Often, approaches to investment-related land rights violations are reactive, rather than proactive and preventative: legal support is usually provided after communities have been negatively impacted, displaced or evicted — and after lives have been lost, property destroyed, local waters and soils polluted, and communities devastated. In such cases, legal support has a limited chance of reversing the damage caused.

There is a growing recognition that Community Development Agreements (CDA) - if effectively implemented - can promote long-term development benefits for communities affected by mining operations as well as improve relations between extractive companies and communities. Section 139 (1) of Sierra Leone’s Mines and Minerals Act, 2009 provides that small scale or large scale mining licence holders are required to have and implement a CDA with primary host communities if their approved mining operations will or does exceed certain stipulated limits set out in the Act.

This guidance document is designed to help Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development (IGF) member states implement the IGF Mining Policy Framework (MPF). It focuses on the role that national governments can play in ensuring the effective and sustainable management of the environment and natural resources by the mining sector, using the legislative, regulatory, and policy tools and mechanisms at their disposal.

This Guide is drawn from experience in the action research project “Bottom-up accountability initiatives and large-scale land acquisitions in Africa”. The project aimed to bring the international soft law instrument, the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of the Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests (the Tenure Guidelines or TGs), to rural communities and, together with them, to use the Guidelines to strengthen their tenure of land, fisheries and forests.

This guide is intended to support smallholder farmers, and advocates working closely with them, in exercising more agency and living more independently according to their own priorities. It aims to assist smallholders in making free choices in relation to farm production, markets and trade. Farmers with agency can negotiate with, and challenge, the people and institutions that affect their lives.

This framework serves as a guideline for evaluating the fulfillment of the rights to food and livelihood within the business and human rights framework. The guidelines in this framework can be adopted individually by each party and jointly or collaboratively between parties.

This document shares emerging ideas, principles, and good practices to socialize the concept of Community Monitoring among companies and investors in land-based sectors, as well as outline steps they can take to meaningfully engage with Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples to monitor and respond to the potential environmental and human rights impacts of their operations, supply chains, or investments.

The IISD Model Clauses aim to support agricultural investment negotiators, state lawyers, and policy-makers in helping achieve their country’s sustainable development objectives for investment in agriculture and food systems. The IISD Model Clauses are primarily designed to inform the drafting of investor–state contracts. These are contracts in which a “grantor,” that is, a government entity, grants rights to private (often foreign) investors for the large-scale and long-term lease of agricultural land.

This learning guide provides civil society organizations (CSOs) with a methodology and a set of materials to undertake training on the VGGT and SSF Guidelines with civil society actors from the grassroots to the national level. Trainees will learn how to apply the VGGT to actual tenure governance challenges. They will also learn to use the SSF Guidelines, which reinforce the principles of the VGGT specifically in the context of small-scale fisheries.

The starting point for the Conference and Summit was the recognition that ongoing transitions in the name of climate change and clean energy are deeply unfair in multiple ways. Climate policies and so-called green investments place huge burdens on people and spaces in the Global South as well as on areas inhabited by marginalized populations in countries of the Global North. Their rights are put under pressure, safeguards are lacking or not enforced, and the room to defend their lands, forests, pastures, and territories is constrained.