WUNRN
Rights & Resources
http://www.rightsandresources.org/how-we-create-change/by-issue/gender-justice/
Moreover, national legal
protections and gender justice advocacy and programs have failed to advance
women’s tenure and rights in customary regimes and legally pluralist systems –
often pitting women against men, rather than empowering them to identify and
advance their equity and rights in consonance with the broader community rights
movement.
RRI believes that it cannot
be successful in meeting its objective of securing and advancing Indigenous
Peoples and forest communities’ rights unless land reform processes make gender
justice a goal of reforms.
RRI aims to advance the
goal of gender justice in forest tenure and resource rights by doing the
following:
·
Producing and
strategically disseminating lessons on advancing gender justice in the land and
forest tenure reform process, particularly focused on customary tenure systems
and reforms strengthening legal pluralism; and the establishment, support, and
enhancement of women’s and gender sensitive enterprises.
·
Engaging
strategically with Indigenous Peoples and other social movements, and women’s
advocacy networks on gender justice in collective tenure regimes and forest reforms.
·
Better
integrating the tracking of progress on gender equity in RRI’s tenure and
poverty tracking.
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Illegal gold miners work in a mine at a deforested area in Puerto Luz in
the Amazon Region
Reuters/Miguel Bellido/El Comercio
By Katie Nguyen - Editing by
Tim Pearce
LONDON, Oct 30, 2014 (Thomson Reuters
Foundation) - Conflict over land is inevitable in countries like Indonesia,
Brazil and Peru where indigenous people and local communities live on tens of
thousands of mining, oil and gas, logging and farming concessions, a report
said on Thursday.
The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI)
said more than 93 percent of the 73,000 concessions analysed in eight countries
- Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, Indonesia, Liberia, Mozambique, Peru and the
Philippines - had people living on them.
"When governments sell the land, forests
and other natural resources out from under the people who live there, local
conflict becomes inevitable," said Andy White, coordinator at RRI, a
global coalition working on forest policy reform.
"The companies and governments
implicated need to first fully respect and involve indigenous peoples and
forest communities in all aspects of proposed investment, not as bystanders who
can be pushed aside," he said in a statement.
At least 40 percent of land in Peru, the host
of the next round of global climate change talks in December, has been handed
over by the government to the private sector for timber, mining and oil and gas
operations, RRI said.
Indonesia has also "signed away" a
huge chunk of its land - 30 percent - for large-scale agriculture, timber and
mining activities, while in Liberia the figure is 35 percent, it said.
Experts say policies to end deforestation are
essential for curbing climate change. Forests absorb climate-changing carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere and protecting them could help reduce the worst
impacts of climate change, scientists say.
RRI also says careful management of natural
resources such as forests and rainforests would prevent local conflicts.
Three-quarters of conflicts arising from this
kind of development concession occurred at the start of a project or when the
project expanded, it said.
Another pattern it identified from research
by the Munden Project - consultants focusing on climate change, land use and
development - was the lack of compliance with laws on developing natural
resources, leading for example to the contamination of local sources of
drinking water.
A third type of conflict is triggered when
the rights of the people living on the land are disregarded or when they are
not consulted on major projects.
"Property rights in many emerging or
frontier markets are dysfunctional to the point that ownership of land can be
granted without the knowledge or consent of the people who live or depend on
that land," said Leonardo Pradela of the Munden Project.
"Generally tied to their land for many
generations, these people have little interest in moving to urban areas and are
practically impossible to relocate. Yet the conflicts generated by attempts to
push them aside generate the worst kinds of financial risk: hidden and
potentially ruinous."
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