The modern state of New Zealand was founded on the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between the British Crown and indigenous Maori tribes. New Zealand’s partly uncodified, partly unwritten constitution is thus structured around questions of indigenous rights and the treaty relationship between the Maori and the Crown. This chapter examines how and why the Treaty and indigenous rights play a fundamental role in New Zealand’s constitutional system, and it uses the example of New Zealand to challenge conventional understandings as to what counts as a “constitution.”

This chapter underscores the role of liberation theology in promoting social rights. The Second Vatican Council (1962–5) and the Catholic Church’s concern with social inequality and development inspired the liberation theology movement, which took these concerns still further. From the mid-1960s until the end of the century, a small but active and progressive sector of the Mexican Catholic Church engaged with liberation theology and played a significant role in advancing the cause of social, cultural and indigenous rights. Empowering communities at the grassroots level, they helped found lay Catholic organisations and collaborated with networks and institutions to establish new NGOs and social movements that began to assert their social, cultural and indigenous rights. This was the first time that Catholic Church leaders took a radical approach to social inequality and opposed the state. By the 1990s, the influence of liberation theologians in the Church hierarchy was on the wane, but their legacy has persisted in social movements throughout Mexico ever since.

This chapter provides a background to and analysis of REDD+ from multiple angles and across a number of different registers. Firstly, it traces the history of REDD+ as a legal agreement that provides the framework through which activities to address deforestation and forest degradation can be measured, reported and verified as ‘result-based action’ and made legible in the rubric of one tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent. Secondly, this chapter examines REDD+ as constituted through experimental practices, preparatory and market-construction activities. Thirdly, it analyses REDD+ as a concept or idea arising from the field of environmental economics, namely, that forest protection can be ‘incentivised’ through the financial valuation of nature and payment for environmental services schemes, including potentially the inclusion of forests in international carbon markets. Fourthly, it provides an overview of the activities that are promoted through REDD+ and interrogates the history of both conservation and sustainable forest management. Finally, it outlines how the scope of REDD+ programmes and projects has extended beyond its initial environmental focus, so that REDD+ has now also become a social project concerned with ‘co-benefits’ such as poverty alleviation, tenure reform and rights for people living in and around forested areas.

The intersection between indigenous rights and international economic agreements is paradigmatic of the ways in which globalization accommodates issues of social and economic justice. This intersection provides insight into the fate of the marginalized communities in a system that privileges certain values and goals often incompatible with some indigenous values and goals. The prior chapters make evident that, to address social and economic justice, international economic agreements can start by addressing indigenous interests in a systemic and more encompassing way and lead the way to frameworks for better social and economic inclusion. This is the key litmus test for the very legitimacy of international economic law after crises derived from a nationalistic turn and exacerbated by a global pandemic. This chapter offers some basic recommendations.

This chapter provides the assessment of the intersection – that between international economic law and indigenous rights – coined in this book as international indigenous economic law. The author asserts that there is an important place for indigenous rights within the field of international economic law. Indeed, an international indigenous economic law, one that focuses on the vulnerable and marginalized, can provide a limited yet important pathway for improving the unequal distribution of the benefits of globalization and for moving beyond the standard conversations among mainstream and classical economists and policymakers that the redistribution of wealth and power should be purely domestic policy responses. This claim has implication for international economic law and indigenous rights scholars alike.

The intersection between indigenous rights and international economic law serves as an instructive lens of the complex interactions between human and economic-focused areas of international law. Specifically, it uncovers how two fields with distinct goals, rules and structures are implicated in the way globalization both affects and tries to protect marginalized communities. Since both fields can also complement each other to improve the situation of almost one billion marginalized indigenous peoples, international economic law can incorporate the struggle for social inclusion espoused by human rights law as it relates to indigenous peoples, as argued in Chapter 6. This final chapter briefly provides first, a reflection on how to rethink the failure of globalization with indigenous peoples in mind. It further outlines the normative underpinnings of an inclusive globalization that can provide more hope for those marginalized by the current structure created by international economic law.

Taking a transnational and comparative approach, this chapter examines how a distinctive discourse of indigenous rights in Anglo settler states (the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) threaded claims at the level of the state – about collective identity, treaty promises, land rights, and sovereign peoplehood – together with an international language of human rights. Indigenous claims to rights of identity and sovereignty were not considered human rights in the way that international institutions and civil society was employing the concept in the 1970s. That is, to protect individuals from violence and suffering at the hands of the state. Yet indigenous peoples in the Anglo settler states argued that their claims to collective rights were matters of concern to humanity. This chapter argues for an alternative genealogy of the 1970s – distinct from the earlier anti-colonial claims of leaders in the Third World and from the increasingly individualist emphases in other human rights campaigns – in which indigenous peoples in the heart of “the West” claimed collective, quasi-sovereign, and substate rights in part by deploying, and expanding, the language of human rights.

Finally, in Chapter 12, Caroline Dommen concludes our discussion by addressing how human rights impact assessments can contribute to ensuring that Indigenous rights are upheld in international trade agreements. She considers how explicit reference to the rights of Indigenous peoples, including the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, may improve human rights impact assessments as well as trade agreements, from both legal and policy perspectives. There is now a substantial body of impact assessments of actual or likely impacts of trade and investment agreements on human rights, including on the rights of Indigenous peoples. Her chapter describes the role and the objectives of impact assessment, explaining the particular advantages of human rights-based impact assessment. It draws on recommendations of UN human rights mechanisms and analysis of completed impact assessments of trade agreements to present some of the main principles of human rights law that are relevant in the trade policy context, and how these impose legal obligations on states to carry out human rights impact assessments prior to adopting new trade agreements.

In the aftermath of this political upheaval, Guatemalans embarked on a tenuous democratic experiment across the 1920s. A group of radicalized Q’eqchi’s formed a branch of the Unionist Party and demanded that the state end forced wage labor, abolish debt contracts, and grant citizenship to all Mayas. For the next decade, Q’eqchi’s engaged in labor strikes and land invasions, which articulated another history of time and space based on memories of prior possession and land alienation. At the same time, urban reformers and intellectuals, including Miguel Angel Asturias, increasingly sought to move beyond the failed ladino nation-state that had taken power in 1871. To do so, they looked to Alta Verapaz to imagine a new nation based on modernization through prosperous coffee plantations and European immigration, which had yielded an alternative mestizaje project based on interracial mixing between German immigrants and Mayas. Guatemala’s decade-long democratic experiment came to an end with the Great Depression and Central America’s 1932 Red Scare.

In Chapter 6, William David looks at the inter-linkages between trade and environment in various FTAs and provides a thorough examination of new provisions in the environment chapters of regional trade agreements and how they may impact Indigenous peoples. Particular emphasis is placed on an exploration of the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), a side agreement of the NAFTA, as well as the CPTPP and the intersection between Indigenous rights, environmental law and ISDS under the NAFTA.

In Jessup’s 1956 Storrs Lecture he defined transnational law as “all law which regulates actions or events that transcend national frontiers,” which includes public international law, private international law, and “other rules which do not wholly fit into such standard categories.” Considerable recent scholarship on transnational law has focused on that residual category of “other rules” and their “private” character. There has, however, been a revolution in international law itself since 1956, reflected in a proliferation of international institutions, international courts, treaties, and so-called “soft law” technologies of governance. This chapter assesses the role of international law in the creation of what can be viewed as “transnational legal orders” that penetrate and imbue state law, shape social identity, and inform public and private legal practice. International law, this chapter contends, is even a more important shaper of the transnational than in Jessup’s time, and, in turn is shaped by it.