1. INTRODUCTION
The contemporary Climate Crisis (external link) constitutes the most serious challenge to the stability of the planet's socio-ecological systems. Although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been documenting, with increasing precision, the acceleration of environmental collapse, the institutional mechanisms designed to address it reveal profound structural limitations. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its derivative instruments, such as the Paris Agreement, operate under a paradigm that Aráoz (2017) terms an "ecotechnocratic discourse": a rationality that treats the crisis as a technical-managerial problem, amenable to solutions through market mechanisms and technological innovation, without questioning the ontological and economic foundations that produced it.
This paradox is particularly visible in the Amazon, a territory that holds approximately 40% of the planet's remaining tropical forests and is home to hundreds of Indigenous peoples whose ways of life depend directly on the integrity of the biome. The region is simultaneously a space of highly complex geopolitical dispute (BECKER, 2005) and a stage for resistance movements that produce concrete alternatives to the dominant model. While climate negotiations drag on across successive Conferences of the Parties (COPs), deforestation advances, Indigenous territories are invaded, and environmental leaders are murdered.
Against this backdrop, this article formulates the following research question: how do transnational Indigenous organizations overcome the limitations of the dominant ecotechnocratic paradigm and propose epistemological and legal-political alternatives to the climate crisis? The general objective is to analyze the protagonism of the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon in reinventing global climate justice, with an emphasis on the formation and effectiveness of transnational governance networks.
The central thesis of the article is that the Amazonian Indigenous movement, by articulating organizations such as the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB), the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), and the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin (COICA), not only resists the hegemonic extractivist model, but reconstructs the foundations of climate governance based on its own epistemologies, ontologies, and legal-political practices, challenging the sovereignty of States that fail to protect the Amazon and repositioning original peoples as subjects of International Law.
The article is organized into four main sections. The first examines the ecotechnocratic paradigm and its limitations. The second analyzes the coloniality of power in the Amazon and ongoing geopolitical disputes. The third addresses Indigenous protagonism and its epistemic dimension. The fourth studies transnational networks and their implications for global climate governance. Finally, the concluding remarks are presented.
2. THE CLIMATE CRISIS AND THE ECOTECHNOCRATIC PARADIGM: LIMITS OF AN INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSE
The climate crisis cannot be understood as a strictly natural or technical phenomenon. It is, above all, the result of civilizational choices that have structured, over the past centuries, a development model founded on the unlimited exploitation of natural resources and the externalization of its environmental and social costs. In this sense, the crisis is inseparable from a political-economic project that Quijano (2000) identified as the "coloniality of power": a pattern of domination that subordinates nature, bodies, and forms of knowledge to a Eurocentric and capitalist rationality.
The institutional framework created to address the crisis—centered on the UNFCCC and its negotiating mechanisms—largely reproduces this same rationality. Aráoz (2017) demonstrates that the "ecotechnocratic discourse" operates through two complementary ideological operations: the naturalization of environmental catastrophe as an inevitable consequence of "progress" and the depoliticization of solutions, presented as neutral technical choices. Instruments such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), carbon credits, and so-called Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) insert the forest into financial circuits without questioning the economic structure driving deforestation.
This critique echoes the reflections of Ailton Krenak (2019), for whom the ontological separation between humanity and the Earth is the foundation of the crisis. By treating nature as an object of exploitation rather than a subject of relationships, Western modernity produced what the Yanomami thinker Davi Kopenawa (2015) describes as the release of xawara: the smoke of epidemic and death that, emanating from the greed of the "commodity people," threatens the integrity of the sky. For Kopenawa, what the West calls "development" is equivalent to an ontological attack on the very condition of possibility of life.
This perspective is not merely symbolic. It points to a profound divergence over what counts as legitimate knowledge in climate governance processes. The systematic absence of Indigenous knowledge systems from UNFCCC negotiations is not an accidental gap: it is the result of an epistemic hierarchy that, since colonization, classifies the knowledge of original peoples as tradition, folklore, or spirituality—categories that the technocratic paradigm excludes from the realm of valid knowledge. It is precisely this exclusion that contemporary Indigenous protagonism seeks to contest.
