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effective land control does not necessarily follow(Radel 2005).Poor indigenous people, who represent 15 percentof the world’s poor but only 5 percent ofits population (ILO 2007: 27), are another specialtest for Legal Empowerment of the Poor due tophysical or social isolation from the influence ofthe governance claimed by a nation-state. Someindigenous people are nomadic; some have beendispossessed de jure or de facto of their ancestrallands. They may speak a separate language. Indigenouspeople often live in remote sites with higheconomic potential for water, timber, or medicinalplants, but lack legal instruments to preventover-extraction of natural resources by outsiders.All these characteristics make it all the moreimportant for government to reach these wouldbebeneficiaries. (See Box 5.2 for an example ofa participatory approach that helped indigenouspeople in Philippines assert claims to their ancestralrealm.)Box 5.2 Ancestral Domain, Sustainable Development, and ProtectionPlan of the Bago and Bugkalot Tribes.The Philippines Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA) of1997 consolidated bills related to ancestral domains andlands, and international agreements on the recognition ofland/domain rights of the indigenous peoples. Metagora(a project funded by OECD) in the Philippines developedevidence-based assessment methods and tools combiningquantitative and qualitative approaches. Thestudy measures four aspects of the rights of indigenouspeoples to their ancestral domains and lands: the indigenouspeoples’ perceptions and awareness of their rights,the enjoyment or violations of these rights, the governmentmeasures and customary laws for the realisationof these rights, and the availability of mechanisms forredressing violations or fulfilling rights.Metagora’s method of work is based on a bottom-up approachconsisting of:• Working with the shareholders in pilot countries, toidentitfy issues in human rights, democracy; andgovernance for which evidence-based assessment ishighly relevant;• Applying statistical methods and tools to that particularcontext;• Assessing these methods for their capacity to providepolicy relevant results;• Providing stakeholders with a shared knowledge on thepolicy issues at stake; drawing universal lessons fromthe local experiences;• Formulating recommendations for further applicationof the tested methods elsewhere.Three tribes covering public ancestral domains in threeregions of the Philippines were covered by the survey.Major respondents were representative samples of thetribal population stratified according to selected criteriathat are in consonance with the customs and traditionsof the target population. Non-indigenous people respondents,especially the governance stakeholders, alsocomprised the secondary respondents of the survey.This is a case of objective survey data having policy forceon account of the involvement of an international projectin partnership with the Commission on Human Rights ofthe Philippines, its Regional Offices, the National Commissionon Indigenous People, and National StatisticalCoordination Board (NSCB).The data and evidence gathered had the positive consequenceof making the national and regional governmentauthorities take the implementation of the provisions ofthe Philippines Indigenous Peoples Rights Act seriously,so that the rights of indigenous peoples are settled, aproactive public policy approach is taken, and fundsprovided under the law are allocated properly to benefitthe indigenous people.Source: Metagora Training Materials. Ref:http://www.metagora.org.293