Chapter’s Conclusion

This chapter aimed to discuss the specificities of each variable that may affect the variation of the results explained in this thesis. A comprehensive table summarizing the main characteristics of the variations in Brazil and Canada can be found below (Table 4).

Table 4: summary of the description of the independent variables

Variables/countries Brazil Canada

Institutional design SV 1: Hybrid (Simultaneously bottom-

up and top-down) SV 2: highly protective

SV 1: Top-down SV 2: fairly protective

Federalism SV 3: strong SV 4: conflictive pattern

SV 3: weak

SV 4: conflictive pattern Government agenda SV 5: marginal

SV 6:

neodevelopmentalism

SV 5: central SV 6: business

liberalism Native collective

agency

SV 7: declining capacity of mobilization SV 8: increasing number of associations

SV 7: increasing mobilization capacity

SV 8: increasing number of associations

While Brazil’s participatory institution can be considered one of the most important bottom-up participatory experiments in the country and perhaps in the world, its provisions will not necessarily be taken into account by the federal government. At the same time, the existence of top-down processes involving Indigenous groups, as the Canadian case shows, does not imply reduced quality or effectiveness. The actual impacts of such institutional design variations on the prospects for policy change in both countries will be addressed in chapters 3 and 5.

Furthermore, it has been shown that, while Brazil and Canada have distinct constitution-making processes, both have included the acknowledgment of Indigenous rights among the provisions. The timing of a constitution’s enactment and scope of its provisions may have played an important role in the processes analyzed in this thesis, due to the constitution’s capacity to structure the political interaction between social actors and public agents and to provide momentum to Indigenous groups to push their agenda forward.

The Brazilian and Canadian federations have assigned distinct roles to their provincial and state governments. In both countries, Indigenous issues have historically been managed by the central government. Nonetheless, subnational entities might either resistance or support policy changes related to Native claims, and the entities’ roles in each concrete case must be further clarified. We described Brazil as a country where Indigenous groups and their initiatives find strong and organized opposition in the Parliament, whereas the Canadian parliamentary system favors the party discipline around the prime minister’s and his/her cabinet agenda.

Moreover, we have shown that the judicialization of the Indigenous politics and policy seems to follow a conflictive pattern in both Canada and Brazil.

In both countries, despite their differences regarding their systems of government, there has been an increasing capacity on the part of the central governments to set parliaments’ political agendas and dominate the political lives of both polities. Notwithstanding, it remains unclear how the governments’ political agendas during the processes analyzed in this thesis have contributed to the success or failure of policy changes. For the moment, we have seen that the regarding the budgetary centrality of the Indigenous issue in both countries, whereas the Brazilian case shows a chronically underfunded agency, the federal spending on Indigenous policy in Canada has risen steadily since 1946.

Finally, Indigenous groups in Brazil and Canada have been experiencing a comeback to the national stage since the 1960s, with important repercussions in their political achievements since then. However, the specificity of Indigenous collective agency in both countries must be investigated to connect its features to the outcomes presented in each context. As Turner (2002, p.245) says, “empowerment, not the inertial continuity of ‘tradition’; engagement, not separation; and hybridity, not cultural purity, are the values informing the vitality and assertiveness of renascent Indigenous peoples and cultures all over the world”.

Ingram and Schneider (1997, p.66) have concluded that “policy design has significant consequences for democracy”. Therefore, policy design should be seriously analyzed in all of its constitutive dimensions, including the design’s stated goals and problems to be solved, the targeted populations, the agents involved in the delivery of the policy, the tools used to change behaviors as a result of the policy, the rules that provide the parameters of action to the actors involved in the policy, the explanations and reasons used to justify the design and the explicit or implicit

assumptions that connect the design’s elements. Essentially, when citizens have more control over the formulation, design, implementation and evaluation of public policies, the more democratic and legitimate the public good delivered by those policies will be (INGRAM, 1993; FISCHER, 2003; 2009; FISCHER; GOTTWEISS, 2012).

The next chapters 2 and 4 will describe in detail the history of Indigenous policies in Brazil and Canada, stressing their distinct historical pathways, their early formulations and their design at the time the processes analyzed in this thesis occurred. In doing so, policy changes over time will be shown. The two different policy designs on Indigenous issues related to the recognition of traditionally occupied lands will be discussed at length, exploring each design’s major features.

2. CHAPTER 2:

There is no single indigenous history in Brazil, but a multiplicity of stories, woven with experiences in diverse temporalities, in different ecosystems and colonization, resulting in organizational forms, cultural traditions and political horizons that are also very different. The strategies for reproduction and continuity of the ruling elite, always based on war and the civilizing mission, never dispensed from each other, a collective that can be object of domination and exploitation, but whose names and forms change throughout history according to the interests and concerns of the ruling elite, in a true epiphany of otherness (OLIVEIRA, 2016, p. 39)⁶⁵.