In the Laos Forest Management and Conservation Project, for example, one of the Bank's lawyers reviewed national forestry and land legislation relating to the customary rights of ethnic minorities in upland villages. This review provided the Bank with the necessary information to raise the subject with the government and to include provisions in the project for recognizing and regularizing customary land rights. The Bank has also had experience, for example, in the Philippines and Brazil, in improving the institutional capacity of the government agencies responsible for the titling of indigenous lands. This experience has demonstrated the benefits to be gained from indigenous participation in physical mapping and land demarcation. Modern schooling of indigenous children has proved more effective when it includes instruction in both vernacular and national languages and when it is bicultural or multicultural in content.
Effective communication depends heavily on the element of trust.
Those individuals or organizations that have been able to gain their trust have usually done so through long years of contact, learning, and respect for their languages and cultures. If such individuals or organizations can be brought into the project preparation process, a much better chance exists for introducing culturally acceptable mechanisms for consultation and participation. The traditional lifestyles of indigenous peoples involve subsistence strategies that use locally available natural resources to satisfy their basic needs, while maintaining a balance with their environment. Many unfortunate examples of programs for indigenous development exist that have undermined these traditional subsistence strategies without providing socially and ecologically viable alternatives. Similarly, the most successful projects are building on existing institutions, instead of creating new ones to deal with specific development tasks.