Date: December 13, 2013
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.
More information about the program, presentations, media coverage, and related supplemental information, including two short films made on the conference, is available at the Community Land Rights website.