{"id":4731,"date":"2025-11-24T09:28:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T08:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nomopolis.org\/?p=4731"},"modified":"2025-11-26T10:16:35","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T09:16:35","slug":"nomopolis-03-mobile-indigenous-peoples","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nomopolis.org\/en\/nomopolis-03-mobile-indigenous-peoples\/","title":{"rendered":"Nomopolis 03 – Mobile Indigenous Peoples and the Quest for Human Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Mobile Indigenous Peoples and the Quest for Human Rights<\/span><\/p><\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Dawn Chatty


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Abstract<\/h3>

Mobile indigenous peoples (e.g. pastoralists, swidden farmers, and hunter-gatherers) have sustainably managed the lands they lived on for centuries. However, throughout the modern era and especially in recent decades, many have been displaced, dispossessed, and expelled from their traditional territories, forced to settle, and prevented from practising the forms of mobility upon which their livelihoods and social systems are based. These restrictions have left many destitute and have disrupted the cultural foundations of mobile indigenous identities. While the explicit aims of settling mobile peoples are no longer stated in the rhetoric of conservation and development, practical steps toward land restitution and mobility rights have not been forthcoming. Policy has not kept pace with advances in thinking about the relationship between mobile peoples, the state, and territory. Nor do states and international actors often live up to public declarations of concern for the human rights of mobile peoples. This article\u00a0 explicitly articulates the policy documentation in the Dana Declaration and the Dana + 20 manifesto\u00a0 which sets out to define and defend the rights of Mobile Indigenous Peoples. Yet even as rights holders, mobile\u00a0 indigenous\u00a0 peoples continue to be marginalised in policy and in practice. The problem for Mobile Indigenous Peoples is not that their rights are not beginning to be recognized by international human rights law but that these rights are not adequately upheld by national policies and laws and are often not respected by conservation agencies and corporate investors.<\/p>

R\u00e9sum\u00e9<\/h3>

Les peuples autochtones mobiles (par exemple, les \u00e9leveurs, les agriculteurs pratiquant la culture sur br\u00fblis et les chasseurs-cueilleurs) ont g\u00e9r\u00e9 de mani\u00e8re durable les terres sur lesquelles ils vivaient depuis des si\u00e8cles. Cependant, tout au long de l’\u00e8re moderne, et en particulier au cours des derni\u00e8res d\u00e9cennies, beaucoup ont \u00e9t\u00e9 d\u00e9plac\u00e9s, d\u00e9poss\u00e9d\u00e9s et expuls\u00e9s de leurs territoires traditionnels, contraints de s’installer et emp\u00each\u00e9s de pratiquer les formes de mobilit\u00e9 sur lesquelles reposent leurs moyens de subsistance et leurs syst\u00e8mes sociaux. Ces restrictions ont laiss\u00e9 beaucoup d’entre eux dans le d\u00e9nuement et ont perturb\u00e9 les fondements culturels des identit\u00e9s autochtones mobiles. Si les objectifs explicites de s\u00e9dentarisation des peuples mobiles ne sont plus \u00e9nonc\u00e9s dans le discours sur la conservation et le d\u00e9veloppement, aucune mesure concr\u00e8te n’a \u00e9t\u00e9 prise en faveur de la restitution des terres et des droits \u00e0 la mobilit\u00e9. Les politiques n’ont pas suivi les progr\u00e8s de la r\u00e9flexion sur les relations entre les peuples mobiles, l’\u00c9tat et le territoire. De m\u00eame, les \u00c9tats et les acteurs internationaux ne sont souvent pas \u00e0 la hauteur de leurs d\u00e9clarations publiques concernant les droits humains des peuples mobiles. Cet article expose clairement les documents politiques contenus dans la D\u00e9claration de Dana et le manifeste Dana + 20 qui visent \u00e0 d\u00e9finir et \u00e0 d\u00e9fendre les droits des peuples autochtones mobiles. Pourtant, m\u00eame en tant que titulaires de droits, les peuples autochtones mobiles continuent d’\u00eatre marginalis\u00e9s dans les politiques et dans la pratique. Le probl\u00e8me pour les peuples autochtones mobiles n’est pas que leurs droits ne commencent pas \u00e0 \u00eatre reconnus par le droit international des droits de l’homme, mais que ces droits ne sont pas suffisamment respect\u00e9s par les politiques et les lois nationales et sont souvent bafou\u00e9s par les agences de conservation et les investisseurs priv\u00e9s.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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How to cite<\/h5>

Dawn, Chatty. 2025. \u00ab Mobile Indigenous Peoples and the Quest for Human Rights \u00bb<\/span>. <\/span>Nomopolis<\/i> 3.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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INTRODUCTION<\/strong><\/p>

