New Indigenous Environmental Politics in Latin America: Institutional Entrepreneurship and Policy Learning by Example of the Peruvian Forest Legislation

What happens after new institutions for indigenous participation have been created and then serve to regulate crucial policy fields? The growing practice of prior consultations with Indigenous peoples in Latin America did not only trigger a vibrant discussion about their contribution for improving Indigenous self-determination (e.g. Wright/Tomaselli 2019). Moreover, prior consultations are increasingly used for creating new regulations in the contested field of natural resource governance, and therefore exhibit particular relevance. The paper addresses the following research questions: (how) can consultations be used to safeguard Indigenous interests concerning environmental governance in the course of national legislative processes? And, how are new institutions in this policy field shaped by consultative processes? Peru is a paradigmatic case for analyzing these issues, as it is the first country in Latin America that enacted a general Prior Consultation Law (2011). The paper analyzes indigenous participation in Peru’s new forest legislation and compares two instances of institution-building, the Peruvian Forests and Wildlife Law (2011) and its Regulatory Norm (2015), which were both issued after national consultations. The paper compares the inclusion of Indigenous organizations and explain why interest representation has been more substantial in the second instance. Conceptually, the paper rests on a combination of rational-choice and normative institutional theory and it is guided by the following hypotheses. (I) It is argued that the creation of Peru’s forest legislation can be seen as an institutionalization process, involving the legitimization of new roles and competencies. (II) The form of resulting institutions can be explained by both the relative power of different stakeholders and by the legitimization processes of these new institutions (via the internalization of routines, learning and socialization). Such an analytical approach helps to demonstrate why the exploitation of new participatory opportunities by Indigenous organizations has been more successful in 2015; they acted as institutional entrepreneurs (DiMaggio 1991, Maguire et al. 2004), creating wider legitimacy for their claims, attaching them to pre-existing organizational routines and bridging various stakeholders, which permitted them to access a dispersed set of bargaining resources (O’Faircheallaigh 2016). The empirical analysis rests on interview and archive data collected during field trips in 2015. Social network analysis is used for process tracing in order to examine the hypothesized causal mechanisms (resource exchange and legitimization) in a diachronic cross-case comparative design. The paper contributes to the literature on democratic innovations for Indigenous participation in Latin America by narrowing the „implementation gap“ (Weitzner 2017) after the enactment of prior consultations.