The voice of Indigenous peoples in cultural development negotiations

This article analyzes Indigenous peoples’ negotiations in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals through a comparative study of the Malaumkarta communities in Indonesia and the Bonda communities in India. Integrating Gramsci and Spivak’s subaltern theories with Escobar’s political ecology, this study identifies five dimensions of negotiation: everyday resistance, strategic adaptation, lawfare, maintenance of traditional practices, and multi-scale negotiation. Malaumkarta adopts formal engagement through the Sasi system and the Customary Council, while Bonda employs strategic isolation through traditional millet farming. The findings demonstrate that Indigenous peoples’ environmental struggles are ontological struggles that articulate the pluriversity of knowledge, challenging the hegemony of modern development discourse. This article calls for decolonizing the Sustainable Development Goals toward a platform that recognizes Indigenous knowledge as an equal epistemology.