Beyond Consultation: Rethinking the Indigenous Right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent in Costa Rica

Abstract

Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) is an international legal norm meant to ensure Indigenous Peoples’ right to be consulted about projects that affect their lands. Over the past decade, the small Central American country of Costa Rica has strived to develop and implement a series of new, ‘culturally appropriate’ consultation protocols to better uphold the right to FPIC. This dissertation investigates the concept of FPIC as it applies to the Indigenous Bribri in the context of Costa Rica's burgeoning national forestry and climate change strategy known as the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) program. Drawing on extended, multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, including semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, this dissertation addresses the issues of Indigenous agency and autonomy by considering the ways in which the country’s REDD+ consultations and emerging FPIC processes serve to both strengthen and weaken communities’ rights to participation and self-determination. Weaving together a conceptual framework from political ecology, critical development theory, and political and legal anthropology, this study reveals that the country’s current FPIC protocols perpetuate historical state-Indigenous relations while simultaneously creating new opportunities for negotiation, compromise, and resistance. I demonstrate that FPIC consultations are all at once sites of ontological conflict, a legal instrument for the ontological defense of territoriality, and participatory spaces of (re)negotiation and resistance wherein ontological differences are arbitrated in an effort to shape policy and transform age-old power relations. Ultimately, this research deepens our understanding of how Western mechanisms designed to protect human rights and natural resources intersect with Indigenous ways of knowing and being to inform broader debates on Indigenous self-determination and climate justice. In doing so, it asks us to consider how we—as scholars, advocates, and practitioners—may go about collaboratively reimagining and rethinking FPIC in the future.