ID: 2072
Presenting Author: Marina Costa
Session: 668 - Spreading the Deliberative Approach to Impact Assessment and Decision-making
Status: pending
Shows how Indigenous dialogue from the Amazon can transform deliberative impact assessment into a pathway toward relational and social justice.
In Brazilian Indigenous Amazonian traditions, dialogue is not a method but a way of living — a continuous act of listening between humans, rivers, and forests. This paper explores how Indigenous forms of communication can both expand and heal Western approaches to negotiation and deliberative impact assessment.
Drawing from Ailton Krenak and Davi Kopenawa, and from the contemporary leadership of Indigenous women in Brazil’s political sphere, the presentation connects ancestral ways of dialogue — rooted in reciprocity, time, silence, and collectivity — with current challenges in environmental governance. It suggests that while Western institutions often approach participation as procedure, Indigenous traditions treat it as a core relationship: a space where knowledge, responsibility, and healing converge to improve the wellbeing of the entire community while minimizing impacts on the environment that sustains it.
Through stories from community engagement and field practice, the paper reflects on how learning from the forest can transform impact assessment engagement into collaboration, and deliberation into coexistence. Embracing these epistemologies may allow institutions to restore balance — between humans and nature, decision-makers and the affected, reason and purpose.
Marina Costa is a Brazilian social anthropologist with a master’s in pre-colonial Amazonian archaeology. She works as a social specialist in environmental consultancy, focusing on community engagement