“First I would like to say as one of the co-sponsors of this meeting - and in response to one recommendation - that we at Forest Peoples Programme will try to implement the follow up process that has been proposed. However we would like to do so with the indigenous peoples’ organisations, like the Alliance, with us in a support role.

Some people have said that they thought this meeting should have focused more on biodiversity. I must say that I thought that we were talking about biodiversity all the time.

We only reach what we now call ‘biodiversity’ through our ideas and through our societies. We regulate our activities through our institutions.

What institutions effectively regulate biodiversity use for the long term?

As we have heard, Indigenous Peoples live closest to many of the major remaining areas of high biodiversity. It is their institutions which are thus closest to biodiversity too.

Clearly, this meeting could have explored in more detail the way these communities and institutions interact with ‘nature’ at the local level on a day to day basis and there is a need for that. But local issues are also part of a bigger picture which is what we have focused on during this meeting.

So here is the bigger picture.

We have talked about how donors should give funds directly to indigenous peoples to help them secure biodiversity by securing their rights to land. This means helping them to map and claim their territories, to secure their rights through appropriate titling and to gain recognition for their own institutions so they can effectively own and control their lands and resources. This means providing assistance to their organisations and communities to build capacity, strengthen their institutions. It means providing holistic support - not narrowly conceived sectoral assistance just for what we think of as ‘biodiversity management - but for more broadly for health, human rights, for education.

We have said that wherever possible this funding should be direct to indigenous communities or that we should strive to shorten the money chain to limit the number of intermediaries between ‘donors’ and ‘recipients’.. If money is to be passed through NGOs then they must be made accountable to the IPOs in whose name funds are raised. Indigenous peoples are asking for long term support, for mutual accountability and two way leraning. Donors should seek to learn from Indigenous Peoples and be accountable to them as well as the reverse. Funding procedures should be simplified. One group also mentioned the need to support action-oriented research.

We have also learned that these ‘projects’ cannot be ‘sustainable’ or ‘replicable’ without reforms in current national processes. The main obstacles to securing indigenous peoples’ rights come from national laws, national policies and national institutions which do not recognise customary law and indigenous peoples’ rights. These national policies are themselves heavily influenced by international aid, trade and investment. We have heard for example how mining and oil exploration exert major pressures on national laws and policies and on indigenous territories.

So indigenous peoples also need support to carry out advocacy work to push for these reforms. They need to be able to engage in national dialogues to make their demands and ideas known. Advocacy NGOs can also help with this work. However the NGOs should work to support the indigenous voice and not substitute for it. Achieving such reforms will require alliances with broader social movements so that political space can be created and laws, policies and insitutions changed.

We have also talked about how these local and bottom up processes can be assisted by donors who work through governments. The diversity of kinds of donors has been recognised as a potential source of strength. There are possibilities for synergies between the ‘big donors’ and those which can give support direct to the indigenous peoples.

For this intergovernmental ‘aid’ to work in support of indigenous peoples there need to be changes in the way aid is given. There has been a lot of discussion about the need for effective donor coordination. A strong message from this meeting as that donors should have policies on indigenous peoples. They also need mechanisms to implement these policies: that means that staff should be given incentives to apply them and the funds to implement them properly. To cover so-called transaction costs. Additional funds or trust funds should be created to cover these diverse costs.

These policies should be ‘mainstreamed’ - applied across the whole portfolio of the agencies’ projects -so that they are not undoing with one hand what they are doing with the other. This means that indigenous issues should be included in the agencies ‘country strategies’ so that their whole project portfolio is coherent.

Donors should thus support efforts to reform national laws, policies and institutions to secure land rights and customary law. Indigenous peoples should be involved in monitoring and evaluating projects which should be elaborated using indigenous peoples’ knowledge so that the evaluation criteria are relevant ones. Projects should be guided by the principle of prior and informed consent. Measure should be introduced to regulate the private sector to ensure that it respects inidgenous peoples’ rights.

There has been some nervousness about the word ‘conditionality’. This smacks of interference with countries sovereignty. But we should recall that most countries have already agreed to operate to these standards through international agreements. For example, most have ratified the Convention on Biodiversity, which requires countries albeit ‘in the framework of national laws’ to secure customary management of natural resources. Most have also ratified the major human rights convenants which have been interpreted by the UN’s specialist committees as conferring the same rights of indigenous peoples that are conslidated in the draft declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. In this sense what is being advocated is that only that countries adhere to treaties to which they are already party. There has also been a call to get all countries to ratify ILO Convention 169.

Let me finish by thanking you all. It has been a very creative process and I feel good about the results.”

Marcus Colchester