Mobile indigenous peoples (e.g. pastoralists, swidden farmers, and hunter-gatherers) have sustainably managed the lands they lived on for centuries. However, throughout the modern era and especially in recent decades, many have been displaced, dispossessed, and expelled from their traditional territories, forced to settle and prevented from practising the forms of mobility upon which their livelihoods and social systems are based. These restrictions have left many destitute and have disrupted the cultural foundations of mobile indigenous identities. While the explicit aims of settling mobile peoples are no longer stated in the rhetoric of conservation and development, practical steps toward land restitution and mobility rights have not been forthcoming. Policy has not kept pace with advances in thinking about the relationship between mobile peoples, the state, and territory. Nor do states and international actors often live up to public declarations of concern for the human rights of mobile peoples. Mobile peoples, even as rights-holders, continue to be marginalised in policy and in practice.<\/p>

In 2002, the Dana Declaration \u00a0was promulgated by a group of social and natural scientists in Wadi Dana, Jordan.\u00a0 The rationale for this effort drew upon the advocacy of numerous anthropologists and other scientists concerned with the growing marginalization and impoverishment of mobile herding societies in countries that did not recognize indigeneity as defining elements of their population. Either they were countries that had not experienced colonialism (e.g. the Arabian Peninsula) or where mobile herders represented the majority of the population (e.g. Mongolia). Wadi Dana was the site for the expulsion of Bedouin sheep herders from important grazing land. And the Dana Declaration was formulated in the \u2018footsteps\u2019 of the Barbados Declaration of 1971 which criticized the way in which nation states, religious missions, and anthropologists\u00a0 related to Indigenous\u00a0 Peoples in Latin American. The Dana Declaration was a \u2019compromise document\u2019 which criticized\u00a0 the way in which mobile peoples were ignored, demeaned and made invisible, but went further to put forward ways of working together for the benefit of\u00a0 mobile peoples, conservationists, and the states in which they were located. \u00a0The Dana Declaration signatories established a \u00a0standing committee and tasked it \u00a0with spreading its message and continuing its work with other bodies to address the concerns regarding the welfare of mobile indigenous peoples in sustainable development in general and in biodiversity conservation in particular. Initial efforts to reach out to the larger Indigenous Peoples Movement revealed concern within that body that\u00a0 a focus on mobile peoples might\u00a0 fracture\u00a0 efforts towards\u00a0 developing a united declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. Thus, the Dana Standing Committee worked in parallel with the Indigenous Peoples Movement and noted in all its documentation that\u00a0 mobile peoples were a sub-set of Indigenous Peoples.\u00a0<\/p>

The \u00a0Dana Declaration on Mobile Peoples and Conservation (www.danadeclaration.org<\/a>), provided guidelines for a synergistic strategy for dealing with challenging extractive industries and development,\u00a0 the impact of climate change, \u00a0the requirement for environmental protection and meeting the human rights and needs of mobile peoples. Over a series of workshops with ever increasing numbers of mobile peoples participating, the Dana Declaration and its Dana +20 Manifesto\u00a0 reached the United Nations General Assembly in 2024 through the report on the situation of Mobile Indigenous Peoples\u00a0 which the Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Issues\u00a0 of the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights delivered.\u00a0<\/p>

I. BACKGROUND<\/strong><\/p>

Land conservation and protection efforts have been part of human society for centuries.\u00a0 Government measures to set aside pristine areas of nature are generally considered to date back to the late 19th<\/sup> century when significant areas of land were set aside as \u2018wilderness\u2019 to be preserved, \u2018untouched by humans\u2019\u00a0 for the good of largely urban populations with little access to clean air and water.\u00a0 In 1872, a tract of hot springs and geysers\u00a0 northwestern Wyoming\u00a0 was set aside\u00a0 by the United States Federal government to establish Yellowstone National and later Yosemite and Glacier National Parks (Manning 1989). The inhabitants of these areas,\u00a0 mainly\u00a0 Crow, Shoshone, and other\u00a0 native American\u00a0 Indians, were driven out by the army which took over\u00a0 the management of the area (Morrison 1993). In the United Kingdom, conservationists were mainly foresters\u00a0 who stressed\u00a0 that the public good was best served though protecting forests and water resources, even if this mean the displacement of local communities (McCracken 1987:190).\u00a0 This expertise and philosophy was transferred aboard to all of Great Britain\u2019s colonial holdings; in the colonies, the customary rights of indigenous peoples were often denied (Harmon 1991; Colchester 1994).\u00a0 Now more than a century later,\u00a0 most national parks in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the rest of the world\u00a0 have been and to some extent\u00a0 still continue to be created on the model pioneered at Yellowstone\u00a0 National Park\u00a0 and built upon by the early British colonial conservationists. The fundamental principle\u00a0 remains to protect\u00a0 parks and nature reserves from the \u2018damage\u2019 which indigenous communities are assumed to inflict on the land. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