3. COLONIALITY OF POWER AND THE GEOPOLITICAL DISPUTE IN THE AMAZON
The Amazon occupies a unique position in contemporary geopolitics. Becker (2005) demonstrates that the region has historically been the subject of external projections—whether by colonial powers, transnational corporations, or international organizations—which conceive it as a reservoir of resources to be managed from the outside. This dynamic is the territorial face of the coloniality of power described by Quijano (2000): a regime of social and spatial classification that subordinates the peoples and territories of the Global South to the accumulation needs of the North.
In the Amazonian case, this subordination assumes multiple and often overlapping forms. The advance of agribusiness, mining, and infrastructure projects onto Indigenous territories is not an anarchic process, but the outcome of deliberate state policies that, over decades, prioritized the extractivist model to the detriment of the rights of original peoples. The 1988 Federal Constitution represented a significant normative advance by recognizing the original rights of Indigenous peoples to their lands, but the effectiveness of these rights remains conditioned by the political willingness of governments to enforce them—a willingness that has varied dramatically over time.
The Amazonian conflict is therefore not merely a conflict over land. It is, more fundamentally, a conflict between ontologies. On the one hand, an instrumental conception of the forest as a space for value extraction—timber, minerals, soy, carbon. On the other, what Kopenawa (2015) describes as a web of kinship and spirituality connecting humans, animals, plants, rivers, and spirits in a network of interdependent relationships. This second ontology is not merely one "worldview" among others: it is the foundation of concrete territorial management practices that, for millennia, have maintained the Amazon as the most biodiverse biome on the planet.
Recognizing the ontological dimension of the conflict has direct implications for International Law. If Indigenous territories are spaces for the reproduction of radically distinct ways of life, and not merely environmental conservation areas, then their protection cannot be reduced to the logic of ecosystem services or carbon credits. It requires the recognition of a right to ontological difference, anchored in the self-determination of peoples and sovereignty over their territories and knowledge systems. This is the central demand of contemporary Indigenous protagonism.
4. INDIGENOUS PROTAGONISM AND EPISTEMIC JUSTICE: THE TRANSITION FROM TUTELAGE TO AUTONOMY
The response of Indigenous peoples to colonial violence, in its historical and contemporary forms, is not limited to passive resistance. Porto-Gonçalves (2002) characterizes it as "struggles of re-existence": processes of recreating identities, territories, and forms of knowledge that simultaneously produce a critique of the dominant model and the construction of alternatives. This perspective finds resonance in the political elaboration of Indigenous movements themselves, synthesized in the concept of Good Living (Sumak Kawsay, or Kawsak Sacha, "living forest," in the Kichwa tradition).
Bem Viver (Good Living) is not simply a cultural alternative to capitalist development. It is, as Gersem Baniwa (2006) argues, a radically distinct conception of social justice that integrates harmony in human relations with the integrity of ecosystems, the transmission of ancestral knowledge, and the political autonomy of communities. For Amazonian peoples, climate justice is not a matter of an equitable distribution of the costs and benefits of the energy transition: it is a matter of recognizing territorial and epistemic sovereignty as a condition for the possibility of life.
This conceptual elaboration is at the center of the manifesto "A Resposta Somos Nós" (2025), jointly published by COIAB and APIB. The document explicitly breaks with epistemicide—the systematic destruction of Indigenous knowledge described by Aráoz (2017)—by asserting that ancestral knowledge is not merely cultural heritage, but climate technology superior, in terms of long-term ecological efficacy, to the market mechanisms proposed by the ecotechnocratic paradigm. By claiming their role as guardians of the Amazon, Indigenous peoples shift the debate from governance "over them" to governance "carried out by them," transforming tutelage into protagonism.
This transition has concrete legal implications. International Human Rights Law progressively recognizes the centrality of the Right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consultation, enshrined in ILO Convention No. 169 and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2007), as a mechanism to protect Indigenous autonomy against projects that may affect it. However, the effectiveness of this right remains limited when States interpret it as a bureaucratic procedure rather than recognizing it as an expression of the right to self-determination. The protagonism of transnational Indigenous networks is, in part, a response to this limitation: by building their own bodies for decision-making and international coordination, Indigenous peoples bypass state filters and bring their voice directly to global forums.
5. TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS AND THE REINVENTION OF GLOBAL CLIMATE GOVERNANCE
The efficacy of Indigenous protagonism in the global climate arena lies largely in its ability to operate simultaneously across multiple territorial and institutional scales. The organizational architecture formed by COIAB (Brazilian Amazon regional scale), APIB (national scale), and COICA (pan-Amazonian scale, encompassing nine countries) forms a network that simultaneously coordinates local demands with global negotiation processes and produces innovative political and legal instruments.
