Gustavo Moreira Ramos

In response to an increasing number of attacks since 2010s, the Brazilian indigenous movement has expanded its struggles to the legal and international arenas, with special attention to water issues. This ethnographic research investigates what indigenous struggles for water at the international level tell us about the mechanisms of global environmental governance in a context of climate change. Scholarships that analyze indigenous actions related to water have focused on the divergence of meanings, understandings and ontologies among indigenous people and other agents. In order to advance these debates, I examine how the indigenous concept of water as life relates to the legal notion of water as right. I explore how climate appears in these indigenous struggles by focusing on its legal and practical dimension and on the entanglements between water issues, international human rights law and bureaucracy that emerge in the international actions carried out by indigenous lawyers. This project offers new understandings on how the international legal sphere and its bureaucracy shapes the minority groups struggles, as well as how climate change issues mediate the encounter between the local and the global in international environmental debates.