In much of the developing world, conservation efforts\u00a0 have been largely based on the assumption that human actions negatively affect the physical environment. Problems like degradation of rangelands, desertification, and destruction wildlife have been viewed as principally due to local indigenous misuse of resources.\u00a0 The common Western, urban notion of wilderness as untouched or untamed land has pervaded conservation thinking and thus many polices are based on the assumption that\u00a0 nature reserves can only be maintained\u00a0 without people.\u00a0 They do not recognize the importance local indigenous management and land use\u00a0 practices sustaining and protecting biodiversity.\u00a0 Nearly every part of the world has been inhabited and modified by people in the past and apparent wildernesses have often supported high densities of people\u00a0 (Colchester 1994; Pimbert and Pretty 1995).\u00a0 In Kenya for example the rich Serengeti grassland ecosystem was, in part, maintained by the Maasai and their cattle\u00a0 (Adams and McShane 1992).\u00a0 There is good evidence from many parts of the world that local, often mobile, indigenous peoples do value, utilize, and efficiently manage their\u00a0 environment (Oldfield and Alcorn 1991; Scoones et al. 1992; Abin 1998) as they have done for millennia. It suggests that\u00a0 the mythical pristine environment exists only in our imagination (Pimbert and Pretty 1995:3).<\/p>

From the late nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth century, conservation meant the preservation of flora and fauna and the exclusion of people. As was the case\u00a0 in the formation of Yellowstone National park, armies and colonial police in Africa, Asia, Latin America and much of the developing world\u00a0 have been employed to expropriate and exclude indigenous communities, many of them mobile, from areas designated as \u2018protected\u2019 often at great social and ecological costs. Forced removal and compulsory resettlement, often to lands\u00a0 totally inadequate for sustainable livelihoods were common. Examples of these practices which resulted in forced settlement and destruction of\u00a0 mobile livelihoods include the San in areas of the Kalahari desert, the Maasai in the Northern and Southern Maasai reserves of Kenya and Tanzania, and the Berber in southwestern Morocco\u2019s Toubkal National park \u00a0\u00a0(Jacobs 1975; Lindsay 1987). \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>

Despite the end of the colonial era in the 1960s, the \u00a0last quarter of the twentieth century \u00a0has witnessed\u00a0 a remarkable growth in parks and protected areas designed to conserve the Earth\u2019s invaluable ecosystems and biodiversity (Anderson and Grove 1987; Brandon, Redford and Sanderson 1998; Redford and Sanderson 2000). Much of this activity was stimulated by the Brundtland Report of 1987, \u2018Our Common Future\u2019, which identified\u00a0 the need to preserve the Earth\u2019s biodiversity. It was written by Go Harlem Brundtland, the former Norwegian Prime Minister and Chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development. The report,\u00a0 which was showcased at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, called for ever larger percentages of the Earth\u2019s surface being protected.<\/p>

In 1950, the Swiss-based World Conservation Union recorded that there were about 1,000 protected areas world-wide. By 1985 this \u00a0number had grown to 3,500 \u00a0protected areas; by the beginning of the 21st<\/sup> century, however, it had ballooned to 29,000. These areas protected from residential and economic use, encompassed some 2.1 billion acres of land and compose 6.4 % of the earth\u2019s land, or about half of the world\u2019s croplands at the beginning of the 21st<\/sup> century. By 2024 these figures had shot up to 261,766 protected areas (17.6 % of the earth\u2019s surface) and encompasses 22.5 billion acres of land (UNEP\/IUCN Protected Planet Report 2024). It is stating the obvious to write that the\u00a0 first decades of the 21st century have seen a major biodiversity conservation goal achieved: the setting aside of large areas of the earth\u2019s surface to protect its biodiversity. The Convention on Biological Diversity has succeeded in its target of expanding protected areas to 17% of the earth\u2019s surface in the first decade of the 21st<\/sup> century (UNEP-WCMC, 2021). Its target for 2030 is 30% of the Earth\u2019s surface (https:\/\/www.cbd.int\/gbf\/targets<\/a>).<\/p>

Unfortunately, much of this global greening continues with very little regard for the rights of the people who are resident in them (Bell 1978; Botkin 1990; Colchester 1994; Ewers 1998; Harmon 1991; Lindsay 1987; McCabe 1992, Chatty and Colchester [2022] 2025).\u00a0 Some 70% to 85% of the world\u2019s protected areas are inhabited by human beings. In many places these local, traditional or indigenous people are viewed as detrimental to biological conservation and are often evicted, or prohibited from hunting, gathering, herding or farming.<\/p>

