"Land Rights: From Awareness to Action"
Recently, land rights issues have been getting a lot of global attention. At the 2015 climate change conference in Paris, for example, indigenous peoples leaders and other activists have highlighted the importance of local land and resource rights...as an important element of global emission reduction efforts. And the United Nations’ (UN) new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)...include [five]...that include land rights... [The] Global Call to Action on Indigenous and Community Land Rights...aims to double the area of secure community lands worldwide by 2020... However, significant gaps remain in the fabric of funding and organizational support needed to help convert this growing awareness into more effective action and positive outcomes in the years ahead...
The Rights and Resources Initiative...has been advancing land and forest rights issues by supporting local organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America...
[If] we follow up our intentions with purposeful action, we should be able to achieve our global and local land rights ambitions in the years ahead. Namely, we need to:
1. Strengthen our civil society support models... [G]overnment elites and private companies often want to access and control the same lands as local people. So locally rooted, committed civil society organizations and social entrepreneurs need to play a particularly critical role...
2. Scale up appropriate funding...
3. Capturing the public imagination.
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