Description

This project aims to explore the role of legal pluralism as a potential lingua franca for countries of the Global South and as a strong decolonising constitutional narrative. Abya Yala, Latin America in its ancestral name, has garnered growing interest as a living laboratory for legal pluralism and Intercultural Constitutional Engineering. These innovations stem from the need to depart from the Western legal tradition, seek a more efficient response to the demands of indigenous peoples, made more urgent by the climate crisis, and introduce pioneering innovative measures that align with ecological ethnicity. Such measures are aimed at supplanting the legal frameworks of colonial heritage, safeguarding the traditional modus vivendi of indigenous communities, and offering a counterbalance to the pervasive effects of neoliberal globalization.

However, although the demands of indigenous peoples are accepted at the constitutional level, their concrete implementation has encountered considerable difficulties, undermining the circulation of a transformative Andean constitutional model, as exemplified by the failure of the Chilean constitutional revision project. An unbiased exploration of these paradoxes is essential for a comprehensive understanding of how legal pluralism can be successfully integrated within the constitutional frameworks of the Global South in general, and of Latin America in particular.

To this end, this project intends to adopt a comparative perspective, analyzing three different levels of legal pluralism related to the decolonial, identity and sustainability demands of indigenous peoples in the constitutional systems of Bolivia and Colombia:

Political Pluralism Level: This level of pluralism is linked to the concept of plurination and self-determination of indigenous peoples in contrast to colonial homogeneity. The project will analyze the mechanisms of democratic participation of indigenous communities and autonomies and the relationship between pluralism and territory.

Legal pluralism level: The legal pluralism enshrined in plurinational constitutions entails the recognition of an autonomous indigenous jurisdiction, which can compete with ordinary and special jurisdictions. The analysis of this level of pluralism will focus on the implementation of indigenous law, the recognition of indigenous jurisdictions, the rights of nature paradigm within the jurisprudence, and the competition between special indigenous jurisdictions and agri-environmental jurisdictions concerning rights of Nature.

Eco-ethical pluralism level: Economic self-determination advocates for the leading role of indigenous nations in the elaboration of their own models of development, with particular emphasis on non-anthropocentric conceptions of the relationship with Nature, opposing extractivism and capitalist exploitation of natural resources. This level of pluralism combines the economical and ethical dimensions of the indigenous cosmovision known as buen vivir. The project will analyze the exploitation of natural resources in the countries under examination together with the impact of such policies on indigenous communities.

Methodology

The project’s methodology challenges the assumptions of dominant normative models and positions Indigenous and Latin American communities in general as co-creators of knowledge, not mere objects of observation. In this sense, Latin America is not considered an object of study, but a source of knowledge.

Through collaborative research and co-design processes, LOLA supports communities in regaining control over their own representation and narrative.

The tools used include fieldwork, collaboration with Latin American researchers, and the co-production of community documentaries focusing on Indigenous legal cultures, ecological justice, and alternative forms of governance.

To ensure an authentic view of constitutional law issues in Colombia and Bolivia, the project has established a partnership with Colombian constitutional scholar Alejandro Santa María Ortiz of Externado University and Bolivian constitutional scholar María Elena Attard of Domingo Savio University, who are contributing to the compilation of legal material from a Latin American perspective.

The project also collaborates with Professor Giorgia Pavani and Professor Silvia Bagni of the Centro Studi America Latina at the University of Bologna, who contribute to the analysis of the material collected by Latin American colleagues and to the organization of events related to the project.

Objectives

The LOLA project has three core objectives:

1. to assess the efficiency of the constitutional mechanisms used to translate the described levels of pluralism;
2. to identify constitutional measures that can replace the legal system of colonial origin with a constitutional grammar that guarantees the values of Andean indigenous culture,
3. to elaborate an alternative model of sustainable development, diversity governance, management of cultural conflicts, social and climate crises that could be useful in the European context.