Ateneo de Manila University

Center of International and Comparative Education (CRICE) in University of Malaya 

NGO Karenni Evergreen 

ASEAN GREEN JUSTICE NETWORK (AGREEN) aims at estabilishing and ensuring  GREEN JUSTICE for local and indigenous people in ASEAN through our netowrk with advocacy activities on fundamental and universal human rights to quality livelihoods in inclusive community. 

As a lot of discussion on climage change shows, local and indigenous peoples are originally well prepared for the environmental transformaiton with excellent adaptation ability. Local and indigenous people are well connected to information and knowledge on the earth through their lifestyles in long history. It is international soceity and government that does not prioritize the voice of local and indigenous people even though they continue to be reporting the risk and impact of climate change to international society. The situation has contributed to worsen the vulenrability of local and indigenous people on human rights wiht the negative impact of climate change such as land degradation, which led to their unique cultural degradation in the local and indigenous communities. 

Green Justice becomes the key concept in the context of community based resource management. Green justice is not only a seductive concept but also an attractive one intellectually and practically. It offers a mechanism for conceptualizing and deepening your understanding of the means by which open and complex systems respond to dynamic and unpredictable independent variables and, potentially, produce positive outcomes. Although the definition of green justice has been widely contested, a consensus seems to be emerging, focused on the fair and equity access to community resources in inclusive indigenous community to cope with rapid-onset effects or significant sources of stress and intervention on human rights arising from environemnt degradation. 

Green justice is more than just bounce-back to the original stage; it is not possible to the same position on socio-ecological status before climate change as individuals and organizations within structures have changed on policy of resource management in the community. 

At an intial stage for a change and reform on community based resource management, Green Justice Network focuses on building capacity for bounding, bridging and linking capital. The network aims at making a reliable and interactive partnership with a diverse range of local organizations and actors on community based resource management in local and indigenous communities in ASEAN. At the second stage, based on bounding, bridging and linking capital, the network designs an interactive activity for formulating and integrating citizen participatory resource management strategy for Green Justice. At the third stage, the network moves toward refining and deepening of network gains through social differenciation analysis on implementation of resource management policies and activities for inclusive and sustainable community. Through theses three steps for a social change and reform, community engagement and environment awareness on climate risk is enhanced. Finally, the network can deliver a social change and reform of green justice with the scheme of ensuring fair and equity access to natural resources for an inclusive community in harmony. 

ASEAN is in the process of establishing decentralization under the reformed administration, where community based resource management is counted as a tool for enhancing the sustainable management of natural resources and reducing the poverty on the management in development. Community based resource management has the potential to empower local and indigenous communities and contribute to improving the quality of life for local and indigenous people. Community based resource management has also the function to promote the mitigation and adaptation measures against climage change through sustaining and enforcing the natural resources and their corresponding carbon stock. Incorporating community based resource management inot the climate change mitigation policies at community level increases the potential of accessing to long-term additional economic profits. For that, community has to acquire the right to access to resources under the equitable benefits-sharing mechanism through sound localization. These elements are also acknowledged as the instrument for alleviating poverty in Asia. Formulating the adaptation strategy of community based resource management for local and indigenous community based on the recognition of the local value and culture in the context of biodiversity.

The social structure of ASEAN includes various social viabilities of vulnerability on climage change such as insufficient infrastructure for livelihoods, sufficient financial resources and lack of capacity of governance. The outcome of vulnerability leads to worsen deforestration and environment degradation, which has been discussed as a major concern in community. It also leads to less agricultural productivity while deforestration contributes to the contextual economic vulnerability. As a result of environment degradation, the quality of life of local and indigenous people are significanlty damaged, including gender, poverty and human rights to health agenda. In ASEAN,  the governance structure at macro level often fails to show any pragmatic intervention to prevent and mitigate the environment degradation and deforestation. Hence, it is a prerequisite that the framework of public policy on natural resource management for enabling self-governance of local and indigenous people based on the conformity to political, social and economic status at the local level makes it possible to ensure the right to access to appropriate resource for protecting the livelihoods. For that, establishing model of community based resource management with the effort at micro level is crucial. In response to various problems of environment degradation and deforestration related to mismanagement of resources  based on the prismatic vulnerability, local organizations such as NGOs and CSOs began experimenting with collaborative forms of citizen participatory natural resoure management practices with communities.

In addition, ASEAN is one of the minority ethinic concentrated areas in the world, which is a social differentiation risk on green justice in anthropocene. For example, in Myanmar, the 2008 constitution does not mention on UNDRIP and any reference to ethnic minorities or indigenous people. The constitution does not allow local and indigenous people to have the collective land rights or customary land use practices. This is a source of inequity and injustice on socio-ecological, cultural, economic and political context in Myanmar. Local and indigenous people are vulnerable to the impact of environment degradation and deforestration because their lifestyles are strongly linkages with ecosystems and their local environment elements.