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An intercultural approach to climate justice: A systematic review of Peruvian climate and food policy [1]

['Ingrid Arotoma-Rojas', 'Priestley Centre For Climate Futures', 'University Of Leeds', 'Leeds', 'United Kingdom', 'Lea Berrang-Ford', 'James D. Ford', 'Carol Zavaleta-Cortijo', 'Faculty Of Public Health', 'Administration']

Date: 2024-10

Abstract Despite increasing global recognition of Indigenous knowledge and rights in climate governance, Indigenous Peoples’ initiatives are often constrained by state-centric structures. Their perspectives frequently clash with development strategies that prioritize economic growth and resource extraction, particularly in biodiversity hotspots where many Indigenous Peoples live. Despite the crucial role that nation-states play in addressing climate change, research on the incorporation of Indigenous Peoples in national climate policies is limited. This paper addresses this gap by analysing the inclusion of Indigenous Peoples in Peruvian policies and the associated justice implications. We do so by developing and presenting an intercultural justice framework, through a textual and discursive analysis of 21 Peruvian policies related to food security and climate change. Our findings reveal that there is minimal inclusion of Indigenous Peoples in Peruvian national climate and food policy, highlighting their vulnerability, with limited integration of their knowledge and worldviews, thus perpetuating colonialism. However, Indigenous organisations are claiming important participatory spaces, beginning to influence Peruvian climate and food policies, albeit nominally.

Citation: Arotoma-Rojas I, Berrang-Ford L, Ford JD, Zavaleta-Cortijo C, Cooke P, Chicmana-Zapata V (2024) An intercultural approach to climate justice: A systematic review of Peruvian climate and food policy. PLOS Clim 3(9): e0000404. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000404 Editor: Ana Maria Loboguerrero, Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT: Alliance of Bioversity International and International Center for Tropical Agriculture, COLOMBIA Received: February 12, 2024; Accepted: August 21, 2024; Published: September 20, 2024 Copyright: © 2024 Arotoma-Rojas et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: Data available on the supporting information. Funding: This research was supported by the Indigenous Health Adaptation to Climate Change (IHACC) Program (http://ihacc.ca/) through funding from the Canadian Institute of Health Research (106372-003, 004, 005 to LBF and IAR), the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (WM160093 to LBF), the UKRI GCRF/Newton Fund (EP/V043102/1 to JF, IAR, CZC, VCZ), and the Wellcome Trust (218743_Z_19_Z to CZC). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1 Introduction Climate justice is underpinned by the fundamental understanding that climate change’s impacts on human society are experienced disproportionally: climate impacts exacerbate–and are shaped by–existing inequalities [1, 2]. This aspect of climate change’s impacts–with the most marginalised people most likely to experience the most significant impacts–places climate justice and marginalised populations at the frontline of climate change discourse. Reflecting this, the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [3] calls for consideration of three dimensions of climate justice when developing, implementing and evaluating climate interventions: (1) targeting distributive justice to address the structural inequities, burdens and benefits that make some people more vulnerable than others; (2) procedural justice to analyse who decides and who is excluded; and (3) recognition justice to privilege interventions rooted in different worldviews, challenging the dominance of the Eurocentric hegemony of Western knowledge [3, 4]. Adaptation–the process of preparing for, avoiding, and minimising the impacts of climate change–plays a crucial role in responding to the risks posed by climate change. However, adaptation planning risks reproducing systemic inequalities in resource distribution, knowledge production, and power without explicitly integrating a climate justice framework, often favouring the less marginalised [2, 5–8]. For example, after analysing 34 international-funded adaptation interventions, Eriksen et al. [9] evidenced that adaptations may exacerbate, redistribute, or create new vulnerabilities by privileging the elite and avoiding addressing the socio-political causes of vulnerability, leaving the most vulnerable behind. Additionally, ecosystem restoration and conservation are at the centre of climate change mitigation strategies [10], which aim to decrease the emissions that cause climate change. These mitigation strategies, however, frequently exclude consideration of climate justice and the impact on marginalised peoples who depend on affected ecosystems, aggravating their situation by causing displacement and environmental conflicts [11–13]. For example, by analysing climate governance of national protected areas to fight deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon, Paredes & Kaulard [14] evidenced that Indigenous Peoples’ practices of small-agriculture, fishing, hunting, and gathering were criminalised when entering protected conservation areas without permission, not considering the traditional uses of the territory, limiting Indigenous Peoples’ access to land and increasing their livelihood vulnerability. Climate justice is particularly resonant for Indigenous Peoples, who in many cases face persistent marginalisation in decision-making spaces, combined with the degradation of ecosystems and biodiversity, as well as climate change impacts, with broader negative consequences for their food systems, heritage, and socio-cultural identity [15, 16]. Indigenous Peoples’ lands safeguard 80% of the planet’s remaining biodiversity, and rates of biodiversity loss are lower in Indigenous territories [17–20]. However, over the last 50 years, Indigenous food systems–based on their interdependence on ecosystems, including biodiversity–have been affected by development frameworks that prioritise urbanisation, natural resource extraction, and monoculture, making them highly vulnerable to a range of climate impacts, including, for example, increases in the frequency, intensity and severity of droughts, floods, heatwaves, and sea level rise [3, 16, 18, 21]. Despite playing a key role in the current climate crisis, knowledge production for adaptation and mitigation strategies has largely excluded Indigenous knowledge and been managed by Western science, and in doing so, typically dismissed Indigenous conceptualisations, epistemologies, and worldviews linking nature and society [4, 22–24]. Regardless of the recent growing recognition of Indigenous knowledge and rights within global climate governance, Indigenous Peoples’ initiatives are limited within state-centric structures, which favour economic growth, overpower discourse on Indigenous rights, and often result in a tokenistic representation of Indigenous perspectives in decision-making [25–28]. National climate policy represents a new public sphere in which the relationship between nation-states and Indigenous Peoples is being redefined: addressing climate change is an opportunity to simultaneously enhance justice, sustainable development, and recognise Indigenous Peoples’ rights [2, 4, 11]. Nation states play a crucial role in addressing climate change by developing policies that advance a just transition to climate-resilient development; however, these initiatives usually clash with development strategies that privilege economic growth and resource extraction, especially in biodiversity hotspots where Indigenous Peoples frequently live [29]. As Routledge et al. [1] suggest, nation-states are paradoxically both the source of the problem and a crucial part of the solution towards climate-resilient development. However, there is little research and understanding of how national climate policies include Indigenous Peoples and their justice implications [28, 30–32]. To fill this gap, this paper develops a conceptual framework grounded in intercultural climate justice to analyse the inclusion and representation of Indigenous Peoples in national policy, using the case of national climate and food policies in Peru. Following a dual approach to critical discourse analysis, we apply this framework in Peru to understand: (1) how Indigenous Peoples are being presented in climate and food policies, and (2) the justice implications of the strategies within these policies for Indigenous Peoples.