In many parts of the world Mobile Indigenous Peoples continue to be discriminated against, marginalized, or simply chased out. For some better organized and statistically more significant groups such as the Sami in Scandinavia, and the Inuit in North America, a global rights-based debate has emerged which integrates the leadership of these societies with international pressure groups which lobby\u00a0 to\u00a0 maintain these peoples\u2019 rights to the lands that they have traditionally lived on (Barnes 1995; International Alliance 1997; Margolis 2000; MRG 1999; PRIA 1993; Pimbert and Pretty 1995). Such advocacy, however, hardly exists for the more loosely- structured and widely dispersed mobile peoples of the world – the nomadic pastoral societies of North and East Africa, and the Middle East, the hunting and gathering societies of southern Africa,\u00a0 the tribal societies in India and the\u00a0 swidden farmers and fishermen of Southeast Asia.\u00a0 For them, the creation of nature reserves and protected areas on their lands\u00a0 still often means\u00a0 exclusion, further marginalization and in some cases eviction from\u00a0 lands they have maintained for decades if not centuries.<\/p>

In Latin America, an estimated 85% of Protected Areas are inhabited by peoples – many of them mobile – who traditionally use vast areas of land non-intensively.\u00a0 The state of Madre de Dios in Peru, for example, is one of the last great wildernesses of the Amazon – a region of 80,000 square kilometres that still contains large, unmapped areas which are home to isolated indigenous people who have no direct contact with the outside world.\u00a0\u00a0 The Manu National Park includes part of the territory of isolated communities of the nomadic Yora peoples. Many conservations wish to entice the Yora into settlement outside of the park in order to preserve its integrity.\u00a0 Anthropologists and indigenous representatives, on the other hand, argue that is it up to the nomadic groups themselves to decide whether and when they make contact, and what lifestyle they adopt – and they are backed up by international law (see also Chatty and Colchester 2025; CBD 1992; ILO 169, 1989; IUCN 1994; WCPA 1991).<\/p>

In the Middle East and North Africa, biodiversity conservation does not have a long history. Its mainly arid land mass is not suitable as a wooded reserve and it has few species of large mammals, making it unattractive for the development of wildlife protected areas.\u00a0 Animal reintroduction projects, however, have become significant conservation and human concerns in the area as a whole. At one time, large herds of Arabian Oryx did thrive throughout the Arabian Peninsula. But by 1917, the Oryx survived mainly in two pockets: one, in the Great Nafud Desert in the north; and one in and around the Rub\u2019-al-Khali (Empty Quarter) in the south.\u00a0 The northern population became extinct around 1950, but Oryx were still being sighted in Oman until 1972 when there too, they were declared extinct in Arabia.\u00a0 In 1980, an area the size of Scotland in the central desert of Oman was proclaimed a wildlife sanctuary and the first Oryx from the World Herd were flown back into the country and released into an enclosure on the sanctuary.\u00a0 The nomadic pastoral peoples, the Harasiis, who inhabited this desert were not consulted and, at a stroke of a pen, their traditional land claims and subsistence livestock-raising – their whole way of life \u2013 became\u00a0 threatened. The same or similar scenarios have been repeated in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Israel (Chatty 2002).<\/p>

Secure land rights and sustainable livelihoods for these Mobile Indigenous Peoples\u00a0 around the world are under threat. This is due, in part, to the widely held view that indigenous people are a menace to environmental conservation as well as the largely invisible nature of mobile peoples\u2019 lifestyles and livelihoods.\u00a0 The lands they inhabit are often declared empty (terra nullius)<\/em>, thus making the land available for\u00a0 extractive industry exploitation and \u2018green hydrogen\u2019 planning of immense wind farms and solar panels to create electricity in\u00a0 territory traditionally held in common by Mobile Indigenous Peoples for pastures.\u00a0 In a settled world, people who move as part of a strategy of sustainable natural resource use do not register on national, regional or international consciousness.<\/p>

In the drive to establish reserves and parklands for the protection of habitat and to prevent species loss, traditional and indigenous peoples throughout the world have suffered limitations on resource use, land expropriation, even expulsion at the hands of national and international agencies, as well as human rights violations. While conservation agencies have publicly denounced such practices \u2013 see for example the Durban Accord and Action Plan adopted at the World Parks Congress in 2003 \u2013 progress in land restitution and protection of indigenous rights in individual nation states has been either sluggish or non-existent, particularly where the peoples concerned are mobile, dispersed, and not physically present at all times of the year. Domestic laws rarely keep up with international proclamations or policy recommendations in this domain.<\/p>

