Workshop outcomes

Topic 1: Effective forest conservation by Indigenous people and local communities: Rights-based and gender-just approaches

 

Best practices to share on rights-bases and gender-just approaches

 

- Having a human-rights and gender just approach

- Evidence-based approach: Identify areas of critical values, landscapes, environmental services, communities needs (form forest & environment)

  • Financial sector: standardized framework to protect, monitor, manage

- Capacity building on rights for IP&LCS: make sure when we get to community, train them on issues of rights so they are able to continue working together and empowered

  • Rights violation → community identifies challenges, identify resources and is able to protect resources
  • The moment they know their rights they are confident.
  • Respect and recognition of rights (everyone should be involved, women, youth, elders)

- Empowerment and capacity building of women: patriarchal system. Introduce community committees (water and sanitation, ect), with equal representation of men a women

  • Local level: capacity building of women
  • Regional level: how women conserve forest

- Equal participation in decision-making processes (local, national and international)

  • Resources and conditions for women in village meetings so that they can effectively participate (child care, breastfeeding spaces, ked-friendly community assemblies)

- Patriarchal society is a threat

- Participatory approach: take into account social and cultural aspects in the landscape.

- Organizational level: youth and women are part of decision making body (composition is equal). It has allowed to highlight the perspective of women and children

- Community level: community resistance. Traditional agriculture. 70% of traditional agriculture is done by women. Challenge: govt think it is a bad practices

- Support innovations by the communities: reduce pressure of fires community develop their own alternatives (cooking stoves using less firewood). Innovations are very important

- Power, evidence, reporting and integration to share experiences

- Legal system: Promote gender alliance of legislation initiatives to promote legislation changes.

- Substantive data on community needs: know target groups and what group needs resources

- Free, prior and informed consent

- Use topic to publish best practices and organize other conference when resources allow to exchange those practices, to go place to another and support local

- Biocultural protocol-Nagoya protocol

- Participatory management plans: participatory mapping with local communities and rangers

  • Promote participatory management plans, involving community members.
  • Role of women: women rangers need care spaces to participate in decision-making spaces. Masculine work spaces, need more safe spaces for women



What needs to change?

 

  • Changing the perspective that community work on forest conservation is not a good practice. Stigmatization of community forest conservation
  • Lack of real participation of IPLCs in conventions and COPs decision-making processes: international decisions are top down. There is no feedback from local communities.
  • Create women-safe spaces: consider cultures, difficult for women to participate in meetings where men participate.
  • Role of government in recognition and respecting best community practices on forest conservation
  • Promote inclusive land rights and land regulation
  • Challenges with implementation and respect of legal framework
  • Lack of financial and gender technical resources: need to consider financial resources to plan and implement gender-transformative interventions in the communities. Also gender technical methodologies to assess gender inequalities on the ground. GFC has developed gender methodologies that can be shared.
  • Relations with government: when we go to international level we have to lobby with parties
  • Conflict of data (overlap between govt and CSO data): data is not the same.
  • Customary law

Topic 2 - The Use of Environmental Law in Forest Conservation


DOMESTIC:

  • Since there exists a multiplicity of legislations, laws can seem to be disconnected.
  • It is important to have legal pluralism: we need to integrate indigenous customary law into national legal systems.
  • Indigenous people tenure rights: We need to create a minimum for companies to comply with.
  • There must be a progress (evolution) of private sector liability.
  • Access to justice for indigenous peoples: The main problem is the lack of funding (not profitable for environmental lawyers who do it pro bono). While polluters or companies pay to the best law firms to defend them. In Africa, sometimes the governments are also supporting the companies, so the entire system is against those who you want to bring a case before a court.

  • Rangers’ point of view: Rangers do not have enough voice. They try to apply laws which sometimes are made by people that do not have the time or understanding of the topic. Moreover, enforcement is also an issue since there exist uniformed and ununiformed rangers (the first have the legal mandate and the others do not). Their power to enforce the mandate must be strengthened.


INTERNATIONAL:

  • Capacity building of lawyers must to become more aligned to Indigenous Peoples’ issues.
  • There is also a top-down approach which needs to change.

  • Representation at the international for a is also a problem: there must be more Indigenous voices at COPs (lobbies of oil companies are more powerful than states).


