International Organizations and Indigenous Peoples: Definitions and Recognition

Walk into any conversation about India’s tribal communities and you’ll hear the word “indigenous” tossed around freely. Yet at the international level, no one has ever agreed on what that word actually means. The United Nations, the International Labour Organization, and the World Bank all work with indigenous peoples, but each has taken a strikingly different route to figuring out who counts. Understanding these approaches matters if you want to make sense of why India insists it has no indigenous peoples, while calling nearly a tenth of its population Scheduled Tribes.

Why the UN chose identification over definition
The Cobo definition and its blind spots
Why scholars pushed back
ILO Convention 169: from “populations” to “peoples”
Convention 107: the assimilationist starting point
Convention 169: self-identification takes centre stage
Why Asian states resist the “indigenous” label
The “salt-water” argument
India’s stance: everyone is indigenous
The World Bank’s separate, narrower track

Why the UN chose identification over definition

The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has never adopted a formal, legally binding definition of “indigenous.” This is not an oversight. Indigenous communities across the globe are too diverse in history, language, and political circumstance to fit inside one tidy sentence. Instead, the UN treats identification as the more workable approach, resting on self-identification as the anchor criterion.

Rather than a checklist that must be fully satisfied, the UN system looks at a cluster of characteristics that, taken together, help identify indigenous peoples:

Self-identification as indigenous at the individual level, accepted by the community as a member
Historical continuity with pre-colonial or pre-settler societies
A strong link to territories and the natural resources around them
Distinct social, economic, or political systems
A distinct language, culture, and set of beliefs
Forming non-dominant groups within the wider society
A resolve to maintain and reproduce ancestral environments and systems

This flexible model lets the UN engage with wildly different groups, from Arctic reindeer herders to forest-dwelling communities in central India, without forcing them into a single legal box.

Before the Permanent Forum settled on identification, the UN leaned heavily on a 1986 working definition prepared by Special Rapporteur José Martínez Cobo. His report described indigenous communities as those with historical continuity to pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies, who consider themselves distinct from the dominant groups now occupying their territories, form non-dominant sectors of society, and are determined to pass on their ancestral lands and ethnic identity to future generations.

Why scholars pushed back

Cobo’s framework leaned on the idea of “historical continuity” with a moment of invasion or colonisation. Legal scholar Benedict Kingsbury pointed out a serious problem here: this template fits settler-colonial cases like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand far better than it fits Asia or Africa. In much of Asia, there was no clean single moment of “invasion” by outsiders from across an ocean. Populations moved, mixed, and settled over thousands of years, long before European colonisers ever arrived. Applying a framework built for settler societies to a place like India or Indonesia produces confusion rather than clarity, which is part of why the concept remains so contested in this part of the world.

ILO Convention 169: from “populations” to “peoples”

While the UN avoided a hard definition, the International Labour Organization actually tried to write one into binding treaty law. It did this twice.

Convention 107: the assimilationist starting point

Convention 107, adopted in 1957, described indigenous groups as tribal or semi-tribal populations regarded as indigenous because they descended from communities that inhabited a country before conquest or colonisation. The Convention’s underlying goal was integration into mainstream national life, an approach that today reads as paternalistic and assimilationist. India ratified this Convention in 1958, and it remains bound by it, since India recognises its tribal communities domestically as Scheduled Tribes under this older framework.

Convention 169: self-identification takes centre stage

By 1989, the ILO recognised that Convention 107’s integrationist logic was outdated and revised it into Convention 169. Article 1 of the new text moved away from “populations” toward the language of “peoples,” a term with far stronger implications for collective rights and self-determination under international law. Convention 169 also folded in self-identification as a fundamental criterion for deciding who the Convention applies to, alongside historical continuity, territorial connection, and distinct social and cultural institutions. Crucially, it uses the combined phrase “indigenous and tribal peoples” and gives both categories identical rights, an important detail for a country like India where the domestic term used is “tribal” rather than “indigenous.”

Despite these advances, Convention 169 has struggled for acceptance. Roughly two dozen countries have ratified it worldwide, and Nepal remains the only Asian state to have done so, having ratified it in 2007. No African or Asian giant, including India or China, has signed on. This near-total absence of ratification across two continents significantly limits how far the Convention’s definition can travel in international law.

Why Asian states resist the “indigenous” label

The reluctance to ratify Convention 169 is not accidental. Many Asian governments actively reject the idea that “indigenous peoples,” as a distinct legal category, exist within their borders at all.

The “salt-water” argument

China has argued that the entire concept of indigenous peoples grew out of European colonial expansion into other continents, and during the drafting of Convention 169, Chinese representatives flatly denied that any indigenous populations existed within the country. This position echoes what scholars call the salt-water or blue-water thesis: the idea that indigeneity is meaningful only where settlers crossed an ocean to colonise a population, which conveniently excludes most of Asia and Africa from the conversation entirely.

India’s stance: everyone is indigenous

India takes a related but distinct position. Rather than denying tribal identity altogether, the Indian government’s argument is that all Indians, having descended from populations that have lived on the subcontinent for millennia, are equally indigenous to the country. On this reasoning, singling out particular communities as uniquely “indigenous,” the way the term is applied in the Americas, Australia, or Africa, is neither accurate nor necessary. India ratified Convention 107 back in 1958 but has never accepted “indigenous” as an official legal status, choosing instead to protect around 700 recognised communities under the constitutional category of Scheduled Tribes, with reserved seats in legislatures and dedicated welfare institutions.

The World Bank’s separate, narrower track

Alongside the UN and ILO systems sits a third, quieter framework: the World Bank’s Operational Policy 4.10 on Indigenous Peoples. This policy sets out its own criteria for identifying indigenous communities affected by Bank-financed projects, largely to trigger safeguards like free, prior, and informed consultation before land or resources are disturbed.

What makes OP 4.10 different is its legal weight, or rather, the lack of it. The policy functions as an internal operational guideline rather than a binding rule of international law. It only applies where a government has borrowed money from the Bank for a specific project, meaning its reach is limited to Bank-funded activity rather than a country’s population as a whole.

Taken together, none of these frameworks, UN, ILO, or World Bank, produces one universally accepted legal definition of “indigenous peoples.” Yet this gap has not stopped meaningful progress. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007 after decades of negotiation between states and indigenous representatives themselves, stands as proof that shared standards can be built even without a single agreed definition anchoring them.

What do you think? If India argues that all Indians are equally indigenous, does that framing help or complicate the specific struggles faced by Adivasi communities over land and forest rights? And should international law keep relying on self-identification as its core test, even in regions where governments themselves reject the label?

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Table of Contents

Why the UN chose identification over definition 🔗

The Cobo definition and its blind spots 🔗

Why scholars pushed back 🔗

ILO Convention 169: from “populations” to “peoples” 🔗

Convention 107: the assimilationist starting point 🔗

Convention 169: self-identification takes centre stage 🔗

Why Asian states resist the “indigenous” label 🔗

The “salt-water” argument 🔗

India’s stance: everyone is indigenous 🔗

The World Bank’s separate, narrower track 🔗