Climate Crisis and Western Capital in the Tropics: Can Resources Allocated to Indigenous-led Funds Make a Difference?

Indigenous Peoples' Organizations around the world often operate with minimal monetary resources, yet they leverage knowledge, time-tested practices, social networks, and remarkable creativity to achieve impact. Their capacity for collective action has finally earned recognition and respect from mainstream environmentalists and the scientific community after being largely minimized and excluded from dominant narratives about ‘nature’ as far back as the public science of Alexander von Humboldt, or seen as a potential menace for fragile ecosystems.  They are known for preserving extensive forests, reviving coastal ecosystems, and maintaining pasture areas with better soil quality than “undisturbed" ones.  More often than not, they provide proof that societies can have a positive influence on ecosystems all over the planet, having more than one type of behavior or way of relating to the world. 

It can be difficult to grasp the nuances and avoid essentializing a category like 'Indigenous Peoples,' as it is both globalized and synthetic, encompassing immense diversity. It is constructed in opposition to the traumatic history of colonial empires and their rationale. Their networks work with the diversity of millennial history and its centuries-old opposition and negotiation with different colonial powers, defending territories, preserving cultural identities, and integrating worldviews into global discourses to resist blunt forms of homogenization and acculturation.

As Indigenous Peoples are already framed as key actors in addressing the global environmental crises, questions about the instrumentalization of their rights, knowledge, and practices have to be raised. Will people value Indigenous Peoples' networks for their utility (or ability) to mitigate crises? Will globalized societies share resources to foster collective action among Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples for a living planet? 

In this blog post, I will focus on how Indigenous organizations struggled to be the ones that administrate new resources to halt deforestation and forest degradation in the tropics, and they continue to do so. 

Between 2011 and 2020, only 1% of global climate financing, or an average of $270 million annually, was directed toward supporting land tenure and forest management by Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Often, these resources are indirect, short-term, unpredictable, and misaligned with the self-determined priorities of the organizations and territories they are meant to support. With the goal of transforming this structure and channeling direct financing to their territories, Indigenous Peoples, Afro Descendent Peoples, and Local Community-led organizations have started to develop innovative initiatives and mechanisms aimed at shifting unequal relationships within the current financing ecosystem. 

Many actors are involved in this change at several degrees and recommend improving the engagement with Indigenous and local communities’ organizations. As for now, most of the projects financed by The Green Climate Fund are currently channeled through big international environmental NGOs or international institutions. Its evaluation unit highlights that Indigenous Peoples knowledge and input is still insufficiently leveraged, and the rights and concerns of IPs are to be further ensured and addressed when project-level grievance redress mechanisms (GRMs) function effectively.  Recently, UNDP started a new initiative on Indigenous Leadership to enhance direct access to financial resources. 

The oldest ongoing Indigenous-led fund with global reach is PawankaFund, which responds to the needs of Indigenous peoples by building relationships of trust, networking, and promoting articulation between local and global processes. They provide direct support to community-led organizations for the recovery and revitalization of indigenous knowledge and learning systems in seven socio-cultural regions of the world, including North America, Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Arctic, the Pacific, and Russia. 

Similarly, Indigenous Peoples and local communities directly manage the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund, a groundbreaking financial mechanism that, along with other territorial funds, is part of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities (GATC). Operating in six countries across Mesoamerica, the fund empowers those who live and sustain the last remaining large forests to steward natural territories while supporting their development goals. Currently, FTM is working on its third call for proposals that expands beyond AMPB member organizations.  This model ensures that resources are allocated in alignment with local priorities, fostering resilience and cultural continuity. In Indonesia, the Nusantara Fund offers another compelling example of how a light structure can efficiently support a good network of initiatives. In the Brazilian Amazon, Podaáli has been carefully designed and envisioned by COIAB for more than ten years to ensure that its governance supports, rather than bureaucratizes, the representative organization or the aldeias. Its approach focuses on providing resources in forms that empower these organizations to strengthen their capacities and achieve remarkable outcomes aligned with their visions and priorities.

The task is challenging. These efforts usually work amid violence, as most of these landscapes do not play by the rule of law, but are on the verge of great change. As liberalism is in a profound crisis, the foundational respect for others' rights—vital for peace—is increasingly under threat. Efforts by prominent Amazonian thinkers such as Davi Kopenawa, Ailton Krenak, and others publishing for a global audience reflect their challenge to many practices of globalized societies associated with commodity transactions.

