Making Indigeneity without Indigenous Peoples through REDD+ initiatives

REDD+ projects aim to ‘reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries’ by providing ‘additional forest-related activities that protect the climate, namely sustainable management of forests and the conservation and enhancement of forest carbon stocks’ (UNFCCC 2024). While some actors underscore the benefits of REDD+, some critical scholars have emphasized how this type of initiative reproduces the capitalist logic that generated the ongoing socio-environmental crisis. We contribute to this line of inquiry by examining how Indigeneity is framed by non-Indigenous actors who work in REDD+ projects in Colombia. Answering this question is critical because these projects usually occur in dense forest areas that Indigenous Peoples inhabit and whose design and management are in the hands of external actors. Based on a year of participant observation at in-person and online public meetings and workshops about REDD+, 20 open and semi-structured interviews with non-Indigenous actors involved in these projects, and the analysis of primary public documents, we identify two dominant ways of thinking about Indigeneity that are strongly entangled with gendered processes: through the lenses of entrepreneurship and guardianship. We argue that such framing traps Indigeneity in Western values and potentially intensifies gendered-based inequalities and power differentials.