Indigenous Participation at COP30: : Frictions in Climate Governance

Abstract

This article draws on the experience of the Kuntari Katu Program to reflect on the process of climate governance in the context of Indigenous participation in COP30. Developed through a partnership between Brazil’s Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the program trains Indigenous leaders to engage with international climate negotiations. We examine the tensions generated by their insertion into a space historically structured by rigid norms, technocratic and bureaucratic language, the centrality of the state, and the hierarchical ordering of knowledge. In such an environment, the presence of actors whose cosmopolitical experiences exceed the dominant logic is far from harmonious. Rather, what emerges are spaces of friction, in Anna Tsing’s sense: encounters marked by translation, negotiation, and also by misunderstanding. Indigenous participation is mediated by institutional protocols that simultaneously enable and constrain their engagement. The research employs a qualitative and critical-analytical methodology, combining document analysis, participation in the training process, and interviews. We argue that Indigenous participation is expanded through initiatives such as the Kuntari Katu Program, yet it remains conditioned by the structural limits of state sovereignty and consensus-based climate governance. Even so, Indigenous presence in negotiation rooms produces subtle displacements. Participation transforms Indigenous leaders themselves, who begin to operate across multiple registers; it also reshapes the negotiating space by introducing alternative narratives about territory, life, and responsibility; and it affects state interlocutors, albeit in more subtle ways. These transformations are partial and situated. The Indigenous experience at COP30 reveals less a rupture than an unstable field of contestation, in which inclusion and containment unfold simultaneously.