An improved understanding of the causes of environmental damage is slowly occurring and the conservation movement has re-examined its approaches to biodiversity protection, especially the assumptions underlying the exclusion of indigenous peoples from protected areas (Chatty and Colchester 2025; West, et al. 2006; Brockington et al. 2008; Gilbert 2018). The beginning of the 21st century has been marked by a new understanding of indigenous peoples\u2019 positive contributions to their local ecosystems and conservation (Rio Declaration, Article 22; Convention on Biological Diversity, Articles 8j and 10c; Resolutions on Indigenous peoples, IUCN General Assembly 1996; Beltran, IUCN and WWF, 2000; and the Durban Accord and Durban Action Plan: IUCN, 2004). This nuanced recognition of the special knowledge, roles and rights of such peoples has resulted in increasing efforts to integrate indigenous, traditional, and local communities into the planning and management of conservation areas or, at the very least, ameliorating the negative impact that such schemes have on the sustainability of their livelihoods (Borrini-Feyerabend et al. 2007; Renard et al. 2007; Colchester 2020). When indigenous peoples are sedentary and relatively organised due, in part, to the density of their habitation patterns, developing and building capacity to take part in conservation-based negotiations are normally straightforward. However, when indigenous peoples are mobile, then standard sedentist efforts to reach them often fail.<\/p>

Mobile Peoples are a subset of traditional and indigenous peoples whose livelihoods depend upon mobility and extensive common property use of natural resources; mobility is both a management strategy for sustainable livelihoods and land and a distinctive source of cultural identity[1]<\/a>. In some parts of the world, such as Latin America, Mobile Indigenous Peoples do have an organised presence within the Indigenous Peoples Movement. In many other parts of the world, however, such as Africa, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, Australia, and the Pacific, they remain largely excluded and peripheral to the main dialogues on Indigenous Peoples \u2013 Biodiversity Conservation \u2013 Sustainable Development.<\/p>

Mobile peoples \u2013 be they pastoralists, hunters and gatherers, far-ranging swidden agriculturalists or other similarly land-based groups \u2013 are marginalised due to the mobility that they exercise as a fundamental aspect of their livelihoods. The requirement to be widely dispersed and spread out over extensive territory makes them largely invisible in their natural habitats but also marginalises them, when they are forced to settle on the edges of their former territories, be it desert, savannah or forest. The removal of Mobile Indigenous Peoples from their traditional lands often goes unrecognised because there is no organised protest, outcry or interest group advocating their right to remain mobile both within the borders of their traditional lands and beyond. This is the case even when their land management practices are such that the lands that they occupy are of high biodiversity value and meriting conservation. Furthermore, the special knowledge that mobile indigenous peoples have about their environment and the special role that their mobility plays in the conservation and sustainable use of biological resources often go unstudied and unrecorded.<\/p>

II. THE DANA DECLARATION AND INTERNATIONAL POLICY AND SOFT LAW<\/strong><\/p>

In April 2002, nearly 30 experts \u2013 social and natural scientists – from around the world attended a five-day conference in the Dana Nature Reserve, Jordan. They came together to address a difficult and sensitive issue: the relationship between Mobile Indigenous Peoples[2]<\/sup><\/a> and conservation. After intensive debate, in which contrasting perspectives were offered, common ground was successfully developed around an agreed statement of principles \u2013 the Dana Declaration on Mobile Peoples and Conservation (<\/em>see www.danadeclaration.org<\/a>). <\/em>\u00a0A special issue of the Journal of Nomadic Peoples<\/em> (Vol 7 no 1, 2023) documented those proceedings by presenting edited versions of the keynote addresses of both the social and natural scientists as well as the case studies prepared by scholars working in Borneo,\u00a0 Australia, Peru, East Africa, Southern Africa, and Jordan.\u00a0<\/p>