For Ailton Krenak, referring to Brazil, the root of the country's inability to embrace its Indigenous peoples lies in the enduring colonial mindset that expects them to contribute to the success of modernity's "nature-depleting project," just like everyone else. This mindset overlooks the fact that Indigenous peoples have maintained their ways of life for thousands of years, which have been relentlessly and inhumanely attacked by these colonial attitudes that persist to this day. This depleting project confined Indigenous Peoples' influence, if any, to specific and exceptional territories. Indigenous territories, they warn, will continue to retreat unless they can foster communication, reciprocity, and respect.  

What does true transformation involve? A global alliance of indigenous peoples emphasizes that a just transition must ensure the return, recognition, and respect of Indigenous lands, territories, and waters, alongside the protection of Indigenous natural resources, ecosystems, and other vital means of livelihood (IP Principles for Just Transition). Tokenism—the mere symbolic inclusion of Indigenous voices to create the illusion of equality—fails to deliver meaningful environmental outcomes. True progress—whether in an openly adverse or relatively favorable context that nevertheless keeps colonial principles unquestioned—comes from empowering Indigenous communities by granting them decision-making authority and legitimacy. This approach not only advances environmental goals but also affirms creativity and cultural sovereignty. 

It is crucial to align societal investments with place-based knowledge, localized health systems, and innovative frameworks for assessing risk and resilience—measures that may ultimately define the cost of avoiding an apocalyptic trajectory.

The examples outlined here can illustrate how resource mobilization might move beyond tokenism to effectively support Indigenous-led solutions to global challenges. While much remains to be seen and learned, there is no denying the wealth of experience already present—encompassing the painful legacy of colonial violence, the nuanced legitimization achieved through reformist approaches, and the perspective of grounding economies in networks of sustained territories. Building territorial funds and mobilizing resources are not to be portrayed as silver bullets to resolve structural social issues. Nevertheless, they represent a tangible step that initiates a series of transformative actions, promoting alternative models of efficiency and dismantling barriers to financial support for community-driven initiatives in tropical regions worldwide.

References 

Hatcher, J., Owen, M., & Yin, D. (2021). Falling short Donor funding for Indigenous Peoples and local communities to secure tenure rights and manage forests in tropical countries (2011–2020)(pp. 1–33). Norway: Rainforest Foundation Norway.

Krenak, A. (2023). Life is not useful. Polity

Liboiron, M. (2021). Pollution is colonialism. Duke University Press.

Pratt, M. L. (2007). Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. Routledge.

Redvers, N., Schultz, C., Vera Prince, M., Cunningham, M., Jones, R., & Blondin, B. (2020). Indigenous perspectives on education for sustainable healthcare. Medical Teacher, 42(10), 1085–1090. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159X.2020.1791320

“Indigenous Peoples Principles and Protocols for Just Transition”, https://www.indigenoussummit.org/summit-outcome

Independent Evaluation Unit (2025). Independent Evaluation of the Green Climate Fund's Approach to Indigenous Peoples. Evaluation report No. 22 (January). Songdo, South Korea: Independent Evaluation Unit, Green Climate Fund

Deborah Delgado Pugley is an associate professor of sociology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and a Visiting Scholar at KU Leuven. She is also a research associate for the Andes Amazon Program at the Field Museum in Chicago and the 2024–2025 Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor. Her scholarly work focuses on environmental and climate policies in the tropics, with extensive fieldwork across the Amazon regions of Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil. She has led research initiatives on climate change, Indigenous Peoples movements, human rights, natural resource management, conservation, and gender, with a strong commitment to advancing environmental justice. Her co-authored book *En un ambiente tóxico. Ser madres después de un derrame de petróleo* (CLACSO, 2020) examines the environmental and health crises faced by Indigenous Kukama women in Loreto, Peru, following an oil spill, highlighting the need for responsive policies. Engaged in global climate policy, she has participated in United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change discussions for over a decade and collaborated with Indigenous organizations, environmental NGOs, and international agencies such as the FAO and UNDP. Currently, she is working on *Panamazonia: Indigenous Peoples and the Political Economy of Climate Change*, based on her ongoing collaborations with Amazonian organizations. Delgado Pugley holds a Ph.D. in International Development from the Catholic University of Louvain and in Sociology from the EHESS Paris School of Social Sciences Studies.