(Un)changing indigenous land claims policy: evidences from a cross-national comparison between Canada and Brazil

Abstract

Brazil and Canada, countries with large territories and with a minority Indigenous population scattered throughout the land have developed distinct ways to address such claims. Started in 1973, the Canadian public policy towards land claims recognition was reviewed in 1985 after a consultative process including Native groups from all over the country. This process was successful in changing some key aspects of the policy, leading to the design of the contemporary Comprehensive Land Claims Policy. The modern Brazilian policy to address native land claims was regulated in the early 1990’s. In 2016, Indigenous groups were called to participate in the 1º National Public Policy Conference on Indigenous Policy. However, this participatory institution was not able to change the current demarcation policy. To explain this variation in the observed policy change, we carried out case studies using both quantitative and qualitative data. To provide a contextual analysis of the participatory institutions, we suggest that not only the design of the participatory institutions should be taken in account, but also broader factors such as: 1. Constitutional provisions; 2. The role of the provinces and states; 3. The government agenda during the periods under investigation and; 4. The Indigenous political mobilization and civil society associations. Documental data and 12 interviews collected with key actors in both countries were used as analysis material. We concluded that, in the Canadian case, the virtuous interplay between the participatory institutional design, the incentives for change provided by the recently enacted constitution, the cooperative role of the provinces and the absence of concerted bureaucratic and political opposition provided the political environment which allowed policy change. In the Brazilian case, on the other hand, the internal undermining of the Conference by the government, its lack of political centrality and the presence of strong political interference of economic sectors organized in the Congress without the mediation of the head of the executive provided a political landscape where policy changes proposed by Indigenous peoples became unlikely. In both cases, the variable “Native collective agency” seemed to play no important role in the observed outcomes.