The Global Trend in Indigenous Community Recognition
Lessons from my new research on how recognition impacts indigenous identity, welfare, and inclusion across generations
Shifts in international law and domestic politics in recent decades have generated a global trend toward recognizing indigenous rights and governance structures. Countries as diverse as Australia, Bolivia, Mexico, Norway, and the Philippines have elevated rights, protections, and autonomy for indigenous groups. With this shift has come a resurgence of identification among indigenous groups as culturally and socially distinct from dominant national ethnic groups.
Observers have grappled with understanding the effects and implications of recognizing indigenous communities as distinct groups with collective rights to manage resources and aspects of self-governance. Some have emphasized how ethnic diversity and identity politics more generally raises governance challenges, complicates accountability mechanisms, and exacerbates social differentiation. Others underscore how indigenous recognition and multiculturalism can deepen democracy by expanding rights and resources for disadvantaged groups and providing greater political space for non-dominant group self-identification. Recognizing indigenous communities can also carry deep symbolic importance because of the history of discrimination, oppression, and inferiority associated with nonrecognition. At the same time, however, some recognition policies have historically been used in some countries in tandem with efforts to relegate indigenous groups to the margins of society or to pry into communities through rules and regulations that aimed to forcibly assimilate populations into national social and economic practices.
I’ve been fascinated by this topic since I began traveling, working, and teaching in areas with large indigenous populations throughout the Americas, ranging from the highlands of Peru to Oaxaca in Mexico.
As I interacted with indigenous communities over time, I came to realize that there is very little research on the actual impacts of policies of collective indigenous recognition and how these policies might differentially impact groups within communities. So I started working on it myself. My first article on the subject – which explores how the official recognition of indigenous communities by the Peruvian state affects individual identity, community membership, and socio-economic outcomes across generations – was just accepted for publication this week.
Collective Indigenous Recognition in Peru
Over the last century, the Peruvian state has taken a striking turn toward recognizing its indigenous peoples. More than 7,000 separate communities–spread across the Andean highlands, the coast, and the Amazon basin–have received formal recognition, granting them collective rights to land and traditional authority as well as legal standing. Nearly one-third of Peru’s national territory now falls under this regime. Recognition also opens the door for increased community participation in public decision-making and access to state services.
What does this recognition mean for individuals within these communities—especially over time and across generations?
To explore this, I mapped out indigenous communities in Peru and drew on extensive household survey data that I linked to the timing and location of community recognition across Peru’s thousands of communities. I then analyzed how recognition impacts identity and decision-making for individuals based on how old they were when their community was recognized.
My main finding is that recognition does deepen identification with the community, but only for some of its members and only for a time.
Intergenerational Tradeoffs
Individuals who were adults or nearly adults at the time their community was recognized experience the strongest shifts in community self-identification and formal inscription into community membership. These are people who stood to benefit most immediately from the formalization of land rights and the establishment of community-level institutions. They gained access to property, decision-making, and a place in the new legal and political structure. Their incentives to invest in community life—socially, politically, and economically—intensified. In a context of land scarcity, those in a position to stake claims quickly did so.
For the next generation, the dynamic shifts. Those who are born into recognized communities and grow up in a post-recognition environment are less likely to identify as community members and less likely to participate in communal governance. And yet, economically, they often fare better. Their households benefit from secured land tenure and legal protections established by their parents’ generation. Some pursue opportunities outside the community. Others leverage their education and mobility in ways unavailable to their elders.
This suggests that legal recognition creates a kind of intergenerational trade-off. The generation that receives recognition experiences a surge in identity and engagement. But that identity doesn’t automatically transmit forward. In fact, it may attenuate as the material benefits of recognition are secured, and as younger generations engage with broader markets and opportunities.
The mechanism underlying this pattern is more structural than cultural. Land is scarce. When recognition formalizes communal property, it also redefines who has access to it and under what rules. Adults present at recognition have a privileged position. People born into the community later face limited land availability and diminishing space for upward mobility within the community. Their lower attachment is a reflection of constrained opportunity.
Justice Across Generations
The legal recognition of indigenous communities, especially when it includes land rights and autonomy, does foster increased engagement and identity–but its benefits accrue mostly to the cohorts who experience recognition at a formative stage of life. This reflects the fact that recognition is not only a legal act but also a social process that reconfigures power, identity, and opportunity within communities. In the long run, unless mechanisms are put in place to renew these ties and distribute benefits more equitably across generations, recognition may produce short-lived identity revitalization followed by declining local attachment.
This calls for policies that go beyond one-time legal recognition. Continued investment in including young people in community life, equitable land and resource distribution, and flexible community institutions that adapt to changing demographic and economic conditions are essential for ensuring that the promise of inclusion through recognition can translate into sustained, substantive equity for indigenous communities as a whole. Otherwise, the promise of indigenous community recognition as a tool of justice and empowerment risks becoming attenuated by intergenerational inequality and disaffection.
Leading image is a photo I took in Cusco, Peru. The second image is a photo of mine from Huarán, in the Sacred Valley outside of Cusco where I did research.
The research behind this post is from my article “Indigenous Community Recognition and Identity: Evidence from Peru.” Comparative Political Studies, forthcoming.