Conference Day One: “Organizations are not doing enough to address the global crisis of insecure community land rights”
The International Conference on Scaling-Up Strategies to Secure Community Land and Resource Rights began on Thursday, September 19, with over 150 participants from across the world in attendance.
Willi Graf, Deputy Head of Regional Cooperation, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, began the proceedings by thanking the co-organizers and welcoming the participants on behalf of the Swiss Government who is hosting the conference. He stressed the need to discern the various interests involved in order to understand the layers of rights and risks that go along with them, and advocated for a high level of consensus from all interests, both local and other. Graf called on all participants to avoid harming vulnerable groups when reforming land tenure, and cautioned that the right changes to land rights must be chosen, as they would have long-term impacts.
Andy White, Coordinator, RRI, said that the conference was convened because organizations are not doing enough to address the global crisis of insecure community land rights. He stressed the need to improve, accelerate, and expand work on this as quickly as possible before more people and natural systems are lost and more states fail. He said that “uncommon allies and uncommon partnerships” were needed to meet the challenge. Highlighting the commitment of the conference organizers to follow up on its outcomes, he said that by working together the amount of secure community lands could be doubled in the next five years. White warned that the opportunity to make significant progress will be squandered if business as usual is continued, and if stakeholders compete with each other rather than forming new alliances.
Poul Engberg-Pedersen, Deputy-Director General, IUCN, outlined how land and resource rights were at the heart of IUCN’s programs. He emphasized that it is not helpful to secure tenure rights without also promoting sustainable management of nature, and ensuring that governance of nature’s use is both effective and equitable. Underscoring that communities were not homogenous structures, he recognized that securing community rights could often lead to inequities.
Michael Taylor, Program Manager of Global Policy and African Region, Secretariat of International Land Coalition, noted that development partners were waking up to the centrality of land rights in overcoming poverty and food insecurity, but that, at the same time, abuses of community land rights were more frequent due to increasing competition for natural resources. He reviewed discussions among the co-convening organizations of the current conference that led to establishing the goal of doubling the amount of land under secure community tenure by 2018, and to the strategies that would serve to achieve this goal.
Duncan Pruett, Policy Advisor on Land Rights, Oxfam, reiterated the aim of the conference was to increase the profile and prioritization of community land rights as a global concern, catalyze new ideas and alliances, and secure commitments to take these strategies forward in the future. He recalled the assumption that participants agree that “scaling up” of this agenda is urgently needed, and discussed the logistics of how the five parallel strategy sessions will assess and prioritize opportunities and strategies by the end of the conference.
Read about the Panel Discussion on Day One here.
This is an abridged version of a report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) Reporting Services. For more conference highlights, click here.
