CHAPTER 6- BEYOND EXTRACTIVE GOVERNANCE: THE EMERGENCE
6.2 PUBLIC GOVERNANCE: TOWARDS NEW POLITCAL
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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)
6.2 PUBLIC GOVERNANCE: TOWARDS NEW POLITCAL THINKING
Modern states are often called nation-states. Yet, states are in fact multi-nation states. Still, these multi-nation states are often dominated politically by one or a few selected powerful elites, sometimes colonial groups, making other indigenous groups vulnerable in their own society (Chi, 2016) In the recent years, a series of indigenous movements “Return My Land” have helped indigenous groups fight against colonial domination and have gained much progress in terms of sociocultural rights.
Nevertheless, they have not reached to the status of self-government. The core problem was that indigenous lands were lost to colonial powers. Even though land is
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essential to indigenous development, it also has the potential to create conflicts of interest between indigenous peoples and the state. The public policy toward the issue was usually devoid of recognition of indigenous land rights. Therefore, nowadays the major claim of the indigenous movements has moved from the request for additional pieces of reserved land to the request for a total adjustment of the relation between indigenous peoples and the state. Indigenous activists claimed indigenous sovereignty over the “traditional territories” in their statement. (Kuan, 2016)
6.2.1 CONTEMPORARY GROUP-SPECIFIC ENTITLEMENT ACCOUNTS IN POLITICAL THEORY
James Tully have argued for pluralistic approaches to political institutions and for formal recognition of group-based entitlements to enhance self-determination within contemporary states. In Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (1995), and Aboriginal Peoples: Negotiating Reconciliation (1998), Tully
had mentioned the issue concerning indigenous self-government in Canada. James Tully’s pluralism takes the form of plural political institutions within a confederation of distinct nations: those institutions of the First Nations of Canada, those institutions of the Métis nation and those institutions of the Canadian nation. In term of land rights, Tully argues for proper recognition of the distinct and pre-existing set of relations with the land enjoyed by indigenous peoples before expropriation, and the need to avoid seventeenth to nineteenth-century cultural biases in understanding both the nature of indigenous nations and the systems of property characteristic of those nations (Tully 1994). By applying this idea into practice, he uses a framework of three
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conventions: recognition, continuity and consent. First of all, proper recognition is recognition by all Canadians of the diverse nations to which indigenous people belong as well as the non-indigenous nation. Secondly, it is also recognition of the continuity of the nations, their traditions and law- that is, their ongoing existence and
significance. Further, it is recognition of the democratic norm shared by indigenous and non-indigenous people of consent to those things that affect each group in a society (Tully 1995). As such, this kind of pluralism Tully in favor of is a pluralism of national institutions and structures as federated within predominant, pluralistic,
Canadian confederation.
Iris Young’s research focus on groups and special representation which takes the form of recognizing group-based differences within the state and the need for special representation of oppressed groups in order to give those groups a political voice. Her goal is justice realized not simply as distribution, but more as the development of institutional conditions essential for the the development and exercise of individual willingness and collective communication and cooperation (Young, 2000).
Will Kymlicka has also argued for a recognition of cultural pluralism within a single set of state institutions as a way of acknowledging the value of cultural membership for individuals’ life-plans (Kymlicka 1995). He advocates for greater political autonomy for forcibly annexed groups through indigenous group-specific representation rights or rights of self-determination within state borders. This is the freedom to pursue their preferred cultural life and the good governance that members of the dominant cultural groups enjoy by virtue of their shared linguistic, cultural,
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spiritual and institutional history. Kymlicka maintains that there are circumstances in which indigenous groups should be granted regional political and legal
self-determination, not just legal ownership of (parts of) their historical territories. In rare cases, secession and full self-government rights may be the only means of protecting rights to cultural identity (Kymlicka, 1995)
6.2.2 SELF-DETERMINATION AND SOVEREIGNTY
In lifting the debate to the level of relations between nations, and arguing for greater self-determination of the affairs of each nation by the nation, there is a risk of homogenizing the diversity within each nation. Tully, Young, Isak, Brown all uses a concept of sovereignty that they envisage as a move away from one understood as absolute authority over a uniform polity. Tully suggest: “Sovereignty in this non-absolute sense means the authority of a culturally diverse people or association of peoples to govern themselves by their own laws and ways free from external subordination” (Tully 1995).
Essentially, in this case, sovereignty is understood to mean that citizens entrust their individual sovereignty” in forming their governance. The consent of the
governed as individual sovereigns is a means to check the power of the government,
which means that the individuals have stakes in governance to the degree government upholds their rights. Michael Brown also add to the foundation of the Tully’s
argument that the very concept of sovereignty fails to “admit the fluid, multiplex realities of native mobility and cultural intermixture; it rests instead on the misleading premise of stable, clear-cut cultural, ethnic and territorial boundaries and fixed,
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singular identities” (Brown 2007). Plagued by the historical differences, the notion of sovereignty in legal principle remains incomprehensible, ambiguous but critically important.
Young points to the extent of moral considerations that have been advanced against the idea of a global state system as well as the pressure in practice to regulate across national boundaries. She points to the need for a reconceptualization of sovereignty that would separate it from the system of nation states in favor of more diverse arrangement of ‘secessionless’ sovereignty that is shared among different levels of government. The assertion of ‘sovereignty without secession’ indicates the willingness to work within the system rather than outside of it, a secessionless
sovereignty is consistent with the demands of post colonizing society. (Young, 2000)
Isak Afo (2013) argues, in an article promoting Amis nation sovereignty, that the Amis nation needs to fight for regional autonomy or have a separatist movement in order to achieve national sovereignty and to avoid being assimilated by the modern state. Sovereignty in his perspectives includes having full political and cultural autonomy (including decision-making in policies related to language preservation, land and resource protection, and enterprise management)
Through the 1990s and early 2000s, international organizations and many countries, including Taiwan, began paying more attention to the natural rights of indigenous peoples and the ways in which their rights had been neglected in the process of decolonization. For indigenous nations, the meaning of the term sovereignty encompasses their cultural values, aside from their government as
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vehicles of sovereignty, and extends well beyond the boundaries of any legal principles.
6.2.3 IN SUMMARY
Institutional structures that once colonized the ‘nation within’ are no longer acceptable; in their places instead, are indigenous models of self-determination that sharply curtail the state while advancing the idea of indigenous people as autonomous political communities. The noted Métis scholar, Paul Chartrand, writes to this effect when he says ‘We are political communities in the sense that we are a distinct culture and we want to create political institutions to maintain those very distinct
communities (Chartrand 1999).
This research believes the new political thinking should be created to ameliorate asymmetric power relations. There is a need for an effective and accountable nation to nation relations that can play the role of reviewing with extractive development. This institutional framework should, however, also serve as a mechanism to allow these communities which had the direct impacts from the mining industry an avenue to participate in the real decisions-making process. A special relationship (‘nation to nation’) with the state is the precondition for atonement and reconciliations. We should move to restore autonomy and cultural integrity at the level of governance.
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