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Community Exchange Brings Forest Management Lessons From Guatemala to Indonesia
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 Community leaders from Indonesia toured Guatemala in mid-April as part of a community-to-community exchange to learn from successful examples of communities managing their customary forests, coordinating with the government, and engaging in community forestry enterprises. The group visited community forests in the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Petén, one of the greatest examples of community forestry management worldwide with a near zero-deforestation rate. Their second stop was Guatemala’s Cobán area to see how smallholders are managing forests and agricultural lands through a federation of cooperatives, FEDECOVERA.
With communities in Indonesia increasingly gaining legal recognition of their land rights, the visit was a timely opportunity for community members to see successful forest management in action.
“That’s why we came here—because we want to see how the Petén Forest Communities Association (ACOFOP) partners manage the forest and how the communities were able to organize themselves and work together with the government to manage an area of forest,” said Muhammad Sidik, one of the Indonesian delegates.
At the end of the visit, each Indonesian delegate produced a roadmap to promote the implementation of community forestry enterprises in their own communities.
This exchange was organized by RRI, the Rainforest Alliance, and the Samdhana Institute, in collaboration with ACOFOP, AMPB, and AMAN. Over the next 18 months, the Rainforest Alliance and the Samdhana Institute will support delegates in the implementation of community forestry enterprises in Indonesia.
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New Report Highlights Need to Protect Indigenous and Rural Women’s Land Rights
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Indigenous and rural women make up more than half of the 2.5 billion people who customarily own and use the world’s community lands. Their management of community forests is crucial for conservation, climate change mitigation, and economic development. Yet governments are failing to meet their international commitments to provide equal rights and protections to indigenous and rural women, a new RRI analysis reveals.
The report provides an unprecedented assessment of 80 legal frameworks regulating indigenous and rural women’s community forest rights in 30 developing countries comprising 78 percent of the developing world’s forests. The findings reveal that secure community land rights and the legal advancement of women often go hand in hand. Therefore, the full benefits of community forest ownership can only be realized if women’s rights within communities are explicitly recognized and protected.
Learn more about the report here.
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CASE STUDIES
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Oct 4-5: Third International Conference on Community Land and Resource Rights
There are unprecedented commitments by governments, the private sector, and the international community to recognize community and indigenous land rights as a solution to global inequality, conflict, and an increasingly unstable climate. A new set of initiatives is already supporting efforts to scale-up rights recognition. Yet the pressure on community land continues to grow, and without consolidated action global momentum to address the crisis of insecure land rights may be lost.
The Stockholm Conference will be one of the largest international conferences advancing joint efforts to secure the land and resource rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and rural women.
For more information, contact conference@rightsandresources.org or visit communitylandrights.org.
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Peru: What Does the Country Lose if Indigenous Women Lack Access to Land?
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“Indigenous women demand a voice and a vote in decision-making processes regarding our territories,” said Ketty Marcelo Lopez, President of the national indigenous women’s organization ONAMIAP (for its Spanish acronym), at an advocacy event on May 26 in Lima, Peru.
The event called attention to challenges resulting from a lack of coordination among current land titling programs in Peru and lessons that can be learned from women’s participation and leadership. An accompanying policy brief highlighted analyses from RRI, ONAMIAP, and CIFOR, and provided a list of recommendations for decision makers.
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Tanahkita Portal Highlights Land Conflicts in Indonesia
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A new land portal has been launched at www.tanahkita.id to track land issues across Indonesia. Initially intended to serve as a consolidated map of land conflicts, this interactive portal has developed into a powerful instrument that combines data on land conflicts (including the value of affected investments), official spatial data, and concession maps with priority locations recommended for land redistribution, asset legalization, social forestry schemes, and customary (adat) forests. This last category of data resulted from a grassroots effort from the tenure coalition in Indonesia, and can be used as a reference point by the government to implement its broad Agrarian Reform and Social Forestry programs.
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RRI Celebrates Victory for Kenya’s Ogiek Community in Historic Land Rights Case
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On May 26, 2017, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights ruled in favor of the indigenous Ogiek community in a precedent-setting land rights case. Following a prolonged legal battle, the Court ruled that the Kenyan government had violated the Ogiek’s land rights in evicting them from the Mau Forest, among seven separate violations of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which Kenya ratified.
The decision recognized the Ogiek as indigenous, accepted the Mau Forest as their ancestral home, and found that preservation of the forest was not a sufficient reason to deny the Ogiek access to their land—a major step forward for the acknowledgement of the collective rights of Indigenous Peoples in Kenya and across Africa.
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Record-breaking Mobilization Calls for Brazil to End Its Attacks on Indigenous Peoples’ and Afro-descendant Land Rights
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In Brazil, indigenous and local communities are facing a series of constitutional amendments and pro-industry laws that threaten to roll back their hard-won territorial and constitutional rights. In response, over 4,000 people mobilized in April in coordination with the annual indigenous protest Acampamento Terra Livre (“Free Land Camp”). Activists filed a statement with key government ministers in defense of their rights, ancestral territories, and the environment.
As part of the #LandRightsNow Earth Day campaign, an international online petition was also launched calling on President Michel Temer and Justice Minister Osmar Serraglio to end government attacks on indigenous rights and the environment.
Read more about the current situation in Brazil here.
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Coalition Updates:
RECOFTC Celebrates 30 Years of Empowering People for Healthy Forests
This spring, RECOFTC marked 30 years of working to secure community forestry in Asia with events throughout the region—including a celebration at the annual regional conference of the ASEAN Working Group on Social Forestry in Thailand on June 11. More than 80 RECOFTC partners from civil society, governments, and donor agencies gathered to honor achievements from the last three decades, and renew their commitment to people-centered land policies as a prerequisite for meeting global development goals.
Increased Collaboration with the State Forestry Administration of China
In April 2017, RRI signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the State Forestry Administration of China. This MoU will lead to strengthened collaboration on several key topics, including collective and public tenure reform; forests, poverty alleviation, and green growth; and the MegaFlorestais network.
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RRI Fellow Spotlight: Madhu Sarin
 Madhu Sarin has been working on forest tenure reform in India for the last 15 years, and was a member of the Technical Support Group constituted by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, which drafted the 2006 Indian Forest Rights Act (FRA). Read a Q&A with Madhu on how the FRA has strengthened women’s land rights, and the challenges that still remain to fully implement the law.
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To save the world's forests, protect women's land rights
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National laws and regulations in low- and middle-income countries consistently fail to protect the land rights of women living in indigenous and rural communities, according to RRI’s new report “Power and Potential.” Read more.
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When Women Have Land Rights, the Tide Begins to Turn
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In South Asia, distress migration owing to climate events and particularly droughts is high, as over three-quarters of the population is dependent on agriculture, out of which more than half are subsistence farmers depending on rains for irrigation. Read more.
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Guatemala provides an example of community forest management for Indonesia
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Indigenous communities in Indonesia are currently in the process of mapping, titling, and restoring their customary forests after Indonesian president Joko Widodo pledged to grant 12.7 million hectares for community concessions by 2019. Representatives travelled to Guatemala to learn how this has been done by communities in the Maya Biosphere Reserve. Read more.
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