A paradigmatic example of this sophistication is the elaboration of the first Indigenous Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) (APIB, 2025), an instrument that subverts the logic of state NDCs by presenting forest protection commitments grounded in ancestral territorial management practices and well-being indicators defined by the peoples themselves. This is an operation that is simultaneously technical and political: by using the language of the international climate regime—NDCs being the central mechanism of the Paris Agreement—Indigenous peoples assert their presence as legitimate actors in global governance; by redefining the content of this instrument based on their own conceptions, they subvert the ecotechnocratic logic that underpins it.
Another relevant instrument is the Indigenous Amazon G9 (APIB, 2025), a political coordination body that brings together representative organizations of the different peoples of the Amazon Basin and establishes direct partnerships with national governments, international organizations, and climate financing sources. This forest diplomacy, to use an expression that captures the unprecedented nature of the phenomenon, represents a significant shift in the power geometry of global climate governance: Indigenous peoples cease to be beneficiaries or objects of policies formulated by others and become agenda setters and negotiators.
This dynamic has direct implications for International Law. The constitution of transnational collective subjects that operate in parallel and at times in tension with nation-states challenges the traditional categories of public international law, which was historically built around state sovereignty. Indigenous peoples do not fully fit either into the category of non-governmental actors (NGOs) or that of States: they claim a form of territorial and epistemic sovereignty that transcends these categories. The legal recognition of this specificity is one of the main challenges of contemporary International Human Rights Law.
The tension between Indigenous protagonism and state sovereignty is, therefore, constitutive of the process under analysis. States that fail to protect Indigenous territories do not merely breach obligations under International Law: they create the conditions for Indigenous peoples themselves to build alternative bodies of authority and representation. In this sense, the strengthening of transnational Indigenous networks can be read both as a consequence of state failure and as a catalyst for a deeper reform of global climate governance—a reform that would necessarily entail the recognition of new subjects of International Law and new epistemic foundations for environmental decision-making.
FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
This article analyzed the protagonism of the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon in reinventing global climate justice, examining the transnational governance networks established by organizations such as COIAB, APIB, and COICA. The research confirmed the central thesis that this protagonism cannot be reduced to a form of resistance to the dominant model: it constitutes a substantive reworking of the epistemological, ontological, and legal-political foundations of climate governance.
Throughout the analysis, three articulated dimensions of this process were identified. First, the critical dimension: the Amazonian Indigenous movement offers a radical deconstruction of the ecotechnocratic paradigm, revealing its colonial assumptions and structural limitations. Second, the propositional dimension: through Bem Viver, the Indigenous NDC, and the Indigenous Amazon G9, native peoples not only criticize the existing model but also propose concrete governance instruments grounded in their own epistemologies. Third, the legal dimension: by establishing transnational networks that operate directly in international forums, Indigenous peoples challenge the traditional categories of International Law and reposition the question of self-determination as the central axis of climate justice.
The conclusions of this article point to two types of implications. From a theoretical point of view, the analysis demonstrates the inadequacy of an understanding of the climate crisis circumscribed to its technical and managerial aspects: without confronting the colonial structures that subordinate the peoples and territories of the Global South, any institutional response will remain incomplete. From a legal-political point of view, the effectiveness of global climate governance depends on the full recognition of Indigenous peoples as subjects of International Law, endowed with rights to self-determination, territorial sovereignty, and qualified participation in decision-making processes that affect their territories and knowledge systems.
As a limitation, the predominantly theoretical and bibliographic nature of the research should be noted, as it does not include direct empirical investigation with Indigenous organizations or an in-depth documentary analysis of minutes, declarations, and other instruments produced by these networks. Future research may advance in this direction by examining more specifically the actions of these organizations at specific COPs, as well as the mechanisms through which their participation and coordination can influence the formulation of decisions and commitments within international climate governance.
In summary, as Krenak (2019) and Kopenawa (2015) maintain from distinct yet convergent traditions, the answer to the climate crisis cannot be found exclusively in laboratories and COP negotiation rooms: it also lies in the territorial management practices of the peoples who, for millennia, have kept the forest standing—and who today build, through their transnational networks, the architecture of a new global climate governance. The legal and political recognition of this protagonism is not merely a matter of justice toward Indigenous peoples: it is a condition of survival for all.