December 2004, Business for Social Responsibility (BSR)
Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and First Peoples Worldwide (FPW) have formed an innovative partnership called the Resource/Extractive Companies and Indigenous Peoples Engagement (RECIPE) for Dialogue. This guidebook is a practical tool to help company teams as well as Indigenous leaders and facilitators to explore their relationships and the opportunities and constraints for constructive engagement.
Today, Indigenous peoples and resource companies have few road signs to help direct the formation of mutually beneficial relationships. For companies, their relations with such peoples are at the core of their license to operate and a defining element of their commitment to corporate social responsibility. For Indigenous peoples, their very existence can be either enhanced or gravely injured by business activities.
Companies and Indigenous peoples are left facing a vast horizon with few guide markers to show them how to build effective relationships. And the stakes are only getting higher as the natural resources that societies need and that companies can provide are increasingly found on land traditionally inhabited by Indigenous peoples.
Previous efforts to bring companies and Indigenous peoples together to discuss key issues—such as free, prior, informed consent, land rights, and community decision-making in planning processes—have met with limited success, in part because of the political sensitivity of Indigenous peoples’ concerns. Therefore, companies that recognize the benefits of respecting Indigenous peoples’ rights still need to develop tools and a knowledge base to implement effective and practical engagement methodologies, and Indigenous peoples still need to find ways to engage more effectively to protect and enhance their interests.
