Coordinating Global Action: How RuleWatcher Strengthens Indigenous Climate Advocacy

Pub Date: 14th of March 2025

Key Findings

• 160 policy updates across 9 countries and 5 languages (Portuguese, Malay, Indonesian, Spanish, and English)

• 5 major themes identified, helping to define future advocacy priorities.

• Immediate detection of regional commonalities, such as palm oil’s impact on multiple Indigenous communities.

Introduction

How can we coordinate global initiatives for a common good?

Have you noticed that winters feel colder and summers hotter? That floods seem to worsen each year? That extreme heatwaves make cities unbearable while rural communities struggle with water shortages? Yes, the climate is changing, and despite global efforts, we are still far from meeting the necessary climate goals to mitigate its impact.

Forest protection plays a crucial role in this battle. Yet, how can we counter the immense pressure on forests in an economy that constantly demands new resources? Much of the progress in climate action has come from coalitions working together, particularly among Indigenous organizations that have long been the guardians of forests. As the saying goes, "unity is strength"—and through these partnerships, they have secured greater recognition and legal protections for their lands.

From my years of experience supporting these initiatives, one of the biggest challenges has been coordinating future actions and strategies across Indigenous organizations in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This requires understanding the climate and political context of dozens of countries, often in multiple languages, and keeping track of evolving policies and negotiations.

With the overwhelming amount of policy changes, international agreements, and climate negotiations happening worldwide, having the right tools to monitor these shifts is essential. This is where RuleWatcher comes in.

In this article, I’ll share how I used RuleWatcher to track policy developments impacting Indigenous organizations, analyze regulatory trends, and identify opportunities for advocacy. I'll also compare its effectiveness with conventional research methods and discuss what worked best in combination with other tools.

Description of the Research

This study aims to plan future advocacy actions by analyzing key developments in Indigenous rights and conservation policies throughout 2024. Understanding what has happened in the past year is crucial to identifying progress, challenges, and opportunities for strengthening Indigenous advocacy in 2025.

Indigenous organizations have increasingly gained recognition in international climate negotiations, yet navigating the complex and ever-changing policy landscape remains a challenge. With regulations and legal frameworks constantly shifting, having real-time access to government policies, international agreements, and conservation regulations is essential for effective decision-making.

The Role of RuleWatcher

RuleWatcher is a web-based platform that collects and translates primary information published by governments and official entities worldwide, making it more accessible for research, policymaking, and advocacy efforts. Given the complexity of tracking regulatory developments across multiple countries, RuleWatcher allows users to monitor legal frameworks, international agreements, and governance trends in real time.

This study explores how Indigenous organizations can leverage these insights to enhance their advocacy strategies in 2025.

How I Used RuleWatcher

To track policy trends impacting Indigenous organizations and climate advocacy, I followed these steps:

1.  Setting Up the Search

• Published Date: 01/01/2024 to 12/31/2024

• Country: Multinational (to capture global trends).

• Tags: Indigenous people.

• Search Bar Query: environment AND forest (RuleWatcher supports Boolean operators like AND, OR, NOT).

2. Analyzing the Results

• The search returned 160 articles covering policies, negotiations, and reports from various countries.

• I downloaded the data in CSV format and opened it in Excel to analyze summaries and categorize key themes.

• The Excel headers include, among others, the date, location, and one of the most important fields—the article summary.

3.      Using AI for Thematic Analysis

• I uploaded the CSV into ChatGPT to generate a thematic summary of the most discussed issues.

• The AI identified five major topics across multiple countries:

  • Deforestation and Agribusiness Expansion

  • Land Rights and Forced Displacement

  • Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Adaptation

  • Corporate Accountability and Human Rights Violations

  • Food Systems and Traditional Knowledge

4. Using RuleWatcher’s TreeMap for Quick Insights

• Instead of AI, I could have used RuleWatcher’s TreeMap feature to visually explore key topics.

• Since I got 160 articles, in the “Item display” I put 200. The tree maps will show main topics.

• Just from viewing it, I know that Palm Oil was a central issue.

• By double-clicking, I identified that this was a shared concern for Afro-descendant communities in Colombia, Indigenous peoples in Peru, and Indigenous groups in Indonesia and Malaysia.

• You can double-click each article for exploring. For example, further drilling down revealed NGO efforts to hold palm oil companies accountable for deforestation.

Findings and Usefulness

Key Findings

• 160 policy updates across 9 countries and 5 languages (Portuguese, Malay, Indonesian, Spanish, and English).

• 5 major themes identified, helping to define future advocacy priorities.

• Immediate detection of regional commonalities, such as palm oil’s impact on multiple Indigenous communities.

Why RuleWatcher Was Useful

• Saves Time – Previously, gathering this data would take a full week. With RuleWatcher, it took only 4-5 hours.

• Multilingual Sources – Traditional search engines limit results to specific languages; RuleWatcher consolidates global sources.

• Centralized Data – The CSV export allows for both quantitative (data counts) and qualitative (theme analysis) approaches.

Comparison with Conventional Methods

• Google Search: Requires exact keywords in multiple languages, making comprehensive searches difficult. Also, you have to filter the good sources by yourself.

• AI Tools: While AI is useful for summarization, it often struggles with accurate sourcing and sometimes fabricates references. RuleWatcher, on the other hand, provides only reliable, officially published data, ensuring accuracy and credibility.

Conclusions and Future Perspectives

Each day, RuleWatcher improves, adding new sources and enhancing its user-friendly interface. For global advocacy efforts, it offers unparalleled access to real-time policy shifts, making it a critical tool for climate action planning.

Looking ahead, this tool can further support coalitions of Indigenous organizations, helping them identify global trends, connect across regions, and strategize collectively. In a world where international collaboration is essential, RuleWatcher helps bridge the information gap, empowering stakeholders to drive effective, data-backed climate advocacy.

If you work in policy, climate research, Indigenous advocacy or global coalitions, I highly recommend integrating RuleWatcher into your workflow!

Author

Alejandra Zamora

Researcher at National Agrarian University La Molina (Peru)

PhD Student at Kyushu University (Japan)