Alma Segoviano

Lecturer and Legal Advisor
University of the Environment (UMA) and CARMA Consultancy
Mexico

Jul 28, 2021

Alma Segoviano is a lawyer, researcher, and practitioner defending indigenous communities’ land and resource rights through conflict transformation. Since 2015, she has been a law faculty member at University of the Environment (UMA) in Mexico. From the beginning of her career, she has focused on preventing land and water conflicts by supporting community governance through civil society organizations in Mexico such as Cántaro Azul and Cooperación Comunitaria AC. She has also advised international organizations such as the Rainforest Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development, and the International Monetary Fund on these issues. Her educational path to this work started with a bachelor’s degree in law from the Iberoamerican University, followed by a master’s degree (also in law) from the London School of Economics and a PhD in Law on indigenous property rights from Birbeck, University of London.

Alma dates her interest in conflict transformation to an early experience of running away from machete-armed villagers who had disputes with community members she was advising. She subsequently gained dispute resolution experience as a legal advisor for the Rainforest Foundation, where she assisted indigenous communities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) who faced displacement resulting from the implementation of the country’s forest code. Backed by the national government and the World Bank, the code emphasized concessions, allocating land to private investors without considering communities’ traditional territorial rights and land-based livelihoods. Alma compared DRC’s forest code with international laws protecting indigenous communities and analyzed the impacts the implementation of the code would have on communities. She highlighted that the project violated the Bank’s safeguards so the affected communities could file a complaint with the World Bank Inspection Panel. The investigation found that the Bank had not conducted an environmental impact assessment and had therefore not known of the indigenous communities inhabiting the land. The complaint resulted in the preservation of the communities’ land rights and sparked improved environmental assessment processes within the Bank and greater protections for indigenous rights in DRC law. Alma observes that “this experience showed me that land conflicts could be addressed through non-judicial and non-violent avenues like internal complaints and community organizing.” Through these alternative means, the communities were able to shift the balance of power in a peaceful way and drive institutional changes conducive to sustaining peace.

Alma also seeks to share the conflict transformation perspective she brings to her advisory work with her students and the academic community. Drawing on her experience protecting indigenous land rights in Mexico and beyond, Alma developed a course at UMA on conflict transformation for environmental practitioners. The course received so much interest that it soon became a 1-year certificate program co-designed and taught by 12 experts. “This is a new specialization emerging in Mexico for environmental practitioners,” says Alma. “Until recently, mediation was seen as part of only judicial education in Mexico, for family cases and the like, but we now have environmental decisionmakers and civil servants learning these skills at UMA.” The program’s first cohort is graduating this year and included 50 percent more students than the maximum class size generally allowed at UMA.

This exploding interest in the field is a long way from earlier in Alma’s career, when she thought she was “the only one talking about indigenous land tenure conflicts.” She joined the Association to build international synergies on these issues, saying, “I’ve found my people!”