On 21–22 July 2026, during the Economic and Social Council’s Management Segment, Aluki Kotierk presented the report of the twenty-fifth session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. The setting matters. This was not only a statement delivered inside the Forum that produced it. The report was placed before the institution responsible for connecting the UN system’s work on sustainable development, financing, governance and implementation.
Kotierk’s presentation made the connection explicit. Indigenous Peoples’ health cannot be separated from their lands, territories, cultures, languages and right to self-determination. Climate change is already damaging lands, livelihoods, food systems and health. And as demand for critical minerals grows, climate action and energy transition policies must respect Indigenous Peoples’ rights, lands and territories. Free, prior and informed consent must be fully respected.
That is more important than another declaration that the energy transition should be fair. It moves the question into the general machinery of sustainable development and UN governance. Critical-mineral extraction is no longer a peripheral Indigenous rights concern. It is part of the institutional question of what the transition is allowed to do, who may authorize it and who bears the cost when its promises fail.
Watch: Aluki Kotierk, Chair of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, presents the report of the Forum’s 25th session to the ECOSOC Management Segment, 21 July 2026. Watch on UN Web TV →
The green purpose is not a moral exemption
The central mistake of the current transition is to treat the purpose of a project as an answer to the question of whether its development is just.
The green purpose of a project does not excuse the colonial structure of its development.
Lithium, nickel, copper and rare earth elements do not become ethical because they are destined for electric vehicles, electricity grids or renewable energy systems. A battery supply chain can still be built through external definitions of the public interest, appropriation of territory, minimal consultation, individual compensation and the concentration of benefits outside the region of extraction.
The technology changes. The governing pattern can remain familiar.
First, a government or company defines a national or global necessity. Then a territory is re-described as an opportunity, a deposit, a corridor or a strategic asset. The people living there appear as stakeholders in a project whose basic parameters have already been fixed. Consultation is scheduled after the project has acquired political momentum. Compensation is offered to individual rights holders while the collective relationship to territory is reduced to a price. Finally, the benefits travel outward: to manufacturers, investors, governments and consumers elsewhere.
The transition’s moral language can make this structure harder to see. A mine that supplies an electric vehicle is presented as part of the solution before anyone has asked whether the people whose land is being used were able to decide the terms of that solution. “Green” becomes a conclusion reached before the evidence is heard.
That is the moral exemption the transition has now lost.
Rights holders, not stakeholders
The most important distinction in Kotierk’s presentation is also the one most likely to be softened in practice: Indigenous Peoples are rights holders and decision-makers, not stakeholders.
Stakeholder is a managerial category. It identifies a person or group whose interests a company should map, consult or mitigate. Stakeholder engagement can be sincere. It can also be completed without changing the project’s location, timing, design or ultimate authorization.
A rights holder is different. Rights do not merely add interests to an impact assessment. They limit the range of lawful and legitimate decisions available to everyone else.
A decision-maker is different again. Decision-making power begins before the hearing about consequences. It concerns whether a project will proceed, where it will be located, when it may begin, what conditions must be met, which alternatives remain open and what happens when the conditions are breached.
This is why FPIC cannot be reduced to a meeting, a signature or an attendance list. Consent is not the last box in an engagement plan. It is a condition on the authority to proceed. It must be prior to the decisions that make a project difficult to stop: licensing, land allocation, offtake agreements, infrastructure commitments and financial close.
If a community can only discuss mitigation after all meaningful alternatives have disappeared, the process may still be called consultation. It cannot honestly be called decision-making.
From recognition to decision infrastructure
The UN system has made an important move by naming the problem. The next move is harder: translate the norm into the infrastructure through which projects are approved, financed, insured and defended.
If FPIC is a cornerstone of rights-respecting climate action, it should be visible at every point where an extractive project becomes real.
It should be visible before a licence is issued and before a project is treated as an inevitable part of national strategy. Early-stage decisions must disclose which alternatives are still open and who has authority to decide among them.
It should be visible in the due diligence of banks, investors and development finance institutions. A lender should not treat consent as a public-relations document attached to an otherwise complete risk file. The question is whether the borrower can show a legitimate process, a representative mandate, accessible information, culturally appropriate deliberation and the continuing ability of the affected people to withhold or condition consent.
It should be visible in cumulative-impact assessment. A new mine is not experienced as a standalone spreadsheet. It is added to roads, ports, transmission lines, waste facilities, water withdrawals, previous dispossession and the loss of cultural sites. A project can appear acceptable in isolation while making the territory unlivable in combination.
It should be visible in financing and insurance conditions. If consent is withdrawn, a condition is breached or new information changes the rights analysis, the contract must contain consequences that are real enough to alter conduct: suspension, redesign, remediation, exit or refusal to disburse.
It should be visible in the responsibilities of parent companies. Corporate liability cannot stop at the subsidiary that holds the permit while the parent controls capital allocation, strategy, procurement, public claims and the timetable of the transition. A corporate group that benefits from extraction should not be able to outsource the rights question to a thinly capitalized local vehicle.
And it should be visible in the financial model itself. Rights violations are not an external reputational risk to be managed by a communications team. They can produce delay, injunctions, permit cancellation, higher cost of capital, stranded infrastructure, lost offtake value and long-term liability. A serious model should count those outcomes before the project is approved, not after the community has been asked to absorb them.
This is not an argument for turning Indigenous rights into another risk metric. Rights are not valuable because they improve a project’s predictability. The direction of accountability must be the other way around: project predictability is legitimate only when it is built on rights that are respected.
The question after ECOSOC
Kotierk’s statement places the energy transition inside a wider account of health, land, self-determination, sustainable development and participation. That wider frame is essential. A mine does not affect only the price of a mineral. It can alter food systems, cultural practice, health, mobility, governance and the conditions under which a people can continue to exist as a people.
The transition therefore cannot be judged only by the emissions it avoids or the minerals it supplies. It must also be judged by the authority it recognizes and the forms of harm it refuses to reproduce.
Recognition is no longer the central problem. Translation is.
The UN system has begun to acknowledge that the energy transition can reproduce the extractive injustices it claims to solve. The question now is whether that recognition will alter who has authority over land, whose consent matters and which projects receive permits and capital.
A transition that needs Indigenous rights to be quiet in order to move quickly is not just. It is only another extraction frontier, now carrying a cleaner vocabulary.