about what works and what does not. One obvious recommendation emerging from this paper is that it is essential to adopt results-based monitoring and evaluation systems accompanied by qualitative and quantitative impact evaluations that allow policy analysts to determine reliably which interventions have the highest and most cost-effective impact on the welfare of indigenous households. At a minimum such evaluations will help concerned policy makers decide the programs they can continue funding with scarce public funds.

Going forward, and taking into account the lack of progress in reducing income poverty, the decreasing but still wide gaps in health, education and social protection coverage, and limited access to income-generating opportunities, one avenue for raising awareness and putting indigenous peoples needs near the top of the agenda is the simultaneous initiatives on poverty and indigenous peoples. That is, the United Nations launched the 2<sup>nd</sup> decade for the world’s indigenous peoples in 2006; the decade is scheduled to end in 2015, the same year that the Millennium Development Goals are to be achieved.

This suggests two actions that indigenous communities could consider. First, indigenous peoples could argue for a linking – formal or otherwise – of the indigenous decade with the MDGs. This could imply at the very least disaggregated data on indigenous peoples indicators in terms of poverty, education, health and so on. This could serve to highlight how far indigenous peoples are in terms of reaching the goals – in countries that will reach most of the goals by 2015 (for example, Mexico) and for countries that are less likely to reach them (for example, Guatemala). This information will not only highlight the needs of indigenous peoples, but also could be used to leverage special attention and programs. An extension would be to call for regular reporting and commitment by countries to attempt to reach the MDGs for indigenous peoples.

Second, drawing on the commitment to the decade and the MDGs, indigenous peoples could leverage this increased attention to indigenous peoples to argue for results. That is, rather than just getting more inputs or spending on programs that may or may not reach the indigenous peoples, the targets could be outcomes, such as specific reductions in illness rates or increases in school completion. The targets could be elements of “contracts” between governments and the indigenous peoples. In the event of missing targets, then indigenous peoples could renegotiate the contract or change the service provider.

At the risk of oversimplifying, the research to date on indigenous–related issues can be best characterized by two extremes. A few quantitative studies based on nationally or, at best, regionally representative household surveys (for example, Hall and Patrinos 2006), and a plethora of detailed and mainly qualitative studies of a small number of communities emphasizing the sociological and social norms and social interactions governing day to day life in indigenous communities (for example, Stephen 1991; Hamilton and Fischer 2003; Korovkin 1998; Bebbington et al. 1993). The former studies typically emphasize external validity at the expense of specificity thus neglecting differences in the norms guiding behavior within indigenous communities, while the latter studies emphasize specificity at the expense of “external validity.” What we present here is a first attempt to bridge the gap between these two extremes by emphasizing the role of social interactions in a quantitative study of economic behavior and outcomes. Nevertheless more research is needed in order to better understand the condition of indigenous peoples.

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