General
Land rights Now was conceived as a campaign project with a clear time frame from 2016-2020. The three convening organizations recognize the important added value of Land Rights Now and have confirmed their interest in the campaign continuing for a secondphase 2021-2024.
In 2020, the Advisory Board and co-conveners decided to strengthen the governance of LandRightsNow, with its Advisory Board – which currently consists of 5 renewed experts and activists, i.e., Joan Carling, Silas Siakor, Janene Yazzie, Peter Peacock and Miriam Miranda – formally becoming a decision-making body. This decision further strengthened LandRightsNow as a platform where right-holders steer. New members will bring in further outreach, political wisdom, and campaign strategy advice – possibly beyond land rights.
The process of recruiting new members, and new co-conveners is still undergoing and will be a major part of coordination’s workfor the coming months. As LandRightsNow has been further strengthening its governance and concretely acting as a platform, in line with a principle of nothing about us, without us, it shows a good model for concrete way for INGOs to support movements. In this second phase LandRightsNow will focus on supporting national campaigns proposed by participants and will not deliver global mobilisation. Still, it will use its worldwide network to mobilise globally around specific national campaigns.
Oxfam, the International Land Coalition, and the Rights and Resources Initiative have funded the (very small) LandRightsNow budget in the first phase, playing a major role in making actions happen –
also through in-kind contribution. With the aim to further fulfil the idea of campaign to be open and collaborative, a decision has been taken to look for additional entities and organizations to strengthen this group of “co-conveners” who can bring either further resources, outreach, or campaign capacity (as movement, or media companies, or NGOs), to expandLandRightsNow.
Delivering campaigns to advance Indigenous and Community Land Rights in 2021-2022
During the proposed period Land Rights Now will continue its core activity of providing global campaign support to national campaigns lead by Indigenous People and local communities, by responding to campaign opportunities and requests by participants. In this period, the LandRightsNow coordination with mostly focus on one or more global digital actions to advance the relevance of Indigenous and Community land rights, and by supporting 2 / 3 national campaigns across the globe. The campaigns will be decided by the new Board, upon proposal of the Coordinator and the co-conveners.
Keeping amplify the work of co-conveners and participants
The coordination of LandRightsNow will keep supporting the work of co-conveners in the area of Indigenous and community land rights, by:
amplifying stories coming from the RRI, ILCand Oxfam, as well as other participant’s networks to reach a broader and different audience and raise the awareness on the link between secure land rights, climate change and food systems.
issue action alerts around specific cases of land rights defenders at risk because of their peaceful actions or major global relevant policy opportunities.
providing visibility to any update on the RRI‘baseline’, which also constitutes the underlying data justification for the LandRightsNow campaign. The new data may imply the need to develop an updated narrative from the one developed by co-conveners through the ‘Common Ground’ report. The LandRightsNowcoordination will support the process of including any revised context analysis into the second phase of LandRightsNow (e.g., the new dataof the Land Inequality research of the ILC). These actions will be done with the ‘supporter journey’ of LandRightsNowsupporters, making sure they are kept updated, they feel engaged and active, but not overwhelmed. It is also expected that – through LandRightsNow– co-conveners and other participants will continue to share information on the status of Indigenous and community lands worldwide,which in turn increase coherence of actions.