The Dana Declaration Steering committee was tasked with working to move the Declaration into international policy and soft law. Concern among the Indigenous Peoples movement that a focus on mobility would undermine their efforts towards drafting a United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Dana Standing Committee agreed to work on its own but in parallel with the Indigenous Rights movement. Over the past twenty-three years, the Dana Declaration Standing Committee has organised initiatives specifically designed to build capacity among Mobile Indigenous Peoples to represent themselves and advocate their rightful place in the context of biodiversity conservation, extractive industry activity, and sustainable development. One aim has been to promote wider recognition of Mobile Indigenous Peoples\u2019 specialist knowledge, customary systems of resource management based on mobility and their fundamental human rights. Another aim has been to slow down \u2013 and perhaps eventually stop \u2013 the displacement, dislocation, and forced<\/strong> sedentarisation of Mobile Indigenous Peoples; and to move toward restoration of the communal land rights and territoriality upon which mobility depends. Taking a global perspective, these initiatives combined several simultaneous strategies to develop and build capacity among mobile indigenous peoples as well as to raise awareness of their special needs within the general indigenous peoples\u2019 movement. The Dana Declaration Dana and Dana+10 endeavoured to: promote research and dissemination of Mobile Peoples\u2019 traditional knowledge and practices; build the capacity of mobile peoples\u2019 customary institutions by facilitating their representation at international fora; advocate for their inclusion in planning for biodiversity conservation and sustainable development; facilitate the inclusion of addendums to international guidelines relating to indigenous peoples (especially the World Congress of Protected Areas [WCPA], International Union for the Conservation of Nature [IUCN], International Labour Organisation [ILO], United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], and World Wildlife Fund [WWF]); and develop networking capacity across Mobile Indigenous Peoples groups.<\/p>

The Standing Committee for the Dana Declaration has succeeded in implementing all of the above. It has disseminated the Dana Declaration to key conservation actors through a dedicated website (www.danadeclaration.org<\/a>) and arranged an effective presence at the World Parks Congress (WPC) in 2003 in Durban, South Africa, where the Declaration was endorsed in the WPC Workshop Recommendation 5.27. It supported the attendance of representatives of Mobile Indigenous Peoples at the Congress and encouraged their participation in the Indigenous Peoples\u2019 Caucus at the Peoples\u2019 Park \u2013 a parallel event in Durban. It encouraged the formation of the World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples (WAMIP), which came together at the WPC in Durban in 2003, at the IUCN 3rd<\/sup> and 4th<\/sup> Congresses in Bangkok in 2003 and Barcelona in 2008 and at the Dana+10 workshop in 2012. At the 4th<\/sup> World Conservation Congress organised by the IUCN in Barcelona in 2008, the Dana Declaration was finally endorsed as part of the working principles for social development in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (see www.danadeclaration.org<\/a>). And it has supported the production of several issues of Policy Matters<\/em> identifying good practice among mobile indigenous peoples and bringing these to the attention of biodiversity conservation organisations (Vol. 13, 2004; 15, 2007).<\/p>

The Standing Committee for the Dana Declaration also supported representatives of Mobile Indigenous Peoples from Kenya, Ethiopia, Namibia, Tanzania, Mali, Morocco, Jordan, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Socotra\/Yemen, India, Mongolia, Peru, and the United States to attend the Pre-World Conservation Congress Indigenous Peoples\u2019 workshops in 2004 and 2008. It facilitated their attendance at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) in 2006 and 2008; it also conducted capacity-building workshops and side events at the UNPFII, where information regarding the Dana Declaration was disseminated through round table discussions on the impact of climate change and extreme weather on Mobile Indigenous Peoples\u2019 livelihoods.\u00a0 The Dana Standing Committee has sent representatives of the Dana +20 working group to the Convention on Biodiversity Declaration\u00a0 (CBD) Conference of the Parties (COP)\u00a0 in Montreal in December 2022 to disseminate the\u00a0 Dana+20 Manifesto.\u00a0<\/p>

In 2024, the Dana Declaration Standing Committee, following the Action Plan for the Dana +20\u00a0 Workshop sent \u00a0four representatives of\u00a0 Mobile Indigenous Peoples\u00a0 to attend the UNPFII\u00a0 in April 2024 to engage with the\u00a0 Forum\u2019s themes of self-determination and youth participation and \u00a0to \u00a0disseminate the Dana +20 Manifesto and its concerns with regards to sustainability, climate change discourse, and development paradigms, as well as\u00a0 articulate the impact of implicit biases in much contemporary practice and policy. This action, which the\u00a0 Dana Declaration Steering Committee organized with the Rights and Resources Initiative as well as the Forest Peoples Programme, brought \u00a0the concerns of Mobile Indigenous Peoples to a larger\u00a0 international audience\u00a0 as well as \u00a0the support team for the Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples of the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights. In October 2024, the Special Rapporteur , \u00a0Jose Francisco Cali Tzay, \u00a0presented his report on the situation of Mobile Indigenous Peoples to the United Nations General assembly\u00a0 demanding recognition\u00a0 for their basic human rights as well as\u00a0 creating\u00a0 broader\u00a0 networks and alliances\u00a0 for future engagement. This\u00a0 participation coincided with preparation for the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP) in 2026 and helped build a strategic framework for reducing the invisibility\u00a0 and marginality of Mobile Indigenous Peoples as well as generating advocacy for enhancing\u00a0 Mobile Indigenous Peoples\u2019 rights to self-determination\u00a0 in international,\u00a0 national , regional, and local contexts. \u00a0Dissemination of the Dana +20 Manifesto and encouraging governments and\u00a0 local organisations to adopt the Dana Declaration\u00a0 as working principles for the basic\u00a0 human rights of Mobile Indigenous Peoples \u00a0remains\u00a0 a high priority and urgent challenge in the face of the continuing invisibility of peoples whose livelihoods depend on mobility.<\/p>

