The FPIC Principle Meets Land Struggles in Cambodia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea

Colin Filer, Sango Mahanty and Lesley Potter
Additional contact information
Colin Filer: Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Acton ACT 2601, Australia
Sango Mahanty: Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Acton ACT 2601, Australia
Lesley Potter: Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Acton ACT 2601, Australia

Land, 2020, vol. 9, issue 3, 1-21

Abstract: Social and environmental safeguards are now commonplace in policies and procedures that apply to certain kinds of foreign investment in developing countries. Prominent amongst these is the principle of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), which is commonly tied to policies and procedures relating to investments that have an impact on ‘indigenous peoples’. This paper treats international safeguards as a possible manifestation of what Karl Polanyi called the ‘double movement’ in the operation of a capitalist market economy. Our concern here is with the way that the FPIC principle has been applied in struggles over the alienation of land and associated natural resources claimed by indigenous peoples or customary landowners in three developing countries—Cambodia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Case studies of recent land struggles in these countries are used to illustrate the existence of a spectrum in which the application of the FPIC principle may contribute more or less to the defence of customary rights. On one hand, it may be little more than a kind of ‘performance’ that simply adds some extra value to a newly created commodity. On the other hand, it may sometimes enable local or indigenous communities and their allies in ‘civil society’ to mount an effective defence of their rights in opposition to the processes of alienation or commodification. The paper finds that all three countries have political regimes and national policy frameworks that are themselves resistant to the imposition of social and environmental safeguards by foreign investors or international financial institutions. However, they differ widely in the extent to which they make institutional space for the FPIC principle to become the site of a genuine double movement of the kind that Polanyi envisaged.

Keywords: free, prior and informed consent; indigenous people; land; environmental and social safeguards; double movement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/9/3/67/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/9/3/67/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jlands:v:9:y:2020:i:3:p:67-:d:325601

Access Statistics for this article

Land is currently edited by Ms. Carol Ma

More articles in Land from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().