Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Indigenous Peoples (IPs) are particularly vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change. This vulnerability is closely associated with social inequality which is rooted in the IPs’ physical and economic exposure, history of colonization, marginalization, and poverty. Because some of the leading measures to address social inequality, including legal and policy mechanisms, tend to focus on economic production, they only further expose IPs to the disproportionate risks of climate change.

We seek to examine how institutional and legal inadequacies and mismatches between IP governance systems and more conventional government systems doubly expose IPs to the negative consequences of climate change. In the process, we also seek to identify key institutional shortfalls and legal barriers that need to be addressed in order to raise the resilience of IPs to climate change. In addition, we analyze how IPs and their advocates engage strategies to help them make sense of and work around these inadequacies, including how the strategies that can be integrated into governance networks. Text, interviews, focus groups, and network analyses are employed to draw lessons from case studies of two tribal communities - the Talaandig and the Higaonon - from Misamis Oriental and Bukidnon Provinces in Mindanao, Philippines. The methodological approach will allow the paper to tease out the nuances on the resilience and vulnerability of IPs to the changing forest conditions spawned by climate change.