CHAPTER 6- BEYOND EXTRACTIVE GOVERNANCE: THE EMERGENCE
6.1 INDIGENOUS POLITICAL ONTOLOGIES
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CHAPTER 6- BEYOND EXTRACTIVE GOVERNANCE: THE EMERGENCE OF INDIGENOUS POLITICAL ONTOLOGIES
6.1 INDIGENOUS POLITICAL ONTOLOGIES
Most analysis of the extractive governance in Taiwan mainly focus on the short-time memory within the extractive discourse framework. The ill governance is therefore perceived as a particular problem that based on the same rationale of distributive conflicts, as a problem of deficient political representation of indigenous peoples, or as a problem of institutional weaknesses of the Presidency and the Legislation Yuan, specifically, their moves to enact unconstitutional decrees.
Nevertheless, the case in Nan’ao cannot be explained in narrow terms by reducing analysis of ill governance to matters of distribution, political participation. The problems are raised as a products of long and complex processes of colonization. The decolonial perspective is crucial for such analysis.
According to decolonial perspectives, even though formal colonialism ended up in legal and political terms, coloniality27 remains in our societies because power is still distributed around a colonial ontology and epistemology, and consequently the regulative aspects of the society (the way in which social and economic relations are organized) still respond to this logic (Acuña, 2015) The central issue is that private
27 Colonial quality or character; the fact or state of being a colony
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companies and neo-liberal states are based on an ontology of economic growth, a political discourse that post-development scholars have long seen as hegemonic (Simon, 2012). This diffusion of political authority is associated with external and internal factors related to the state. On the other hands, the rise of civil society organization (CSOs) and corporations in politics is a result of the strengthening of these actors in the institutional arena, developing a political culture that has promoted non-state public goods and collective action. In the context of globalization,
companies are more easily able to cross borders in pursuit of maximizing their interests, and have been increasingly successful both locally and globally. On the other hand, this kind of governance is related to a dual crisis of the state: first, the state policy will be maneuvered by the demands of hegemonic economic sectors, and secondly, the state will be constrained on its capability on the social responsibility and its accountability toward the public and therefore, it leads to the ensuing loss of social legitimacy. Both factors have an effect on the state exclusively in term of its
performance and effectiveness to carry out the policy.
The decolonial approach is crucial to understanding the permanence of
coloniality in current socio-environmental conflicts. With this law, the state was able to transfer natives’ lands, empowering it to displace, eliminate or exploit natives people. This open legal violence such as Mining Act, Basic Law, Indigenous Traditional Lands Regulations, and the Forestry Act, the Regulations for
Conservation Forest Managements still exist in our legal discourse. Those laws and regulations were a means of assuring internal colonization because after titling
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communities, huge parcels of land remained without ownership (land that truly
constituted indigenous territory), favoring land grabbing by the state and corporations.
These and other legal and policy precedents are crucial to understanding the Nan’ao mining governance. The enactment of the ‘illegal’ decrees was not the result of a lack of coordination within the government or due to inefficient policy- making.
Indeed, these decrees were approved because of the permanence of coloniality:
Taiwanese political and economic elites still consider the Nan’ao river basin as a space for exploitation and indigenous peoples as barriers for the development of the whole nation. This is usually disguised and downplayed by scholars who emphasize the governance approach in their analyses.
It is also important to emphasize the dispossession of identities deployed by the processes of extractivism. The political economy of extraction transforms indigenous political subjectivities; they become poor mining workers, merchants or peasants with a salary or proprietary entitlements but not with territorial rights. The detachment is a process by which capitalist expansion is able to appropriate the resources relied upon by indigenous peoples. “Extractivism is not just a process of accumulation and dispossession of land and resources, but is also a process that, based on a specific ontology and epistemology, produces subjectivities and denies indigeneity” (Acuña, 2015) These different processes of dispossession of land, resources and subjectivities have had different extensions in the contexts of time and space. Those indigenous peoples and local communities that maintain their identity, territory and ancestral social and legal practices call for respect of their own forms of governance.
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“Indigenous peoples may be more concerned about the negative impact of projects on the natural environment that has nourished them for generations, or about local political sovereignty” (Simon, 2007). In that context, opposition to mining can be seen as the Nan’ao struggle to preserve their political ontology beyond extractive governance. That is why their struggle are strongly connected to explicit ecological concerns.
