Consent, Credit, and Compensation: The 3C’s to Build Equitable Business Ecosystems
With every product that ends up in front of your table, how often do you sit down and think through the origins of the product, the routes it has traversed, and the people involved in the many episodes up until the point the finished output reaches your hands? If not quite often, now is the time to empathetically think through the journey behind every item you are a consumer of, and a part of this discussion involves the imperative to address the possible levels of exploitation, particularly of marginalised communities, that could have been unfortunately normalised in the manufacturing and circulation processes. It is at this juncture that the Cultural Intellectual Property Rights Initiative’s legal literacy campaign and their redefinition of The 3Cs within the domain of sustainable business ventures — Consent, Credit, and Compensation, become significant.
At the heart of the legal literacy campaign, wherein the roots of this reformulation of the 3Cs can be found, is an aspiration to shift mindsets and enable individuals and communities to become informed participants in present and future discussions about drawing inspiration from cultural heritage and engaging in culturally sustainable collaborations with indigenous communities. The first of the 3Cs, consent, foregrounds the free, prior, and informed consent of craftspersons from indigenous or local communities. A close examination of businesses drawing from indigenous knowledge systems and resources will testify to the grave injustices committed upon the indigenous community by the external agent wherein the native community’s cultural practices are appropriated without seeking their permission, let alone acknowledging their ownership and giving them due credit for the same. Thus, the first step of an ethical collaboration with traditional communities starts from actively engaging with the community to gain their consent.
After seeking consent, the next important step is to give due credit to the community whose resources or ideas are used to enrich the strategies and business models of the external agent. By acknowledging the inevitable and indispensable role played by the source community in inspiring, not only can the otherwise silenced cultures of the indigenous community be visibilised, but they can also be empowered to feel confident about their cultural practices that have been consistently subjected to place-eroding and identity-effacing forces. With colonisation and its dominant exploitative forces underwriting native cultures and labelling their practices as unworthy and uncivilised, many indigenous cultural practices and knowledge systems were forced into the fringes of society, and it is by giving them due credit we can accelerate the journey of empowering and enabling indigenous people to take pride in their cultures once again.
Last but not least, though consent and credit are imperative in the quest towards building ethical collaborations, compensation is a factor of utmost importance as it is imperative to ensure that indigenous people are paid, monetarily or non-monetarily, for their ideas that are used by external business agents. Not only is this a fundamental requirement that can enable marginalised populations to lead a quality life, but it is also the right of every individual to receive the compensation they deserve for their contributions. Together, by actively incorporating these 3Cs — Consent, Credit, and Compensation, we can build sustainable and equitable business ecosystems by collaborating with indigenous communities.
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