June 7, 2016
Indigenous cultural communities and indigenous peoples (ICCs/IPs) manage around 8.2 million1
hectares of forest lands in the Philippines. These ancestral domains represent around 52% of the forest lands and a significant portion of the remaining forested areas in the country. These are resource-rich areas, which attract projects and programs from various sectors for the development and utilization of natural resources found therein.
At present, the most concrete and basic safeguard for the recognition and protection of IPs’ rights in the ancestral domain is the conduct of the Free and Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) process. This refers to the formal FPIC process facilitated by the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) or as pursued under the IPs’ own customary processes.
The Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (IPRA) of 1997 guarantees the right of the ICCs/IPs to freely
pursue their economic, social, and cultural economic development.2 FPIC operationalizes the constitutional recognition of the rights of ICCs/IPs over their ancestral domains and their right to decide priorities for their own development over lands they own, occupy, or use.
Under the IPRA, the ICCs’/IPs’ right to FPIC gives them the right to be consulted and for their consent to be secured before projects and programs are implemented in their domains. This extends to having the power to negotiate the terms of engagement and to veto certain projects. The 2012 FPIC Guidelines lay down a uniform and mandatory procedure to ensure these rights, and the actual decision-making process varies depending on the customary law of the concerned ICCs/IPs from whom consent is being sought for, whether the community decision is to be given by the elders/leaders or by the community members involved through household representation or otherwise. However, note that there are also ICCs/ IPs who have their own processes independent of the NCIP and that of the IPRA, or recognize only some provisions of the NCIP FPIC rules and of the IPRA. The case of Daraghuyan in Bukidnon featured in this report is an example.
The NCIP is the national government agency created under the IPRA with the primary responsibility of ensuring that rights to land and resources within ancestral domains of the IPs are recognized and respected. In carrying out this mandate, the NCIP has an important role in ensuring that ancestral domains are demarcated and that IPs secure tenure within these
ancestral domains. In addition, NCIP has to ensure that any developments and projects to be implemented in the ancestral domain have complied with the FPIC requirements imposed on all proponents of the projects. The NCIP’s role in the process is to facilitate the process and validate on the ground whether or not there was indeed genuine consent that is free and prior informed. This presupposes that the community has complete information, including background information on the project and the company. This information must not only be complete but also accessible, and must be understood by the IP community.
In 2011–2012, the Non-Timber Forest Products- Exchange Programme, together with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH, and NCIP conducted a national assessment of the implementation of the FPIC in the Philippines. The assessment provided evidence-based recommendations for the improvement of the process, which were reflected in the revised FPIC Guidelines of 2012.
This report documents the FPIC processes in a number of projects on Community-Based Non-timber Enterprises (CBNEs), forest management systems like REDD-plus, and IPs and community conserved areas and ancestral domain titling. In sum, the reports showed that despite the high hopes that FPIC processes in these projects will be smoother and
predictable, it turned out to be more confusing and frustrating to community partners and proponents. It also exposed the lack of competency of some NCIP field officers to facilitate the process. In addition, lack of trust and confidence by the community to the NCIP has also surfaced during these FPIC processes. Amid these issues, there are ICCs/IPs, like the Daraghuyan-Bukidnon Tribe, that had remarkably shown the practice of seeking consent as embedded in their culture—a customary norm of consent seeking— prior to the legislation of the IPRA Law and before any NCIP-issued FPIC Guidelines.
For the communities undergoing FPIC in their CBNE and forest management projects, a series of FPIC policy discussions were held to address the confusion and disappointment, and involve everybody in the process. The policy discussions were held in the provinces of Quezon and Palawan, and then a national forum in Quezon City. The forums were venues to further distill the issues and bottlenecks encountered during the FPIC process and find ways to address issues, in implementation and in policy.
This report, which documented the experiences of seven projects, aimed to do a continuing assessment of the FPIC process as it is envisioned under the NCIP Guidelines and implemented on the field. This is offered as a contribution to the increasing literature on the implementation of FPIC in the Philippines to further improve its implementation.
During the “Securing Community Livelihoods and Forest Management Systems: Distilling FPIC Experiences, Sharing Lessons Learned” national conference held on June 24, 2015 in Quezon City, the key findings and recommendations found in this report were shared and enhanced:
FPIC. Based on the above findings, key recommendations from the National FPIC Forum are the following:
1. Policy recommendations
2. Operational recommendations
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