Their argument by Atayal is based on the following: that the lands which it works comprise ancestral Atayal territory, and that the area, overall, is ecologically sensitive.28 This view dismisses allegations made by companies and supporters that the opposition of indigenous peoples to mining activities is being fuelled by their desires to receive a greater share of financial benefits as a condition to operate. For the Atayal in Nan’ao, in the case of mining there is no space even for consultation, as explained by one interviewee: ‘‘negotiation and consultation with either government or corporations is political expedience, our request is giving our land back in order to safeguard our river resource”29 Some Atayal interviewed explained that “it is
possible to negotiate with the mining company that is attempting to continue the operation in Nan’ao, but most believed that there is no reason for any discussion to take place because the collective view of the people is that it should not be operating there”.30
28 Interview conducted by the author with AS on August 22, 2017.
29 Interview conducted by the author with AS on August 22, 2017.
30 Interview conducted by the author with CH on September 11, 2017
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Ecological concerns were voiced not only by indigenous people and activists, but also by some of the township and village officials interviewed. For indigenous
peoples, these concerns are constitutive elements of their political ontology: the natural environment assures them of survival in material terms. It also has cultural and political importance, providing a space for particular social interrelations and being local peoples’ ancestral territory. Thus, the translation of indigenous political ontologies into policy designs entails recognition of the right to self-determination.
Indigenous peoples seek to manage their territory in a way that can assure their cultural survival. It does not mean that contradictions over the exploitation of natural resources within indigenous territories do not exist. These divergences exist but indigenous peoples claim that they must be solved within the boundaries of their self-determination as peoples instead of being decided by those in power allegedly making decisions on behalf of the ‘nation’ (Simon, 2007).
In addition, the ecological perspective of indigenous peoples is not a traditional or immutable view of the natural environment; it is rather a dynamic one that entails looking for alternatives to the dominant extractive model. The local leader, who is studying Master’s degree, raises the movement to find the roots of the culture. He arranges the trips every year, hiking to the original community in order to strengthen the people’s belonging and identity. These groups of people eager to figure out how they lived in harmony with the environment for hundreds and thousands of years.
They utilized modern technology to record the traditional territory, cooperating with this research to film the whole process of the movement to show to the public the seriousness of the crisis and to find alternatives to extractive industries. He is no
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doubt, promoting the academic and professional preparation of more people in order that they learn how they can defend their territory.
In this context, indigenous political ontologies confront the extractive governance discourse. From the governance perspective, indigenous peoples are ethnic minorities or communities tolerated within a framework of multiculturalism and are assimilated by extractivism. Their land rights are property rights recognized as specific plots that can be negotiated and exchanged. Social conflicts emerge because legal entitlements are poorly defined, compensation is inappropriate, and/or formal political representation is scarce. From the standpoint of indigenous
ontologies, however, indigenous peoples are not ethnic minorities but rather ‘nations’
recognized within a theoretical framework of plural nationalism (Tully 1995, Bern and Dodds, 2000) which therefore have legitimate rights to self-determination.
However, “the state never seriously returned commercially valuable resources to claimants mainly because this would constitute a form of sovereignty, a vast challenge to the logic of internal colonial society and the modern nation state”
(Altman, 2012)
Theoretical framework of plural nationalism also means that instead of property rights to specific communities, they hold territorial rights as nations. They do not reject negotiations with extractive industries: negotiations are not necessarily about the benefits of extractive activities but rather about extractivism itself. From this perspective, social conflicts mainly respond to the permanence of coloniality, namely, the rejection of a different conceptualization of indigeneity and the natural
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environment beyond extractive governance. It is criticized for its incompatibility with indigenous knowledge and indigenous notions of ownership. State is bolstered
immeasurably by the strengthening of the normative framework of collective rights and inherent rights in international law allowing for greater share economic benefits of dispossession yet redistributing them entirely on their own terms in accordance with indigenous philosophies and congruent with indigenous identity. As Bern and Dodds have said:
“What seems to be at the core of these disputes is that western perceptions have, to a large degree, failed to recognize that indigenous conceptual systems have their own internal logic and rationality, which are not always translatable into the dominant western legal and political system. This is particularly evident in the policy-making areas, where western terminology and concepts are imposed as a way to define, categories and evaluate concepts in indigenous societies” (Bern and Dodds, 2000)