The final conference report is now online
The final report for From Rhetoric to Action: Scaling-up Community and Indigenous Peoples’ Land and Resource Rights is here! Download it as a PDF or read a quick summary below.
The aim of this conference was to develop strategies and actions for scaling up Indigenous Peoples’ and community land and resource rights worldwide. The conference followed a similar meeting held in Interlaken, Switzerland, in 2013. A new global study released on the eve of the conference showed that Indigenous Peoples and local communities claim customary tenure of up to 65% of the world’s lands but lack legal rights to almost three-quarters of those lands.
At the conference, six strategy groups — on community mapping, building legal capacity, leveraging the private sector, engaging conservationists, scaling up women’s land rights, and establishing land rights as a global priority — identified actions that can be taken now to increase legal land rights for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Putting an end to human rights violations—such as torture, imprisonment, displacement and murder — against Indigenous Peoples were shown as essential for justice and also an urgent prerequisite for ending conflicts over land and dealing with climate change.
Three regional panel sessions and a specific session on Indigenous Peoples land rights, showed how, against the odds, progress is being made in securing the land rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in several countries in the tropics, and lessons learned from these efforts can be applied elsewhere.
Putting an end to human rights violations—such as torture, imprisonment, displacement and murder — against Indigenous Peoples were shown as essential for justice and also an urgent prerequisite for ending conflicts over land and dealing with climate change.
The conference identified eight action points for moving from rhetoric to action.
- Endorse the Global Call for Action on Indigenous and Community Land Rights.
- Encourage donors and governments to support the struggle for community land rights.
- Develop flexible and responsive instruments for the distribution of funds to support land governance by Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
- Leverage communication technology and social media to amplify community voices.
- Learn to speak the “language” of decisionmakers in government and corporations.
- Work with leading, sympathetic corporates to put the land rights agenda into other spaces.
- Demonstrate the potential of the land rights agenda to address other pressing issues.
- Keep building alliances, including with those who are not natural allies.
Read the full report.
