This guide is a tool to advance legal, policy, and implementation reforms. Where Moving Rights Forward focused on mobility and access alone, this guide reviews the minimum set of rights that must be legally recognized for pastoralism and mobile livelihoods to be secure, including the specific rights of women within these systems.
Representantes de Povos Indígenas, Povos Afrodescendentes, comunidades locais e tradicionais, organizações e redes associadas, bem como aliados, elaboraram esta Declaração para afirmar a necessidade urgente de transformar os atuais modelos de desenvolvimento, conservação e financiamento, reconhecendo os modos de vida coletivos e as economias comunitárias como pilares centrais para enfrentar as crises climáticas, ecológicas e sociais.
Representatives of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, Local and Traditional Communities, associated organizations and networks, and supporting allies created this declaration to affirm the urgent need to transform current development, conservation, and financing models, recognizing collective livelihoods and community economies as central pillars for addressing the climate, ecological, and social crises.
Sustaining Resilient Pathways is the first thematic analysis of how international funding supports the interconnected dimensions of tenure security. Drawing on data from the Path to Scale Funding Dashboard, the brief examines not only how much funding is being mobilized, but how it is distributed across five thematic areas: territorial recognition, implementation of existing rights, policy reform, livelihoods, and organizational strengthening.
A new analysis by RRI finds Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, and local communities have recognized rights to just 16% of forests. This is despite mounting evidence that secure tenure is vital to achieving global climate and biodiversity commitments and to sustaining the livelihoods, cultures, and self-determined economies of communities that have stewarded these forests for generations.
The Women in Global South Alliance (WiGSA) is a cross-continental solidarity network of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The following principles outline the values that guide WiGSA in its internal relationships, decision-making, planning, and development of joint advocacy. These principles also support WiGSA’s positioning when crafting declarations and defining representation of the network in international and national spaces, and in dialogues with governments, allies, and donors.
Continuing the mapping of lands and spaces used by people of African descent carried out in 2024, this edition incorporates a maritime and coastal dimension that allows for a more complete understanding of the complex network of relationships between Afro-descendant Peoples and the marine environment.
This report offers RRI's updated assessment of the status and strength of Indigenous Peoples’, Afro-descendant Peoples’, and local communities’ statutory forest tenure rights across 35 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
This second edition of the State of Funding for Tenure Rights provides an updated analysis of international donor funding for Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples in tropical countries from 2011 to 2024. This edition includes an expanded scope to all terrestrial ecosystems, recognizing the importance of tracking funding beyond forests.
Through examples of Indigenous Peoples’, Afro-descendant Peoples’, and local communities’ movements from the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala, the Enggano island in Indonesia, India's Bastar region, the Sinangoe in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and Colombia, the report presents best practices from communities defending their territories and cultures.
The Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework’s targets cannot be achieved without the rights, leadership, and knowledge of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, and local communities. This new RRI report with Forest Peoples Programme and the ICCA Consortium analyzes the legal frameworks of 30 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and finds that although most have potential pathways for legally recognized community-led conservation, many have yet to formalize it as a distinct and additional means of achieving national conservation priorities.
This new report presents the results of the second phase of a collaborative research analysis between RRI and WiGSA. It showcases the lack of funding for Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women and highlights the need for the new funding Pledge anticipated at COP30 to concretely include a gender-responsive perspective.
As part of the international meeting "Afro-descendant Voices on the Road to COP30," held in Brasilia from April 1–4, 2025, representatives of the International Coalition of Territories and Afro-descendant Peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean (CITAFRO) launched the “Brasilia Declaration.” In the declaration, CITAFRO calls for effective participation in the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém.
This report examines the current state of play as countries prepare for the operationalization of Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement, offering a systematic analysis of the recognition of the carbon rights held by Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples in 33 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as of August 2024.
This study provides an up-to-date assessment of the status of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women’s forest tenure rights across 35 key forest countries in the Global South. In doing so, it aims to inform and encourage gender-transformative actions by governments and other stakeholders impacting community forests, lands and other resources.
In September 2024, during UN Climate Week in New York, the Rights and Resources Initiative, Namati, the Grassroots Justice Networks, and Rights CoLab convened an expert workshop on how to provide legal and technical support to address the challenges that affected communities face in the context of nature-based solutions, including voluntary carbon and biodiversity credit projects. This document provides a brief overview of the workshop discussion and outlines the next steps.
This analysis aims to highlight the contexts and challenges related to the promotion of leadership skills of Indigenous, Afro-descendant and local communities women based on the life experiences of three women in Latin America who have achieved leadership roles in their families, organizations, communities and at the national and international level.
This policy brief summarizes findings from a study undertaken by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) and McGill University to systematically analyze the carbon rights held by Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples in 33 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
In response to the dearth of data on funding for women and the need to support international advocacy promoting direct funding to Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women’s groups and organizations, the Rights and Resources Initiative initiated a bottom-up research effort to build a baseline for measuring funding levels reaching community women on the ground and assess the extent to which existing grants and funding mechanisms are considered fit-for-purpose.
This Atlas maps the territorial presence of Afro-descendant Peoples in 15 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, the state of recognition of their territorial rights, their overlap with areas that are important for regulating and mitigating climate change, and their contributions to conservation efforts.
This report aims to influence the localization agenda and improve bilateral policies and practices to ensure that more direct, fit-for-purpose support reaches Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples and their supporting organizations to secure tenure rights and conserve key ecosystems and biodiversity.
This research includes four cases of enterprises led by Indigenous women across Peru, and analyze the contributions of Indigenous women-led enterprises to local economies, territorial governance, sustainable natural resource management, and resilience to climate change, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This document includes the results of the study Contributions of Indigenous Women's Entrepreneurship in Colombia to their Economy, Territorial Governance and Climate Resilience during COVID-19, which brings together four case studies of entrepreneurship led by Indigenous women from different regions of Colombia.
Rights and Resources Initiative and Rainforest Foundation Norway are thrilled to announce the launch of the Path to Scale dashboard, a new open-source online tool that gives easy access to donor funding data for Indigenous Peoples’, Afro-descendant Peoples’, and local communities’ tenure and forest guardianship.