Indigenous Enterprises in Latin America and the Caribbean: Analysis of Sustainability Practices

Abstract

Approximately 30% of indigenous peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean live in conditions of poverty. State interventions fail to address the specific needs and realities of these communities in depth, proving insufficient to ameliorate the situation. In this context, indigenous enterprises represent an alternative for strengthening their livelihoods by developing traditional productive activities within organizational structures that integrate sustainability practices based on ancestral knowledge and vocations. This article conducts a systematic review of 27 studies published between 2014 and 2024, aiming to analyze the sustainability practices incorporated into the organizational structures of 26 indigenous enterprise cases from Latin America and the Caribbean. The study provides insights into the evolution, key contributions, and emerging trends in the scientific literature on this subject. The case studies reveal that indigenous enterprises are characterized by cooperative and associative processes, collective decision-making, community empowerment, management and savings capacity, the revival of ancestral practices for the development of productive, marketing, and/or exchange processes, and the alignment of productive practices with ecosystem and knowledge preservation. This study identifies four research challenges related to the topic and four challenges for positioning indigenous enterprises, with the aim of both establishing replicable models in other native communities with similar contexts and informing the formulation of inclusive public policies that contribute to reducing indigenous poverty.