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 Interlaken Group developed this Guide to support companies aiming to align their operations with the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security.
Companies may face operational, legal, and financial risks when operating or investing in locations where land rights are disputed or where tenure rights are not understood and respected. Perhaps more importantly, community access and rights to livelihoods and economic security may be negatively impacted by such investments. This paper illustrates how selected companies are implementing commitments to international best practices on land rights. Given that the companies referenced in this paper are in the process of developing and improving ways to address land tenure rights, the cases ought to be viewed as examples of emerging company experiences, which can contribute to establishing best practices.
A synthesis of an investigation of tenure risk in East, West, and Southern Africa, that shows that a majority of tenure disputes are caused by the displacement of local peoples, indicating that companies and investors are not doing enough to understand competing claims to the land they acquire or lease.
This report explains what tenure risk is and offers objective evidence that the problem is widespread and of increasing frequency, as well as provides highlights from a real-world analysis of over 360 case studies.