1 - Development Projects, Indigenous Peoples’ Land Rights and Rights Implementation

Summary

This chapter provides some economic, social, legal and technical context to development projects and their interfaces with indigenous peoples’ rights to land and the focus of this book. Situating development projects within historical precedents from colonial times, it identifies some important new features of the modern development project landscape. These include the increasing proximity of international economic arrangements and transnational financial transactions such as project finance and its underlying documentary network with issues of indigenous land connection, survival and precarity. Against this background, the book’s objective is to consider how, under the conditions of a development project and its contractual framework and safeguarding policy architecture, private entities and judicial and non-judicial mechanisms frame, conflict with and informally delegate out the recognition and implementation of rights to land for indigenous people. In responding to this objective, I lay out the core themes that repeat throughout: fragmentation, invisibility, power(lessness), priority, delegation, (un)predictability and the integration of public and private remedies.