By Veronica Korber Gonçalves and Tchella Maso
There is an expectation of significant Indigenous participation at COP30. The event is being held in the Amazon city of Belém in Brazil, where over half of the country’s Indigenous population currently lives. This has led to an increase in training, “capacity building” and educational activities focused on the climate regime and COP agendas, aimed particularly at Indigenous leaders and youth.
. This is connected to the understanding that:
- The location of the COP matters. While COPs have their own structure and internal logic, the host territory inevitably seeps into and is expressed within the pavilions. The decision to hold COP in Belém reflects this concern, ensuring the forest is present at the COP.
- The expansion of Indigenous participation at COPs is a demand; it is not only diplomats who have a place at the COP. Indeed, in recent years, COPs have evolved into summits that gather not just negotiators, but increasingly, business actors — especially fossil fuel lobbyists, as exposed at recent COPs — NGOs, youth, and subnational governments. Indigenous peoples have played a crucial role in expanding spaces and voices within the COPs, as evidenced, for instance, by the creation of the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform (LCIPP).
- COP is a space of articulation that extends beyond formal negotiation rooms; it is an opportunity for interaction among peoples from diverse parts of the globe and with other international actors. COP has become a platform for promoting, recognising, and safeguarding Indigenous rights, including free, prior and informed consent, and the protection of ancestral territories and their socio-biodiverse cultures.
Over the past month, we have been invited to contribute to these training initiatives and developed training materials to prepare Indigenous representatives for COP30. We also designed our own mini-course for the Indigenous student Association at the University of Brasilia, which we will reflect on in another blog. However, undertaking these activities generated a series of discomforts – as framed by feminist anthropology – tensions, unease, and doubts that form part of a reflective knowledge practice (Haraway, 1994).
Reflecting on and departing from these feelings, we offer in this text an analysis of what drives the expansion of educational initiatives aimed at Indigenous peoples. We suggest that we need to move away from these initiatives as a method for translating the COP world to facilitate civil society participation. And instead, view them as a means of contact and opportunity for shared learning between civil society and the diplomats representing and negotiating on behalf of these diverse communities in COP processes.
In March 2025, in dialogue with the TYBYRA Collective, we decided to write a booklet aimed at LGBTQIAPN+ Indigenous people. The aim was to explain what COP is and why LGBTQIAPN+ people must be included in the conversation. This reflection emerged from a collaborative research process focused on shaping public policies for this population. Through collective effort, we produced the booklet “LGBTQIAPN+ Indigenous Peoples and the Struggle for Climate Justice: A Seat at the Negotiation Table!”, which was launched at the 2025 Acampamento Terra Livre (ATL).
On the weekend following ATL, we were invited to take part in a training activity organised by the Kabu Institute for Kayapó Indigenous people from the Baú and Menkragnoti territories. The invitation was for Veronica to address climate finance, and for Tchella to discuss gender and climate. The expectation was for us to facilitate Indigenous people’s engagement with the “world” of the COPs by offering a digestible translation of the acronyms and logic governing these meetings to help them to prepare to navigate this event.
These experiences proved to be both beautiful experiences and very challenging. Between the invitation, the plan, and the session itself, we found ourselves tasked with something greater than we’d initially envisioned. In presenting the 2025 negotiation agenda, we found ourselves in a position of needing to explain the unexplainable and irreconcilable: the gap between the urgency of the crisis and the capacity to reach radical and ambitious consensus. That no, there is not enough financing. That no, there is no agreement on urgently ending fossil fuel exploitation. And that no, not everyone will gain entry to the COP pavilions; and even if they do, they may not understand what is being said and may not be heard if they speak. The two-day training or a booklet we could provide would not dissolve or resolve the barriers that our participants would likely encounter, such as the English language barrier or the opaque jargon of these spaces.
So, while we firmly believe in and advocate for everyone’s right to participate, we also became increasingly uneasy about the risk of creating false expectations, as if simply mastering the language of this “world” would be enough to gain entry to the “party”. In fact, the more this language is learned, the more apparent its limits become. This may have been at the root of our discomfort.
What is the meaning of “teaching” about the COPs, when what is truly needed is for negotiators, and especially decision-makers, to learn to listen to these voices? If there is an effort by Indigenous peoples to understand the world of the COPs, is there an equal effort by the COP world to listen, comprehend, and transform based on what the voices from the territories are saying?
There is, therefore, a limit between the physical location of the COPs – now, in the Amazon – the expansion of participation (in our experience, focused on Indigenous peoples), and the organisational structures that govern the rituals of international negotiations.The COP lexicon cannot be conveyed in two days or a few pages — but if it could, how would that shared knowledge influence the reorientation of global environmental policies? What if the ratio between those upholding the problem and the voices of hope is seven times skewed? This is an imbalance evidenced in the number of oil lobbyists in Dubai compared to Indigenous representatives. How can we ensure that the everyday experiences in the territories, such as springs that no longer provide drinkable water, heavy rains and long droughts, roots that do not nourish as they once did, become the motivation for building consensus? How can we make it so that the falling sky that these communities are experiencing becomes the basis for expanding funding and generating effective mitigation and adaptation measures that they co-design and that truly contribute to the life projects of communities?
Between knowledge of this lived reality and the megalomaniac structures of power shaping the COP world, what can a training session or a handbook really do? The answer cannot be hollow — our dreams of the future depend on it. Without disregarding the role of large-scale social and political structures and pre-established power logics, through the process of offering these courses we shifted our attention to the collectives who invited us to act as facilitators of a particular kind of knowledge. This created a new set of questions to navigate with our participants: what are the aspirations of those who asked us to offer training and to make COP knowledge more accessible? What is their interest in the COP? What do the Indigenous people who take part in these trainings and read these materials hope for? With what goals — and in what ways — do they want to navigate the COP?
Departing from these questions might mean, in the case of a two-day training or a simple guide, setting aside all the apparatus we might see as “essential” to addressing the COPs — such as the history of negotiations, the negotiation agendas, the acronyms, and topics like climate finance or gender and climate — and instead starting from the realities of the collectives and needs of the people themselves.
This demands connection, partnership, and trust. It might seem obvious, but it certainly disrupts the expectations of those who view “training Indigenous people for the COPs” as a process of “delivering knowledge to those who lack it,” of presenting content deemed “indispensable” for participating in that space. Understanding the political and mobilization strategies that underpin Indigenous participation in negotiations — while considering aspects like intersectionality and transversality — can open up a dialogical path. Taking seriously the multiplicity of existences carried by each participation and community representative may require from us a profound process of decentering, unlearning, and misrecognition (Viveiros de Castro) — one that transforms the task of “teaching about the COPs” into something more like populating our rather gray world with everyday realities, tangible adaptations, and grounded alternatives to confront the set of challenges that continue to shape climate negotiations — whether they are held in the Amazon or not.
Perhaps we are the ones meant to learn about COPs — not the bearers of knowledge. And if the forest speaks through its people, may we have the ears to listen.
