The nascent literature on business and human rights has advocated for a right-centric perspective of indigenous peoples and their relations with firms. Global legal norms play a pivotal role in prompting indigenous rights, acting as institutions defining social practices. However, the adoption of these norms in domestic policy, in particular, the conditions in which and how institutional adoption fails to achieve developers' goals remain poorly understood. We conduct an in-depth case study of the adoption of the global norm of prior consultation in Colombia between 1992 and 2022. Our findings uncover a process of means-ends decoupling in which the implementation of the duty to consult rightsholders in policymaking failed to achieve its intended goal of ensuring indigenous rights and instead resulted in the consolidation of the state-led extractivist paradigm.
