25 - 27 June 2026
Regional Consultation: Sharing Lessons Learnt and Building Strategy for the Indigenous Peoples Capacity Building Program
The Diplomacy Training Program (DTP) and Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP) jointly organised a regional consultation workshop, "Sharing Lessons Learnt and Building Strategy for Indigenous Peoples Capacity Building Program," from June 25–27, 2026, in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
The workshop brought together key institutional partners of DTP, trainers and alumni from Malaysia, Indonesia, Northeast India, Nepal, Thailand, the Philippines and Bangladesh. The three-day consultation reflected on 22 years of DTP's Indigenous Peoples Capacity Building Program, considering its outcomes, impact and value, and looked ahead to meeting the change needs of Indigenous peoples’ movements.
The participants reflected on emerging trends and challenges, impacts, and responses on escalating political, economic, environmental, and technological threats facing Indigenous communities across the Asia-Pacific region. Authoritarian regression, corporate exploitation via massive extraction projects, and false "just transitions" are actively undermining Indigenous land rights and customary self-governance. Furthermore, communities face rapid digital vulnerabilities, including AI-driven targeted surveillance on defenders and their organisations. It also discussed the need to consciously center intersectional groups and issues affecting women, youth, and LGBTQ++ individuals. To counter these shifts, participants emphasized a return to core grounding principles rooted in indigeneity and the need to design capacity building initaitives foregrounded on Indigenous value-driven education and intergenerational knowledge flows.
There was also an agreement that DTP’s niche in the regional ecosystem of capacity building programs was its core strengths of Indigenous Peoples’ rights and “peoples’ diplomacy skills”, the rights of Indigenous Peoples in relation to business and in facilitating diplomatic spaces, supporting engagement between Indigenous peoples representatives and diplomats.
To strengthen and ground DTP’s Indigenous Peoples Program there was a suggestion to constitute an Indigenous Training Advisory Committee which will co-create curriculum updates, ensure training content stays deeply rooted in Indigeneity and act as a peer-facilitation and mentoring network for past cohorts. There was also a suggestion to activate country-level focal points to coordinate local alumni networks, ensure continuous relationship building, and to engage diplomatic missions for funding and policy leverage.
Full report to follow.
The Diplomacy Training Program's 2026 Indigenous Peoples, Human Rights and Business capacity building program receives support from the Australian Government through the Australian NGO Cooperation Program (ANCP).
