ALL WELCOME
Tuesday 11 February 2020
4.30–6.00 Mond Building Seminar Room
Yong Zhou
Visiting Scholar, University of Oslo
Institutionalizing Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in China: From a PaternalisticEvolutionist Paradigm to Self-determined Development
The adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of IndigenousPeoples(UNDRIP) was a milestone achievement of global human rightsprotection, but pronounced challenges remain to make these extensively acknowledgednorms a reality of institutionalized order. The lack of implementation of these rights domestically resultsin the failure of achieving the interlinked global agendas on human rights, climate changeandsustainable development.
Implementation of UNDRIP in China is a process requiring a paradigm shift of the institutional framework from a paternalistic relation of the state and indigenous peoples towards an indigenous self-determined development. In exploring constraints and possibilities of such a change, issues of applying the “free prior informed consent” (FPIC) rule in natural resources exploration will be discussed. By observing logging in Oroqin hunters´ community and hydropower development in the Tibet-Yi Corridor, this seminar tries to present empiricalcases for the argument of a “pluralistically institutionalizing interactions” approach and to shed the light on weakensses of the “spiral model”, which assumes a simplified route of the powerfulness of international norms for domestic change.