Indigenous title as a trap: Maritza Paredes, Danitza Gil, Anke Kaulard, ‘The Indigenous land titling trap: adaptive practices and the limits of climate governance’, World Development, 204, 2026, #107429 | settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous title as a trap: Maritza Paredes, Danitza Gil, Anke Kaulard, ‘The Indigenous land titling trap: adaptive practices and the limits of climate governance’, World Development, 204, 2026, #107429

23Apr26

Abstract: This article examines why Indigenous land titling, widely promoted as an enabling condition for climate action, advances without closing persistent gaps in territorial recognition. It conceptualizes this paradox as a climate titling institutional trap, in which reforms progress through adaptive practices yet remain embedded in territorial governance configurations that constrain their transformative potential. Drawing on an extended case study of Kichwa communities in San Martín, Peru, based on multi-scalar ethnographic research, the paper shows how Indigenous leaders and bureaucrats deploy pragmatic strategies to navigate administrative bottlenecks and secure partial advances in titling. However, these gains unfold within historically layered regimes of agrarian, extractive, and conservation governance that overlap and converge in limiting Indigenous territorial rights. The interaction between adaptive practices and these layered institutional orders produces incremental change without altering underlying power relations. The article contributes to development debates by reframing institutional traps as dynamic outcomes of reform processes, highlighting the political-economic conditions shaping the limits of Indigenous inclusion in climate governance.

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