Indigenous Peoples’ land rights: a culturally sensitive strategy for poverty eradication and sustainable development

Alejandro Fuentes

Chapter 19 in Research Handbook on Human Rights and Poverty, 2026, pp 329-345 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: In Latin America – as in most parts of the world – Indigenous Peoples are ‘the poorest of the poor, and the most excluded of the excluded’. Poverty goes hand in hand with their situation of vulnerability, exclusion, and disempowerment. How can this situation be changed? How to find adequate frameworks able to facilitate the overturn of their structural disenfranchisement? Departing from the jurisprudence developed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACrtHR), this chapter argues that the recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ right to collective property over their traditional lands and natural resources constitutes the most adequate strategy for poverty reduction that takes into consideration their own cultural distinctiveness. In this sense, the recognition and effective realization of Indigenous Peoples’ land rights constitute the most effective strategy for reducing and ending their structural condition of poverty but also for guaranteeing their societal inclusion and cultural empowerment. Finally yet importantly, the effective recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ land rights could also be understood as a culturally sensitive approach to the realization of the UN 2030 Agenda and the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 1 (End poverty in all its forms everywhere) that takes into consideration and respects their cultural diversity.

Keywords: Indigenous Peoples; Cultural identity; Right to land; Poverty; Sustainable development; Inter-American Court of Human Rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035350506
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