States must promote transparent and collaborative processes that guarantee the participation of peoples in the design, development, and feedback of plans and roadmaps for implementing the Agreement, ensuring sufficient time and resources. Building these roadmaps without real mechanisms for community participation would perpetuate the colonial order that has made decisions about peoples’ territories without including those who inhabit them. Doing so would not only be a methodological mistake but would also run counter to the principles of Escazú.
Transformative participation is participation that includes their memories, practices, knowledge, and ways of relating to nature and ecosystems, making visible the leading role they play in protecting and restoring tangible and intangible assets. It also names the historical conditions of exclusion and the structural inequalities that persist. Legitimizing that participation and contribution in all Agreement processes means committing to racial justice and the environment. Central America has inherited a colonial, anthropocentric, and extractivist economy that has shaped profound structural inequalities. This model has increased the region’s climate vulnerability and its exposure to extreme events. Floods, high-intensity hurricanes, and prolonged droughts generate severe impacts that disproportionately affect women, Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations, who face historical conditions of exclusion. Climate vulnerability is an expression of structural vulnerability that the extractivist model reproduces and deepens.
The sustained expansion of mining, agribusiness, monocultures, deforestation, and large-scale real estate and hydroelectric projects intensifies environmental crises and erodes the living conditions of those inhabiting the most affected territories. According to research conducted by the Humboldt Center, although the mining sector contributes between 1% and 3% of the regional GDP, more than 4.5 million hectares (an area equivalent to twice the territory of El Salvador) have been granted in concessions, impacting entire communities, protected natural areas, Indigenous territories, agricultural zones, and water sources.
In this sense, environmental justice cannot be reduced to a technical discussion about legislation, nor to narratives centered on development or economic growth. It requires real guarantees of participation, effective access to justice, and protection for those defending their territories. Instruments such as the Escazú Agreement represent an opportunity to move in that direction, but their scope will depend on how they are implemented and for whom.
Participation in decision-making processes
Escazú cannot be understood without placing women, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant peoples, and peasant communities at the center. It must recognize them as architects of the agreement, as political subjects whose voices, knowledge, struggles, and forms of organization are essential to the sustainable management of territories and environmental justice in the region.
Those who inhabit, care for, and sustain life must be an essential part of decision-making processes and not merely consulted. Failing to explicitly include them in the Agreement’s governance mechanisms turns their participation into something symbolic rather than binding. It diminishes their role as defenders of water, land, and territory, whose material, cultural, and spiritual survival has historically operated under structures of exploitation, appropriation, and dispossession.
Politically recognizing their conditions and experiences opens the door to fuller and more effective participation. Meanwhile, the generalized use of the term “public” dilutes the specificity of the impacts these populations face, as well as the particular obstacles they encounter in accessing information, participation, and justice.
al justice.
Escazú from a gender and intersectional perspective
The climate crisis and extractivist violence are not neutral. Their impacts on bodies, territories, and identities are differentiated and fall disproportionately on the lives of women, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, children, and LGBTIQ+ people.
Advancing through a gender and intersectional approach implies developing policies and mechanisms that respond comprehensively to factors such as gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, geographic location, age, and disability. It also means establishing differentiated and concrete measures to prevent, investigate, and sanction violence, discrimination, digital aggression, repression, and the criminalization of defenders.
States must clearly define how implementation will be coordinated among responsible bodies at the interinstitutional, multi-stakeholder, and territorial levels in each country. They must design a monitoring system with quantitative and qualitative indicators and allocate concrete resources to enable early and substantive participation under equal conditions. This includes measures for linguistic and cultural accessibility, accessible formats, support for travel from remote communities, recognition of care work, protection measures, and adequate infrastructure and technology.
Collective protection as a principle
Escazú must recognize collective forms of defense, community protection mechanisms, and land titling as measures for the structural prevention of violence. The implementation of the Action Plan on defenders must therefore include protection mechanisms that recognize peoples’ own forms of security, healing, and collective care, while respecting the autonomy of peoples and community justice systems, and integrating collective reparations processes aimed not only at individuals but also at affected families, communities, and territories.
At the same time, strengthening regional protection mechanisms also requires incorporating specific considerations into participation spaces, including Conferences of the Parties, considering differentiated risk assessments, protection focal points, and clear procedures for following up on incidents reported during sessions.
Escazú was born from the struggles of the peoples. It only makes sense if it returns to them.
It is worth remembering that the main driving force behind advocacy for the Escazú Agreement lies with the peoples of Abya Yala, in their capacity to generate knowledge from the grassroots, mobilize communities, engage in dialogue, sustain processes of resistance, document and make situations of vulnerability visible, and promote structural change.
The implementation of Escazú must itself be an example that another model of governance is possible: one that transforms the power relations determining who makes decisions about territories; recognizes ancestral knowledge and the diversity of political actors as legitimate; links the protection of defenders with safety in spaces and territories; and understands that environmental justice cannot exist without gender justice and racial justice.
Without women, Indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendant peoples, Escazú would not be possible!
Autor
Coordinator of Climate Justice and Indigenous Peoples at Oxfam Central America. Master in Territory and Social Sustainability from the Autonomous University of Guerrero, Mexico.
