You are here

  1. Home
  2. Indigenous Peoples, the City and Inclusive Urban Development

Indigenous Peoples, the City and Inclusive Urban Development

2 May 2017

Although the UN’s Agenda 2030 was established to promote equitable and inclusive urban development, in Latin America, the urban indigenous – disproportionately poorer than non-indigenous urban residents, lacking access to basic services such as water and sanitation, and living in less secure and more disaster-prone neighbourhoods – remain a key barrier to its goal ‘to leave no one behind’.

Indigenous Peoples, the City and Inclusive Urban Development Policies in Latin America: Lessons from Bolivia and Ecuador, a new paper by Philipp Horn published in Development Policy Review, argues that the historical construction of indigeneity as an essentially rural policy category – despite the fact that more than 30 per cent of the region’s indigenous peoples (IPs) lived in cities in 2000, a number that’s likely to increase – is key to this exclusion.

In addition, even when urban indigeneity is recognised through constitutional reform, as in Bolivia and Ecuador in 2009 and 2008, multiple obstacles to the delivery of appropriate policies remain, including development priorities which conflict with indigenous interests and needs, and the difficulties of promoting access to universal rights and services while simultaneously guaranteeing access to collective rights.

The paper concludes with a set of policy recommendations that could lead to more inclusive urban development, including:

  • The consolidation of intercultural and bilingual education to help overcome the notion of indigeneity as a rural category associated with ‘tradition’ and ‘underdevelopment’.
  • Policy-relevant research on integrating universal and collective rights. (Despite the rhetoric around ‘Vivir Bien/ Buen Vivir’, policymakers and planners still struggle to resolve conflicts between distinct rights-based categories i.e. between universal, individual rights to shelter, land, and urban public services and specific, collective indigenous rights.)
  • City-specific solutions to urban development goals – identifying the practices that work best in individual cities and strengthening these across different policy sectors.

To read Indigenous Peoples, the City and Inclusive Urban Development Policies in Latin America: Lessons from Bolivia and Ecuador in full, please contact Philipp Horn.

Share this page:

Research Focus Archive

Contact us

To find out more about our work, or to discuss a potential project, please contact:

International Development Research Office
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom

T: +44 (0)1908 858502
E: international-development-research@open.ac.uk