As I addressed the Fourth International Conference on Youth and Land Governance in Africa (CIGOFA4), I reflected on the critical issue of youth and land access in Africa, which remains a significant barrier to sustainable development. Land is more than an economic asset; it is the foundation of our cultural heritage, our identity, and the key to our future. However, across sub-Saharan Africa, land access continues to pose challenges, especially for our youth. These challenges, if left unaddressed, will hinder Africa's growth.

In the villages surrounding SudCam's vast rubber plantation in Southern Cameroon, the contrast between initial promises and current reality is striking. More than a decade after the establishment of this Halcyon Agri Corporation Limited subsidiary, local communities face a radical transformation of their environment and way of life.

The webinar Inclusive Land Governance and Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration: Whose Purpose?, which took place on 19 September, 2024, explored how a people-centered and holistic approach can transform Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration (FFPLA) and ensure that land administration truly serves the needs of communities.  The webinar, which was moderated by Imke Greven of the LAND-at-Scale Program Advisor at the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) gathered over 275 people. 

On September 23, 2024, a powerful hybrid event titled "From Commitment to Action: Enabling Direct Funding for Indigenous Peoples in Multilateral Climate and Biodiversity Initiatives" was hosted at the Ford Foundation headquarters in New York City as part of Climate Week. The event gathered Indigenous leaders, activists, multilateral fund representatives, and climate finance experts to address a critical question: Can multilateral mechanisms, with their sprawling bureaucracy, meet the urgent need for direct, fit-for-purpose funding for Indigenous Peoples on the frontlines of climate and biodiversity challenges?

The Land Dialogues nurture a community of trust with Indigenous peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendent peoples by producing webinars that bring unlikely voices and perspectives together.

Inclusive land governance at the local level allows for the community’s broader governance ‘muscle’ to be exercised in a constructive and practical way. This can reduce conflict and spark transformative social change.

The recent series of ALIGN articles shed light on how civil society, impacted communities and rights defenders across the world have used strategies such as legal action, publishing of mining contracts and stakeholder dialogues to change approaches to land-based investment governance.

Speaking truth to power is an art, but increasingly a lost art. This goes as much for academia as for the rest of the world. Indeed and unfortunately, much of academia reflects the world in which it functions and often makes the challenge of deepening social justice harder rather than smaller. To put it bluntly, much of academia has resorted to instrumental and naïve beliefs in innovation, technology and efficiency (which dominate the natural sciences) or (as in much of the social-economic sciences) increasingly arcane niche debates that too often revolve around virtue-signalling, methodological-theoretical wizardry or apolitical pragmatism. What we seem to have lost to a good degree – though to be sure: it was never a dominant endeavour and at the same time it has never been absent either – is the art of speaking truth to power.

I would like to make an argument that in aiming to deepen social justice in green transformations, we should pay renewed attention to the institutions of collective action at a very local level. I'm talking about peasant associations, irrigation groups, women's groups, indigenous people’s groups, producer associations, the local committees that manage land, water, forests.

Rapid response mechanisms (RRMs) are a new, proactive legal approach designed to provide legal and technical support to communities facing nascent conflicts related to land-based investments. RRMs provide preventative rather than reactive legal help the moment a conflict arises or community members’ rights are threatened, rather than trying to reverse rights violations once they have already occurred. 

In Cambodia, a recent Human Rights Watch report documents how Indigenous Chong people have faced eviction and criminal charges following the establishment of a carbon offsetting project on their lands. In Kenya, “the world’s largest soil carbon removal project”, whose credits have been used to offset the emissions of global corporations including Meta and Netflix, has been accused of dispossessing Indigenous Peoples of economically and culturally significant land, and reducing the climate resilience of thousands of people. 

Traditional authorities in Zambia complain that the government does not consult them when land is allocated for investment projects, while communities say chiefs are neglecting their interests. Jesinta Kunda of Zambia Land Alliance says more clarity is needed on the role of traditional authorities, in law and practice, to ensure large-scale investments in agriculture, mining and other sectors are governed better – particularly in light of the rising demand for critical minerals found in Zambia. She urges the government, traditional leaders and citizens to seize the opportunities presented by current legal reforms in Zambia to create change.