development-with-identity agendas, but there is disagreement as to how this knowledge should be represented (483)
• Most definitions of indigenous knowledge refer to natural resource management, knowledge about a specific territory and/or knowledge held by a particular group who are assumed to reside in a particular geographical area (483)
• Indigenous movements emphasize indigenous knowledge as diverse modes of thinking/processes of learning (483)
• This focus on logic, frameworks, and epistemology have led to programs such as Ecuador’s Program of Bilingual Intercultural Education which critiques the Spanish model of education through promoting Andean ancestral forms of thinking and learning (483)
• Donor organizations scale indigenous knowledge at the local level through large-scale programs that disseminate specific indigenous knowledge; some examples include the World Bank’s “Indigenous Knowledge for Development” program, UNESCO’s “Best Practice of Indigenous Knowledge” and UNDP’s “Indigenous Knowledge Program,” which seek to transfer indigenous knowledge for adaptation in other contexts (484)
• Large-scale transnational initiatives attempt to professionalize indigenous knowledge so that it can be circulated and shared; representations of indigenous knowledge as inherently oral and local motivate this professionalization in fear that its full commercial potential may not be tapped or that it may get taken out of the hands of indigenous communities (484)
• Donor organizations (such as the World Bank) fund spaces of dialogue between community members, local authorities and national/international development partners and also facilitate local communities in forming research agendas and establishing networks that help practitioners and communities exchange information about local practices (484)
• Increasing systemization and professionalization of information flows in transnational development networks do not necessarily empower indigenous network members; international funding usually requires monitoring based on burdensome report writing; monitoring and evaluation processes can produce contests over the control of governable space by becoming conduits for the introduction of new paradigms, whether or not they are wanted by local and national organizations (484)
• To control how their knowledge is represented and valued in development, indigenous leaders emphasize how indigenous knowledge has been downgraded by colonization; indigenous leaders (like Luis Macas of the Ecuadorian indigenous confederation CONAIE) are attempting to redefine indigenous knowledge to a concept that is universal rather than simply unique to a given culture or society (485)
• By redefining indigenous knowledge, indigenous people are being repositioned as not only actors and agents in ethnodevelopment but also experts (485)
• Institutionalizing Professionalization: Hybrid Development Institutions in Ecuador
• NGO sector of fused grassroots and academic interests operating transnationally helps set the agenda of new courses designed to meet the training needs of indigenous leaders, activists, and advocates (486)
• New decentralization laws and land reform have opened up opportunities for recognizing indigenous rights, including collective rights to resources and decision making power (486)
  • Governable Space and By-Passing the State
  • PRODEPINE, which is funded by transnational donors, the state, and indigenous groups, provides over 700 scholarships for indigenous Ecuadorians to study in established university programs; though the program has been successful, the have been instances of intolerance on the part of both indigenous students and white mestizos in the universities (487)
  • Mainstreaming indigenous students into existing university programs can create division which leaves students untouched by the intercultural experience (488)
  • A similar group called CODENPE heavily supports indigenous movement initiatives to establish training outside the established university system in Ecuador via CONAIE’s proposal for an Indigenous University (first discussed in 1988, resurrected in 1994, rejected by Congress in 1996) (488)
  • This university would emphasize decentralized and flexible forms of teaching, with courses comprising part-study based on distance learning, practical sessions and occasional workshops, with an academic calendar organized around the agricultural calendar (489)
  • This proposal calls into question the state’s jurisdiction over higher education by creating a semi-autonomous university and also explicitly seeks to systemize the experience of indigenous movements’ struggles against state reform in order to strengthen indigenous organization; given these circumstances, not surprising that the state was unwilling to grant approval (489)
  • CODENPE receives funding from the government which allows it to engage the state in policy advocacy, but it also has a direct link with transnational funders which gives it some autonomy that allows it to be critical of state practices and institutions that intrude on indigenous development (490)
  • Though CODENPE facilitates open communication between the state and indigenous movements, this role may also help the state monitor indigenous projects; this dilemma characterizes the struggle for control over indigenous development (490)