Indigenous People and The Sustainable Development Goals in Brazil: A Study of the Kaingang People

Abstract

Indigenous Peoples continue to face substantial challenges. This article focuses on the Kaingang People in Southern Brazil and is contextualized by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) adopted by all the United Nations member states in 2015. The authors adopted an Indigenist research methodology to obtain oral evidence and provided an education-focused case-study. The research findings reveal that, despite Brazilian Constitutional recognition and SDG provisions, in practice, the Indigenous People in Brazil are experiencing renewed threats to their indigeneity. The SDGs need to be implemented more robustly at the local level to overcome these emancipatory barriers. The article reveals the key role of empowerment that can be played by carefully articulated indigenous education programs.

Exploring Cross-Sectoral Implications of the Sustainable Development Goals: Towards a Framework for Integrating Health Equity Perspectives With the Land-Water-Energy Nexus

“…In line with the socio-environmental lapses discussed above, and depicted in Figures 2 , 3 , many of the studies [ 30 , 55 , 76 – 84 ] pointed to a lack of attention within existing nexus methods to systematically unpacking synergies and trade-offs between social and environmental issues across a range of contexts and scales. Our findings ( Figure 4 ), characterize these as scalar and theoretical lapses and link them to a lack of attention to decolonial perspectives that are needed to address impacts on those rural, remote, and Indigenous communities most affected by resource development activities.…”

“…When considering the cross-sectoral relevance of the SDG’s, our review identifies delays and barriers to engagement within rural and Indigenous contexts which also further entrench continued epistemological divides between western and Indigenous conceptualizations of sustainability and development [ 34 , 84 ]. A pertinent question is whether (and how) the SDGs can help to bridge the two ideologies and inculcate Indigenous Peoples’ self-determining goals, socio-environmental values, ways of knowing and being into nexus issues.…”

“…The land, water, energy nexus can also be applied to analyze specific resource issues such as forestry [ 63 ], hydropower [ 67 ], and desalination [ 83 ], with an emphasis on understanding impacts on health outcomes, such as the distribution of the impacts of socio-ecological determinants of health. If future research is to be effective in supporting greater equity and sustainability within nexus systems of land, water, and energy [ 66 , 75 ], the scale and geography of the nexus will be important to consider along with the socio-political nuances and particular socio-ecological dimensions contouring these settings [ 57 , 84 ].…”

“…The water-energy-land nexus offers a potential tool for centering health across scales and contexts, in keeping with the WHO’s Shanghai’s Declaration on leveraging interactions to promote health in the SDGs [ 1 , 3 ]. However, several existing nexus approaches do not actively foster cross-sectoral integration [ 78 , 79 ], system thinking, transdisciplinarity [ 30 , 75 , 84 ], nor place-based considerations in support of promoting the equitable integration of multiple perspectives, knowledges, and needs within decision-making and policy outcomes [ 77 ].…”

Historical Ecology in Brazil: A Systematic Mapping of Scientific Articles (1998–2021)

“…Totalizing, 60% worked in the Amazon, 31% in the Atlantic Forest, making 91% of the articles (these figures include the articles studying one or more biomes). Five works study the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest [68,[71][72][73][74]; three articles study the Cerrado Biome (Brazilian savannah) and the Atlantic Forest [75][76][77]; one studies the Amazon, the Atlantic Forest, and the Cerrado [78]; one studies the Atlantic Forest and Pampa [79]; two study the Cerrado [80,81], one the Pampa [82] and three the Caatinga [83][84][85]. There are no articles about Pantanal.…”