Authoring Governance from the Margins: How Grassroots Procedures Become Governing Standards

Abstract

This thesis examines how actors positioned at the margins of governance become authors of governance itself. Through the case of traditional peoples' Autonomous Consultation Protocols in the Brazilian Legal Amazon, it investigates how communities have mobilised the international right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) to gain political standing. Although FPIC is legally binding, its implementation procedures remain largely undefined. Communities have responded to this institutional ambiguity by drafting their own consultation protocols, several of which have later been recognised by courts and administrative authorities. Existing scholarship documents these protocols but provides limited explanation for how community-authored procedures acquire institutional authority. Drawing on legalisation and signalling theory, this thesis tackles that gap and develops a theory-generating qualitative content analysis of consultation protocols alongside the judicial and prosecutorial decisions that reference them. It argues that procedural authority emerges when community-authored rules credibly signal organisational and procedural capacity, making them suitable for incorporation into institutional decision-making. The findings indicate that protocols demonstrating greater documented production effort are more likely to achieve operative incorporation, defined as the adoption of community-authored procedures as governing standards. Operative incorporation is proposed as the mechanism through which challengers move toward membership within institutional arenas they previously occupied from the margins. With the findings from the Brazilian case, this thesis advances a broader account of how procedural authority can emerge via bottom-up strategies under conditions of institutional ambiguity. It demonstrates that institutional change may occur through the gradual adoption of procedures designed by historically excluded actors, identifying a plausible pathway through which the smallest parties to an environmental dispute can come to author the rules that bind the largest and how environmental stewards can acquire authority within governance systems.