Private Sector Engagement
Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, and local communities live on and manage over 50 percent of the world’s land, but governments recognize their legal ownership rights to just 10 percent. And as investors and corporations have pushed into increasingly remote rural areas seeking land for agribusiness, oil and gas exploration, infrastructure, and renewable energy projects, they have increasingly found themselves coming into conflict with communities over contested land.
These disputes not only jeopardize the rights and livelihoods of local peoples; they also pose a threat to companies and investors as projects can become mired in long and costly conflicts with communities that can lead to work stoppages, stalled investments, and project abandonment.
As the financial and operational costs of insecure Indigenous and community land rights have become increasingly apparent, some progressive companies and investors have committed to addressing land rights in their operations. However, implementing these commitments across sprawling global supply chains has proved challenging.
RRI works to catalyze private sector action on land rights by:
- Steering the Interlaken Group, an informal network of individual leaders from influential companies, investors, CSOs, government and international organization committed to expanding and leveraging private sector action to secure community land rights
- Producing analyses quantifying the costs of tenure risk across regions and sectors
- Convening stakeholders from the private sector, governments, and civil society at the global and national levels to share learning on mitigating tenure risk
- Identifying ways for these stakeholders to support community-led economic models as an alternative to large-scale land acquisitions.
Interlaken Group
The Interlaken Group is an informal network of individual leaders from influential companies, investors, civil society organizations, governments, and international organizations. The purpose of the Interlaken Group is to expand and leverage private sector action to secure community land rights. Together they develop, adopt, and disseminate new tools and advance new “pre-competitive” mechanisms to accelerate private sector learning on responsible land rights practices. Learn more about the Interlaken Group.
Resources recap
- Interlaken Group, an informal network of individual leaders working to expand and leverage private sector action to secure community land rights
- Landscope, a system for measuring tenure risk
- Principles of Community Monitoring: A Path for Companies and Investors
- Land Legacy Issues: Guidance on Corporate Responsibility
- Respecting Land and Forest Rights: A Guide for Companies (Updated 2019)
- Tenure and Investment in Africa
- IAN: Managing Tenure Risk
- Communities as Counterparties: Preliminary Review of Concessions and Conflict in Emerging and Frontier Market Concessions
- Global Capital, Local Concessions
- From Risk and Conflict to Peace and Prosperity
- Land Disputes and Stalled Investments in India