Since the start of my career, I had been coming across and thinking about the obstacles and problems that local communities and local non-profits face in the developing world. Throughout this time, I had been striving to develop solutions, but to little avail. I like to think that my perspectives grew more nuanced and more informed but was only a deeper look into ‘the problem’. Currently, I define this ‘problem’ as a state of incongruence between local and foreign ways of being, that I view mostly through the lens of modernity and neo-colonialism. As my understand changes and becomes increasingly complex and abstract, navigating between my biases, countless false and potentially one true scenario, I have felt a strong need to ground this understanding in some practical goal.

The COP offered me the opportunity to very seriously consider adopting a medium-term objective to work towards over the next few years.

On my first day at the COP, a colleague and I went to the indigenous people’s caucus, which was a meeting taking place on a daily basis amongst representatives of indigenous groups. It was in this meeting that a representative from Tibet raised a point about how troublesome the conflation of the two terms, ‘indigenous peoples’ and ‘local communities’ is, with regards to the formation and operation of the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples’ Platform (LCIPP) and its Facilitative Working Group (FWG).

Before this point, I was making the mistake that the representative from Tibet brought up. I was using and thinking about both indigenous peoples and local communities interchangeably. Only after spending much of the following week at the Indigenous Peoples’ pavilion did I begin to define the problem I wanted to address and articulate a potential approach to potentially addressing that problem.

First of all, indigenous peoples self-identify as such and enjoy protection and recognition through the UN Charter of Human Rights and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. A local community, on the other hand, could essentially be any group of people and there is no specific definition or recognition of local communities to any meaningful extent. Therefore, what the indigenous peoples that have taken on the intergenerational battle for inclusion are forced to share their victory (and all future support that the LCIPP receives) with an undefined set of communities that could potentially have very different priorities from the indigenous peoples.

On the other hand, this all gets far more complicated when I think about the Pakistani context in which I was working. Several of the communities I work with in Pakistan meet all the criteria for being indigenous but do not know that there is an advantage to the title nor that being recognized as indigenous is even an option. Additionally, the indigenous peoples that make up the LCIPP or that were present at the pavilion all seemed to come from cultures that were aesthetically distinct from the predominant cultures of their respective countries; whereby, for many of the Pakistani communities I was thinking about, it would be difficult for an outsider to distinguish between specific local cultures and the predominant set of ideals that make up the country (not that there is a single set of beliefs or ideologies that do so in Pakistan).

Also, several of these communities, such as those in Kashmir, want greater inclusion within Pakistan as a state (for example, they cannot vote in the national elections and their democracy is limited to state governance). In the pursuit of this greater inclusion, fueled by a need for support, these communities work to showcase their ‘Pakistani-ness’; however, it may be useful to think about how they might benefit from being informed of the potential to receive support and be recognized and acknowledged for what makes them distinct from the rest of the country.

Now, I am faced with two options for addressing this issue. Either I can work towards helping local communities in Pakistan navigate the complicated space of self-identifying as and then being recognized as ‘indigenous peoples’ OR I could work towards having more specific definitions produced for ‘local communities’ and then working towards fighting for the rights and inclusion of ‘local communities’ within international law. I expect that the ‘right’ answer for each community will be different. I strongly believe in creating opportunity for communities to decide amongst themselves how they want to approach the challenges they are facing. Yet, I am terrified of the prospect of communities making decisions on the basis of incomplete information or on the basis of ideas that are not holistic or that do not account for the varying epistemologies and philosophies which communities adhere to.