The lack of clarity and recognition of community land and resource rights across the developing world has become a global crisis, undermining progress on social and economic development, human rights, peace, food security, environmental conservation, and our ability to confront and adapt to climate change. Ownership of roughly one-half of the rural, forest and dryland areas of the developing world is contested, directly affecting the lives and livelihoods of over two billion people. These lands, which contain the soil, water, carbon, and mineral resources that the future of all humanity depends upon, are the primary targets of rapidly expanding investments in industrial agribusiness, mining, oil and gas, and hydro-electric production. 

Despite the challenges surrounding the global land crisis, with its roots in issues such as commodity markets, climate change, and weaknesses in governance, there are a range of opportunities for scaling up recognition and security of community land rights globally at present. These opportunities include the prominence of land tenure in relation to food security, climate change, and other development and human rights issues; shifts in practice within certain arenas, including the conservation sector and amongst many private sector investors and networks, towards greater support for community land tenure as a foundation for sustainability; and new policy frameworks such as the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Land, Forests, and Fisheries.

In order to strengthen collective efforts to address these challenges and capitalize on current opportunities to scale up community land rights around the world, from September 19-20, 2013, 180 participants came together in the town of Interlaken, Switzerland. The conference brought together a wide diversity of stakeholders– governments, local communities, Indigenous Peoples’ organizations, private investors, food and resource companies, and conservation groups—in order to promote new alliances and collaborations, scaled up efforts, and stronger connections from the local to the global scale on land issues.

The specific objectives of the conference were as follows:

• Collect, share, and synthesize leading strategies, experiences and bodies of knowledge for strengthening and scaling up community land tenure based on experiences by diverse actors in different parts of the world, in order to develop a better understanding of ‘best practice’ in investing in strengthened community land rights.
• Raise the public profile of community land rights as a global development, environmental and human rights priority issue, and generate information, ideas and practical plans to shape investments and policies in ways that better support local land and resource tenure.
• Provide a forum for the development of new collaborations and alliances among different actors and interests around community land tenure issues, including social justice and conservation NGOs, private investors and companies, social movements, multilateral institutions, and national policy makers.

This report provides a summary of the main outcomes and discussions from the Interlaken conference, with a focus on the priorities for action developed within five thematic strategy sessions, which ran in parallel and provided the main structure and organization of the conference.

Read the final report.

More information about the program, presentations, media coverage and related supplemental information including two short films made on the conference is available at the website: http://communitylandrights.org/.