Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), a cornerstone of indigenous self-determination under ILO Convention 169 and UNDRIP, was among the first in Latin America to be codified in Peru through the Prior Consultation Law (Ley N° 29785). Over the past ...
Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), a cornerstone of indigenous self-determination under ILO Convention 169 and UNDRIP, was among the first in Latin America to be codified in Peru through the Prior Consultation Law (Ley N° 29785). Over the past decade, however, FPIC has been widely criticized as functioning less as a substantive rights mechanism and more as an administrative tool that depoliticizes indigenous resistance and sustains neo-extractivism.
This study conceptualizes this disjuncture as an “implementation gap” and attributes it to two primary causes: (1) structural factors, notably legal ambiguity, and (2) political factors, rooted in the state’s nationalist-developmentalist premises. Despite emerging as a political victory of the 2009 Bagua uprising, Peru’s Consultation Law was drafted with minimal indigenous participation, systematically undermining the binding nature and efficacy of the process.
The paper concludes that the “closed spaces” created by FPIC remain subordinated to statist resource governance. Yet indigenous actors persistently repoliticize and transform these into “created spaces” of autonomous agency.