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Communities need legal support to protect legitimate tenure rights, participate effectively in negotiation with companies, and achieve redress for harm doneDue to power imbalances, communities need capacity-building support to level the playing field in negotiations with companies.

Highlighted Tools & Resources

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Legal empowerment in agribusiness investments: harnessing political economy analysis

Discusses how legal practitioners can make sense of political economy factors driving land allocation for investment decisions to identify levers of influence, and make effective legal empowerment interventions at national and international levels to complement grassroots action. Read the full analytical paper here.

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Preparing in Advance for potential investors: Community-investor negotiation guide

Explains how communities can prepare for interactions with potential future investors and decide whether or not to enter into discussions or negotiations with an investor that has arrived. It is designed to be used before any negotiations start.  Read the full guide here.
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Legal empowerment practitioners – from lawyers to NGOs grassroots groups – have pioneered a wide range of approaches to help rural people to advance their rights.

Several responsible land investment pilot projects contracted independent legal expertise to raise community legal awareness, advocate for redress for harm done, draw up new lease agreements reflecting community interests, and build capacity to assist in managing negotiations.

Project experience bears out wider analysis by LEGEND, that community legal support needs to be: i. politically savvy, and linked to engagement at national and even international levels to address vested interests; ii. not confined to legal issues, but linked to help with land rights mapping, in negotiations, and developing community organisation; and iii. Genuinely independent, to ensure community trust, and avoid conflicts of interests when companies offer legal support. 

In exactly these ways, Namati played a key role in Sierra Leone assisting communities in pilot projects and many other cases. See https://namati.org/news-stories/ for more information on their work.

In Mozambique, with support from LEGEND ORAM and Terra Firma took a training initiative to build capacity of community land associations to negotiate with Portucel, CCSI and Namati:

A key lesson of practical experience is that new financing and institutional arrangements are needed to ensure that community empowerment and legal support is independent of the investor and accountable to the community.  CCSI have investigated options for independent ‘black box’ or ‘blind’ funding mechanisms to which the private sector, donors, governments and others could contribute to enable support at greater scale. This is proposed for Sierra Leone, with Namati and the UN Commission for Human Rights.  

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