CONCLUSION <\/strong><\/p>

Since 2002 when the\u00a0 Dana Declarations was first promulgated\u00a0 significant advances have been made in international human rights law concerning the rights of Indigenous Peoples and others with customary ties to the lands and natural resources that they depend on. In 2007 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The UNDRIP sets out minimum standards on the rights of Indigenous Peoples and, among much else, affirms their rights to: self-determination within the framework of nation-states; self-governance; self-definition; and free, prior, and informed consent to any measures that may affect their rights (UN 2007).<\/p>

These advances in Indigenous peoples\u2019 rights have been accompanied by major achievements in national and international jurisprudence. For example, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have upheld the rights of Indigenous and tribal peoples to their territories, to free, prior, and informed consent and the restitution for lands taken without consent. Importantly for Mobile Indigenous Peoples, this jurisprudence notes that a \u201cguarantee of the right to territorial property is a fundamental basis for the development of indigenous communities\u2019 culture, spiritual life, integrity and economic survival\u201d and that these territories \u201cextend beyond settlements of specific villages to include lands that are used for agriculture, hunting, fishing, gathering, transportation, culture, and other purposes\u201d (Organization of American States\u00a0 2009: 1, 13).<\/p>

The African Court on Human and Peoples\u2019 Rights has also made landmark judgments relevant for Mobile Indigenous Peoples. The court has recognized the rights of the pastoral Endorois people of Kenya to the restitution of the territory they lost to imposed conservation areas (Gilbert 2007 2014). Likewise, in two judgments on the eviction of the hunter and gatherer Ogiek people from the Mau Forest, the court has ordered the government of Kenya to compensate the people for losses and to reinstate their rights to their ancestral lands (African Court 2022).<\/p>

English common law judgments and laws derived from them, in countries like Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia, likewise make clear that territorial rights are not just rights to property but also jurisdictional rights and attaches to\u00a0 people as collective groups. Such rights do not depend on an act of the state but derive from customary rights, practices, and usages and obtain until lawfully extinguished. Such rights may extend over hunting and fishing areas and seasonally occupied foraging areas and explicitly go beyond settlements and cultivated fields. Moreover, such rights are both collective and intergenerational (McNeil 2016).<\/p>

Many Mobile Indigenous Peoples assert rights that overlap the rights of others, such as seasonal transhumant pastoralists, some of whom range across national boundaries. This reality was recognized in 1989 in the International Labour Organization\u2019s Convention No. 169 on Tribal and Indigenous Peoples. Article 15 requires that \u201cmeasures shall be taken in appropriate cases to safeguard the right of the peoples concerned to use lands not exclusively occupied by them, but to which they have traditionally had access for their subsistence and traditional activities. Particular attention shall be paid to the situation of nomadic peoples and shifting cultivators in this respect.\u201d \u00a0The problem for Mobile Indigenous Peoples is not that their rights are not beginning to be recognized by international human rights law but that these rights are not adequately upheld by national policies and laws and are often not respected by conservation agencies and corporate investors.<\/p>

References<\/strong><\/p>

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Adams, Jonathan and Thomas McShane. 1992.\u00a0 The Myth of Wild Africa: Conservation without Illusion<\/em>.\u00a0 New York: W.W. Norton and Co.<\/p>

African Court on Human and Peoples\u2019 Rights. 2022. African Commission on Human and Peoples\u2019 Rights (ACHPR) v. Republic of Kenya. African Court of Human and Peoples\u2019 Rights: Judgment on Reparations (https:\/\/www.africancourt.org\/cpmt\/storage\/app\/uploads\/public\/62b\/44e\/f59\/62b44ef59e0bc692084052.pdf).<\/p>

Anderson, David and Richard Grove, eds. 1987.\u00a0 Conservation in Africa: People, Policies and Practice<\/em>.\u00a0 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<\/p>

Barnes, R.H., Andrew Gray and Benedict Kingsbury, eds. 1995. Indigenous Peoples of Asia. <\/em>Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies.<\/p>