  • POLITICS:

  • Growth of populism is a problem. Extreme right movements do not include Indigenous Peoples in their agendas.
  • Need for policy continuity: Every time a new law is passed, we have to start all over again. Once again, there is a need to harmonize the current legal systems with indigenous customary law.
  • Access to information (Aarhus Convention): Use more resources to strengthen and empower civil society (but indigenous peoples in particular).

  • Target the offer, not the demand: The current trend seems to try to implement these changes in places where the destruction of biodiversity is taking place. But the problem is that those places are often ruled by dictatorships or autocratic regimes. It would be more effective to create restrictions for countries to buy products from those less democratic countries.


Topic 3 – Finance and enabling resources to effectively reach IPLC.(Spanish table)

 

What is missing?

  1. There is a systemic root problem of a lack of the adequate financial architecture to allow the IP to access the funds (it is business type designed when it should not)
  2. There is a lack of recognition to IPLC, environmental defenders, rangers, and overall people in the territory. They need better incentives to defend their territories and prevent them to migrate to cities.
  3. There is a structural problem of land tenure titles in which the most disadvantaged are IPLC and mainly women. It’s important to redesign at all levels (technicism, requirements, administrative barriers)


Recommendations

- Re-educate the donors.

  1. Change the concept of “including IPLC” to “supporting IPLC” who are the rightsholders.
  2. Change the rules of the game. Before giving the money/funds, allow a process of support and funds for building capacities (including administrative) and governance of communities.
  3. Administrative and evaluation accompaniment and support is also key.
  4. Donors should do in-person visits to project sites to understand cultural and environmental contexts.

- Elimination and administrative barriers so that the resource reaches directly to whom it should reach, and intermediaries are avoided.

- Creation of regional funds and other innovative mechanisms based on co-creation of both parties (donors and IPLC)

- Use the PAMFII network.

 

  • Come up with a clear consultation process for the communities to share their needs or challenges; We believe that there is a lot of money. In every fund for nature and biodiversity conservation, there is always an element for communities but, communities are not consulted on the challenges they are facing and how they would like to be addressed and by who.
  • Donors to go deep and understand the community needs to understand for communities – an example is a donor is providing a $5,000/= drone to document videos when rangers do not have the basic needs such as shoes, gloves and other protective gear.
  • Develop of come up with simple and clear mechanisms that facilitate the financial resources to reach to the grassroots. The existing mechanisms are not serving community needs but instead serving community needs.
  • Minimizing the transaction cost – basically minimizing the intermediation of funds and identify channels that bring funds to communities and managed by communities themselves. There is a very small % of funding going to the communities
  • Identification of resilient grassroot organizations less affected by different dynamics such as COVID to help in the continuous implementation of projects
  • Intermediaries to be identifies by community consultation in an effective FPIC and not donors to decide on the flow of finance. International funders already have National development aid organization which is preferred intermediary which in most cases are not serving community interest. Some of the intermediaries do not understand communities with no efforts to understand them.
  • Inter-cultural Intermediation; Train Communities on Project management, monitoring and evaluation. There is good will between communities and the ground but there lacks a disconnect between communities and donors who want to implement projects and take control.
  • Communities need for the intermediaries today but the intermediation should be on short basis to build community capacity and allowing them to run project implementation by themselves.
  • There is need to understand the need of the IPLCs. (Many communities do not even know how to explain what they want) *I left this in yellow as it is mentioned by someone and thought of leaving it here. Than can be a good research question
  • Identify community friendly reporting mechanisms anchored with trust
  • Clear need for funds; differentiate grants from investments finances due to different demands in reporting.
  • The intermediaries should not act as consultants as it makes it make very complicated
  • Training community to feel the gap for experts for documentation, project and financial reports. Demands for reporting is draining a lot of funds; not only from the donor but also including national government siting at the comfort of their offices, asking a lot from the communities. This calls for employment of experts to meet the donor and government demands. This is linked to a lot of unnecessary documentation to meet the demands.
  • The positive way to solve a lot of problems is to put ourselves out of the job - this is whether you are a big or small organization, this should be the role for donor, communities and the governments. Keeping ourselves at the job is creating a lot of conflicts
  • Community ranger leader – sometimes we need different modes of transport such as horses and not the cars for rangers. WWF is very reliable to the community rangers. We need basic needs such as boots, gloves and warm clothes. We also need to make sure that our families are doing well even when we are ok so even though we may need the drones and other complicated things, we need the basic needs too.