Indigenous & community rights to lands, resources and territories

There is unprecedented agreement among governments, the development cooperation community, private investors, and companies, that securing Indigenous Peoples and local communities’ land rights is a global priority. Secure local land rights are a low-cost strategy to reduce forest carbon emissions; a means to reduce financial risk to investments; and a basic human right of the Indigenous Peoples and local communities whose livelihoods rely on local resources.

What kind of support is needed to enable Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities to better protect and advance their rights with governments and private actors?

Sources:

http://www.landmarkmap.org/

http://www.dgmglobal.org/

Topic

[M’Lis FlynnParticipant @rafikigirl]

Thanks Eva

I think that Indigenous peoples and local communities need to be given opportunity to be decision makers through participatory engagement and involvement. Although participatory approaches are time heavy, they can be key igniters for helping people to realise that their voices, knowledge and lived experiences are integral to successful resource management  approaches. Participatory approaches, if well facilitated also assist ‘outsiders’ such as government officers and private actors, to experience the value of the knowledge, experiences and voices of Indigenous peoples. Participatory 3-dimensional modelling (P3DM) is one avenue that I have found to be very successful in this regard.

[Jamison ErvinParticipant @jamisone]

Thanks M’Lis – do you have any examples or case studies you could share on P3DM?

[M’Lis FlynnParticipant @rafikigirl]

Thanks Jamison

If you go to a website http://www.iapad.org there are some fantastic examples of where P3DM has been used for advocacy, land rights issues, engagement in planning, NRM and climate change adaptation issues. Its a great read.

My own experiences in facilitating P3Dm with Indigenous communities here in Australia and the Pacific have shown me what a positive, enlightening, empowering process P3DM and other participatory approaches can be. Of course they are also time consuming, and human-resource intensive, and can be scuttled at times by existing issues in a community too if not facilitated well. If done well, it is the community who make the decisions about what to include on their map, what not to include, how it will look, who will have access to information and when and what to use the information for. At the end the community also makes the decision about when and if to involve outside ‘experts’ or government, and then how they can be involved. They also make a decision about whether they want the information that have placed on the ‘model/map’ to be transferred to a digital mapping system (GIS).

Anyway P3DM is just one participatory technique which draws on many…worth having a peek at the IAPAD website…

M

[Jamison ErvinParticipant @jamisone]

Thanks M’Lis – this is a great resource – thanks so much for sharing! I wonder how new advances in satellite imagery and digital mapping sandboxes (allowing for virtual participation) could be used to achieve the same effect only faster and at less cost….something to noodle over!

[M’Lis FlynnParticipant @rafikigirl]

Hi Jamison

Thanks for your reply! Actually the changes in GIS and access to satellite imagery don’t really have a big impact on the P3DM process as it mainly focusses on the participation of the community at every stage – which is the way ownership of the model and the process occur. So in a P3DM process it is the youth who construct the model which has the effect of engaging them with maps and their landscape as well as connecting them to their elders better. As they do the construction with support from other older community members it is often during this period that youth begin to become privy to some of the stories of elders that spontaneously emerge – usually because they are so focussed on the places that they are constructing in the model. Almost always there are youth who are very engaged in this part of the process that then stay on to become part of the steps around legend development and knowledge depiction. It really is a fascinating technique that can be very empowering in re-connecting communities to their significant places and knowledges!

 

M

[liliane carine MOMDJO TAWOParticipant @liliane]

je vous sur conviens Avec l’approche participative qui intègre la prise en compte des droits des peuples autochtones. Aussi les acteurs qui les accompagnent (ONG, organisation de la société civile) doivent fortement les impliquer dans la mise en oeuvre des résolutions qui  les concernent au premier rang. La participation intègre leur présence à des instances décisionnel.

[Eva GurriaParticipant @evagurria]

Thank you-merci  M’Lis, Jamison, and Liliane for your comments.

I’d like to share a beautiful video of the South Central People’s Development Association from Guyana. They received UNDP’s Equator Prize in 2015 for their forest conservation work. One of their innovative solutions to deforestation was the development of collective land use plans that involved community mapping using traditional knowledge and modern technologies including smart phones, GPSs and drones. The mapping allowed the community to justify their claims to the community forests.

J’aimerais partager une belle vidéo de l’Association de développement du peuple du centre-sud du Guyana. Ils ont reçu le Prix Equateur du PNUD en 2015 pour leurs travaux de conservation des forêts. L’une de leurs solutions novatrices à la déforestation a été l’élaboration de plans collectifs d’utilisation des terres qui impliquaient une cartographie communautaire utilisant les connaissances traditionnelles et les technologies modernes, notamment les téléphones intelligents, les GPS et les drones. La cartographie a permis à la communauté de justifier ses revendications sur les forêts communautaires (le vidéo est en anlais).

South Central People’s Development Association

I would also like to share a Toolkit created by the ICCA Consortium that provides various methods (page 15-) to map indigenous and community conserved areas including:participatory Geographic Information Systems, balloon mapping, kite mapping, participatory mapping,  and cultural mapping, among other forms of documenting land and resources.

Je voudrais également partager une boîte à outils créée par le Consortium ICCA qui fournit diverses méthodes (page 15-en anglais) pour cartographier les zones conservées autochtones et communautaires par example: systèmes d’information géographique participatifs, cartographie des ballons, cartographie cerf-volant, cartographie participative et cartographie culturelle, entre autres. d’autres formes de documentation des terres et des ressources.

https://www.equatorinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/ICCA-Toolkit-Final-web.pdf

Do you have experience these various mapping methods? If so, which one did you use, and what results did it yield?

Avez-vous l’expérience de ces différentes méthodes de cartographie? Si oui, lequel avez-vous utilisé, et quels résultats avez vous obtenus?

 

[Author]

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