The Latin American Indigenous Ethnopolitics: Toward an Expansive and Comprehensive Climate Governance

Abstract

Discussions about climate governance and climate justice from an international perspective have highlighted a close relationship between climate change and human rights. Thereafter the number of national and international policies and litigation about this relationship has increased worldwide, according to recent researches. Furthermore, indigenous claims and actions about this relationship have risen before public spheres at all climate governance levels by taking ethnopolitics paths. Through a hypothetical-deductive approach and bibliographic and documentary research, this study aims to address these paths grounded in a South Global perspective from Latin American indigenous people’s claims and actions on collective human rights before climate changes. It is assumed that those ethnopolitics paths have contributed to an expansive and comprehensive formulation of climate governance. The findings indicate that besides the increase’s trends of national’s laws and policies and litigation before national and international courts, the indigenous people’s ethnopolitical protagonism related to their claims on collective human rights before climate changes in Latin American has updated the formulation of climate governance toward climate justice by an expansive and comprehensive approach, embracing political protagonism grounded in ethnics and its cultural aspects, taking into traditional ways of life vitally dependent on a balanced ecological system, and problematizing states and hegemonic societies’ mechanisms to face climate change from a multicultural perspective.