Is the tide turning? Mobilizing indigenous rights for Environmental Justice: A case study from extractive projects in La Alta Guajira, Colombia

Sammanfattning: This thesis explored the opportunities and challenges to Environmental Justice (EJ) for Wayuu communities as Colombia expands the resource frontier deeper into indigenous lands. Based on qualitative fieldwork the case study has discussed how, and why, indigenous Wayuu in La Alta Guajira engage with or resist a recent offshore hydrocarbon concession in their territories and how indigenous rights, through the formalization of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), may offer possibilities for EJ for the Wayuu. By operationalizing EJ as distributional, procedural and recognition justice and by combining this framework with a conceptualization of Politicization of Indigenous Rights and Identity, I argue that struggles surrounding the concession could be seen as struggles for greater Environmental Justice as local Wayuu have demanded fairer distribution of benefits from resource extraction, participation in environmental decision-making and respect for indigenous self-determination. The analysis showed the diversity of indigenous responses to extractive development and how mobilization of rights was necessary to claim opportunities. Main conclusions from this work highlight the need for consultation processes to be designed from the bottom-up and that structural factors, despite indigenous rights frameworks, highly influence Wayuu possibilities to participation in environmental decisions and actions concerning their lives and livelihoods.