4 Discussion and conclusions This paper examines the representation of Indigenous Peoples in Peruvian climate and food policies and evaluates the justice implications of these policies using an intercultural justice framework, based on a textual and discursive analysis. Our findings reveal that Indigenous Peoples are minimally included in these policies, highlighting their extreme vulnerability to climate change and food insecurity. The integration of Indigenous knowledge and worldviews is also a limited, primarily due to their exclusion from policy design and implementation. Additionally, there is a limited attempt to distribute goods and resources fairly to address existing inequalities. Despite the ongoing limited incorporation of Indigenous Peoples’ cultural diversity in national climate and food policies, there is an important space that is being claimed by Indigenous organisations to enhance their participation. Addressing Indigenous Peoples mainly in the definition of the problem rather than in the strategy or action plan evidences a lack of consideration of their cultural diversity and a continuation of one-size-fits-all policies. Several research have documented the inclusion of Indigenous Peoples in less substantial parts of national climate policies [30, 90, 91], as well as international mechanisms [26, 28, 92–94]. This is also referred to as the “victimisation framework” [92], in which Indigenous Peoples are portrayed as helpless victims of a catastrophic emergency who need to be saved by others. This framework creates a risk of homogenising the lived experiences of Indigenous Peoples about climate change and food insecurity: while highlighting only vulnerability, resilience experiences are omitted [95]. The portrait of Indigenous Peoples as passive victims legitimises outside interventions and state control, privileging solutions that are not based on Indigenous knowledge and worldviews, thereby perpetuating colonialism [96]. Furthermore, the omission of Indigenous peoples in the strategies of action plans only evidence the lack of tailored policies for adaptation to climate change and increase food security. Additionally, the confinement of Indigenous knowledge to technical skills around agriculture and resource management presented in Peruvian climate and food policies risks delegitimising Indigenous knowledge because it only understands Indigenous knowledge with a Western knowledge framework. The inclusion of Indigenous knowledge in climate change is especially difficult for natural sciences that are more aligned with positivist ideas [97], which delegitimise Indigenous Knowledge by referring to it as “anecdotal” [92] and in need of validation by scientific knowledge [98]. As such, Indigenous knowledge is being included “in a symbolic way rather than moving towards epistemic belonging” [25]. Furthermore, most strategies in the analysed policies focus on implementing market-oriented plans and the economic value of their ecosystem’s conservation. This is a contradiction in many ways because the current climate crisis originated by pursuing unlimited economic growth based on a dualist ontology of Western modernity [96, 99]. Thus, solutions to climate change should privilege Indigenous worldviews, knowledge, and priorities considering as equally valid as other types of knowledge and ways of living [26, 100]. Although most policies have historically excluded Indigenous Peoples from design and implementation, the FPIC law has provided opportunities for Indigenous participation, impacting how Indigenous Peoples, their knowledge, and worldviews are being represented in Peruvian climate and food policies. The Intercultural Health Sector Policy (2016), the National Strategy on Forest and Climate Change (2016), and the Climate Change Gender Action Plan (2016) notably include Indigenous worldviews in their texts because Indigenous peoples participated in the design of these documents. Although some researchers argue that such spaces in climate governance do not give Indigenous Peoples opportunities to “assess and influence the multiple, interacting stressors that contribute to their climate vulnerability” [28], this paper provides evidence that meaningful Indigenous participation in the policy design process ensure that their inputs are integrated as well as a more respectful representation of their cultural diversity. Finally, the biggest limitation of this research is that the results are focused only on nominal inclusion of Indigenous Peoples in policy texts. Further research could be undertaken to analyse, for example, how nominal inclusions translate into policy implementation. Additionally, a close analysis of the role of the Indigenous Peoples’ Platform against Climate Change in Peru since its creation in 2020 could provide insights into whether Indigenous-led initiatives contribute to a just climate transition and overcome systemic barriers in policy making.

Acknowledgments I want to thank my primary supervisor, Prof. Lea Berrang-Ford, who made this paper possible. Her guidance and advice carried me through all the years of writing this paper and encouraged me to finish it. I would also like to thank Prof. James D. Ford and Dr. Carol Zavaleta for believing in this paper since it started and for believing in me to lead a policy analysis working group so I could have the time and resources to finish this paper.

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[1] Url: https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000404

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