Making Women's Voices Count in Community Decision-Making on Land Investments

The adverse impacts of commercialization and largescale land acquisitions in the global South are often disproportionately borne by women. The loss of access to farmland and common areas hit women harder than men in many communities, and women are often excluded from compensation and benefit schemes. Women's social disadvantages, including their lack of formal land rights and generally subordinate position, make it difficult for them to voice their interests in the management and proposed allocation of community land to investors. While the development community and civil society have pushed for standards and safeguard policies that promote the meaningful involvement of rural communities generally in land acquisitions and investments, strengthening the participation of women as a distinct stakeholder group requires specific attention.This working paper examines options for strengthening women's participatory rights in the face of increasing commercial pressures on land in three countries: Mozambique, Tanzania, and the Philippines. It focuses on how regulatory reform—reforms in the rules, regulations, guidelines, and procedures that implement national land acquisition and investment laws—can promote gender equity and allow women to realize the rights afforded by national legal frameworks and international standards. The paper stems from a collaborative project between World Resources Institute and partner organizations in the three countries studied

Addressing climate vulnerability : promoting the participatory rights of indigenous peoples and women through Finnish foreign policy

Julkaistu versi

REDD+ on the rocks? Conflict over forest and politics of justice in Vietnam

In Vietnam, villagers involved in a REDD+ (reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) pilot protect areas with rocks which have barely a tree on them. The apparent paradox indicates how actual practices differ from general ideas about REDD+ due to ongoing conflict over forest, and how contestations over the meaning of justice are a core element in negotiations over REDD+. We explore these politics of justice by examining how the actors involved in the REDD+ pilot negotiate the particular subjects, dimensions, and authority of justice considered relevant, and show how politics of justice are implicit to practical decisions in project implementation. Contestations over the meaning of justice are an important element in the practices and processes constituting REDD+ at global, national and local levels, challenging uniform definitions of forest justice and how forests ought to be managed

International law and resource extraction : the reconstruction of indigenous identity in Cajamarca, Peru

Why has there been a sudden upsurge in the politicization of indigenous identities in Latin America? Drawing upon constructivist assumptions of ethnic identity, I find that ILO 169 and the rights contained in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples have been accompanied by a re-construction of indigenous identity in Cajamarca, Peru. Communities that are vulnerable to the deleterious effects of natural resource extraction and have historically identified as non-indigenous, despite having an indigenous identity in their identity repertoire, have re-constructed their indigenous identity as part of a strategy to maintain tenure over traditional lands, but only after the fact that power and rights have been awarded to these communities by international bodies of law and national legal frameworks alike. That is, bodies of law can activate an indigenous cleavage under a condition of grievance.Governmen

Are agri-business companies responsible for land grabbing in Central Africa?

Land grabbing usually refers to the controversial acquisition of a piece of land. As such it is a social concept. It deals with social and cultural use of and access to land, and with land tenure, including customary and legal rights. If we accept this definition, land grabbing cannot apply to a piece of land free of legitimate claim. However, projects associated with large-scale deforestation are often qualified as land grabs, without any reference to the social characteristics of the land and the project. The concept has been used since 2000 to target foreign investments in developing countries in agriculture, forestry, mining or infrastructure sectors. Can large-scale land acquisitions be analyzed within the land grab framework? Several indicators were selected and applied to a large sample of agro-industrial concessions in Cameroon, Gabon, DRC and RC. These indicators include historical occupation of land, customary rights, legal land tenure status, Free Prior and Informed Consent. There have been several periods of important investments in Central Africa which have affected land tenure, access and use in various manners. But agribusiness companies are not the only stakeholders competing for land and national elites should not be overlooked. (Résumé d'auteur

Seeing 'REDD'?: Forests, Climate Change Mitigation and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Examines proposals for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) and their failure to protect indigenous peoples' rights or to address forest governance problems. Calls for talks to include civil society and indigenous peoples

Roadless space and logging in intact forest landscapes of the Congo Basin

Background: Forest degradation in tropical regions is often associated with roads built for selective logging. Forest areas that are not accessible by roads are considered valuable because they provide habitat that is not immediately impacted by major human activities. The protection of such Intact Forest Landscapes (IFL) is high on the biodiversity conservation agenda, leading to a motion of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) to better protect IFL in certified forest concessions. However, in many parts of Central Africa logging takes place at very low intensities and most roads are abandoned after few years of timber harvesting. Taking limited road persistence into account we asked: How did road networks in FSC certified concessions affect IFL? Methods: Intact forest landscapes can be conserved by retention of “roadless space”, a concept based on distance to the nearest road from any point. We used the Empty-Space Function, a general statistical tool from stochastic geometry, to calculate roadless space based on time series of LANDSAT images. We followed the spatial and temporal dynamics of logging roads in a part of the Congo Basin that has recently seen rapid expansion of road networks for selective logging. We compared the development of roadless space in certified and non-certified logging concessions inside and outside areas declared as being IFL in the year 2000. Results: The persistence of logging roads was limited over time, with only 12% of the overall network being permanently open. However, also taking only actively used roads into account, roadless space inside IFL has decreased rapidly due to expansion of logging into previously unlogged areas. Concessions that are now certified by FSC showed a slower rate of decrease before certification but after that their roadless space decreased to a level comparable to non-FSC concessions. The established concessions outside IFL showed a slight increase in roadless space due to forest recovery on abandoned roads. Conclusions: We recommend that forest management should make the preservation of large connected forest areas a top priority by effectively monitoring - and limiting – the occupation of space by roads that are accessible at the same time. Given the strong dynamics in road detectability, we challenge the static definition of intact forest landscapes based on a buffer around any road ever detected. Instead we suggest the empty space function as a viable alternative to calculate roadless space. (Texte intégral