The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Indigenous Peoples: Another Missed Opportunity?

Abstract

Indicators have emerged as a powerful communication tool for complex phenomena in the shift towards quantitative measurement. Indigenous peoples have not been immune to the representation and monitoring of their lives using indicators. Across many of these standard metrics, they consistently underperform. As a result, resources globally and nationally are often targeted at improving these metrics of indigenous populations. Indigenous peoples have not been silent on this matter. In challenging these universal frameworks, they mobilised a self-determination movement which is centred on their worldviews and priorities. The endorsement and ratification of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) have further created a space and impetus to ask how the UNDRIP can be implemented to support indigenous groups around the world to drive their own development agenda. Using a framework informed by UNDRIP and Indigenous knowledge this paper has two aims: 1) to explore if and how the SDGs have reframed policy relating to Indigenous peoples in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and 2) to explore how indigenous communities are developing their own indicators to inform their development needs and in the process mitigate the negative governance effects of national goal and target setting.