Solarpunk Travel

While it’s no surprise that the original concept of ecotourism has been obscured by less virtuous projects, they become more problematic when they block local communities from ancestral lands or even involve their forced relocation. A recent case on the eviction of 16 villages on Rempang Island, Indonesia to build a solar panel factory and “eco-city” illustrates this. While the need to increase renewable energy production is urgent, it’s harder to justify when it comes at the expense of local residents’ lives and territorial sovereignty.

To explore such questions, in June 2023 a group of researchers at Grenoble Ecole de Management (GEM) organised a dialogue with members of the Mbyá Guaraní community from Maricá, Brazil. Our motivation was to explore the relationship between business schools and the behaviour of multinational corporations toward indigenous peoples and their land rights.

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The International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation has recently called for greater scrutiny on non-climate-related reporting, in particular societal and social issues. For multinationals, however, the temptation will always be there to find ways to minimise risks and continue business as usual.

Research has shown that lax reporting and the lack of enforcement mechanisms have led firms to shirk social sustainability and human rights requirements and favour bluewashing strategies. This regulatory environment has enabled MNCs to increasingly follow what historian Patrick Wolfe called a “logic of elimination” that erases natives from the land.

However, there is reason to think that attitudes can shift over time. A 2019 victory in Bahía of the Tupinamba de Olivença tribe over the Portuguese hotel giant Vila Gale created a legal precedent demonstrating that if local authorities license projects without involving federal agencies, it can backfire. For Juliana Batista, human rights lawyer for the Brazilian NGO Instituto Socio-Ambiental involved in the case, it is a matter of understanding the nature of indigenous land rights which, for her “take precedence over any other rights.”