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Across the Amazon region, Indigenous peoples live with vast reserves of non-renewable natural resources located under their lands. National regulations ruling extractive industries on Indigenous lands have historically been nonexistent, weak or poorly enforced. This situation, coupled with concerns over the associated financial, reputational and legal risks, has prompted some companies to establish internal standards seeking to ensure respect of Indigenous peoples’ rights and include affected communities in project benefits through participatory social investment programs. At the same time, national regulatory frameworks and international standards regarding Indigenous rights continue to evolve. This paper presents lessons learned from a field case study of six Indigenous communities in a remote area of the Amazon and describes how a major extractives operation located on Indigenous land in an area of globally important biodiversity has addressed these issues. It illustrates the company’s efforts to design and implement social investment programs aimed at minimizing the operation’s potential impacts and maximizing its potential socio-economic benefits among a recently acculturated Indigenous group. Participatory techniques were used to interview the communities and assess the company’s social performance against its own internal standards. Findings show that in order for a social license to be real and effective, it must involve not only the Indigenous peoples’ representative bodies but Indigenous populations at large. The main contribution of this paper is to provide an example of a participatory social investment strategy and the challenges in its implementation.

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