Bell, Richard. 1987.\u00a0 \u201cConservation with a human face: conflict and reconciliation in African land use planning\u201d. In David Anderson and Richard Grove, eds, Conservation in Africa: People, Policies and Practice<\/em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University press. 79-101.<\/p>

Borrini-Feyerabend, Grazia, Taghi Farvar, Jean-Claude Nguinguiri, and Vincent Awa Ndangang. [2000] 2007. Co-management of Natural Resources: Organising, Negotiating and Learning-by-Doing. <\/em>Heidelberg: GTZ and IUCN: Kasparek Verlag.<\/p>

Borrinni-Feyerabend, Grazia. Eds. 2007. Policy Matters.<\/em> Vol 13<\/p>

Botkin, Daniel. 1990. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century<\/em>. New York: Oxford University Press.<\/p>

Brandon, Katrina, Kent Redford, and Steven Sanderson. 1998. Parks in Peril: People, Politics and Protected Areas.<\/em> Washinton DC: The Nature Conservancy.<\/p>

Brockington, Dan, Rosaleen Duffy, and James Igoe. 2008. Nature Unbound: Conservation, Capitalism, and the Future of Protected Areas<\/em>. London: Earthscan.<\/p>

CBD UNEP-WCMC News Headline. 2021 (https:\/\/news.mongabay.com\/2021\/05\/protectedareas-now-cover-nearly-17-of-earths-surface-u-n-report\/<\/a>).<\/p>

Chatty, Dawn. 2002. \u201cAnimal Reintroduction Projects in the Middle East: Conservation without a Human Face\u201d.\u00a0 In Conservation and Indigenous Mobile Peoples: Displacement, Forced, and Sustainable Development<\/em>, Dawn Chatty and Marcus Colchester, eds. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Press. 227-244.<\/p>

Chatty, Dawn, Marcus Colchester, eds. 2025 [2002]. Conservation and Mobile Indigenous Peoples: Displacement , Forced Settlement and sustainable Development<\/em>. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Press.\u00a0<\/p>

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Colchester, Marcus. 2019. \u201cLegal Obstacles to Territorial Rights Recognition, Sustainable Commodity Production and Forest Conservation on Forest Peoples\u2019 Lands in South-East Asia with a Focus on Malaysia and Indonesia.\u201d Hunter Gatherer Research <\/em>4(1):81-112.<\/p>

Ewers, K. 1998. \u201cThe Politics of Conservation: Pwo Karen Forest People of Thailand\u201d. Indigenous Affairs<\/em> (4):32-5.<\/p>

Gilbert, Jeremy. 2017. \u201cLitigating Indigenous Peoples\u2019 Rights in Africa: Potentials, Challenges and Limitations\u201d. International & Comparative Law Quarterly <\/em>66(3):657\u201386.<\/p>

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Scoones, Ian, Mary Melnyk, and Jules Pretty 1992. The Hidden Harvest: Wild Foods and Agricultural Systems<\/em>. London: IIED, Geneva: WWF and Stockholm: SIDA.<\/p>

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West, Paige, James Igoe, and Dan Brockington. 2006. \u201cParks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected areas.\u201d Annual Review of Anthropology<\/em> 35:251\u201377.<\/p>

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[1]<\/a>. Common property systems gave well established community rules for use \/ownership. They are not the same as open access and include such land use types as seasonal grazing, and community conserved areas.<\/p>

[2]<\/a> By \u2018mobile peoples\u2019, we mean a subset of indigenous and traditional peoples whose livelihoods depend on extensive common property use of natural resources over an area, who use mobility as a management strategy for dealing with sustainable use and conservation, and who possess a distinctive cultural identity and natural resource management system<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Author :<\/h5>

Dawn CHATTY is\u00a0Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Forced Migration. Oxford Department of International Development<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Mobile Indigenous Peoples and the Quest for Human Rights Dawn Chatty Abstract Mobile indigenous peoples (e.g. pastoralists, swidden farmers, and hunter-gatherers) have sustainably managed the lands they lived on for centuries. However, throughout the modern era and especially in recent decades, many have been displaced, dispossessed, and expelled from their traditional territories, forced to settle, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"disabled","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nomopolis-3"],"yoast_head":"\nNomopolis 03 - Mobile Indigenous Peoples and the Quest for Human Rights - Nomopolis<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nomopolis.org\/en\/nomopolis-03-mobile-indigenous-peoples\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Nomopolis 03 - Mobile Indigenous Peoples and the Quest for Human Rights - Nomopolis\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Mobile Indigenous Peoples and the Quest for Human Rights Dawn Chatty Abstract Mobile indigenous peoples (e.g. pastoralists, swidden farmers, and hunter-gatherers) have sustainably managed the lands they lived on for centuries. 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