Securing land rights of women and indigenous peoples in the face of climate change in South Asia

Background

In South Asia, there is a critical need to advance interventions and advocacy led by indigenous peoples, local communities, and women through multi-stakeholder dialogues to build local climate resilience, strengthen the agency and amplify their voices by facilitating knowledge sharing, capacity building and collective action across countries. As a foundational aspect to address climate adaptation and mitigation policies, securing indigenous peoples', local communities, and women’s land rights (WLR) is proven to increase local communities’ adaptive capacities, food security, and inclusive participation in political processes. Strong evidence also reveals that deforestation and degradation are reduced in areas that are owned, managed and controlled by indigenous peoples and local communities, highlighting the centrality of recognition of their land and territory in support of effective and equitable conservation and climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies.

The event format will include paper presentations, panel discussions, group discussions, master class and high-level round tables on the following indicative thematic areas:

1. Effective and equitable tenure security for all with a specific focus on women and IPLC
2. The political economy of land, forest, and water in the face of climate change to build community resilience;
3. Human-rights-based instruments to enhance equitable and inclusive land governance
4. Transparent and accessible community-generated data on land and resources rights for monitoring SDGs and enhancing duty barriers accountability;
5. Showcasing the strategies of women land and environmental rights defenders and finding ways to amplify them while ensuring increased visibility in Asia region;
6. Peoples' organisations, women-led coalitions, and building movements towards inclusive and equitable land rights.

The regional policy dialogue is supported by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI). The event's guiding principles centred on gender justice and rights-based approaches will be refined with the technical support of the SEI Asia team, and subsequently from the basis on which activities-specific criteria will be elaborated to guide the identification, selection, and validation of participants, partners and co-conveners, thematic lead, and sponsors.

Objectives

The overall objective is to engage local and regional state and community leaders in designing and implementing people-centred land policy reform that includes the reality on the ground. This is envisioned to be organised through building the bridge between the state and communities, capacity building of civil society organisations (CSOs), indigenous community champions and relevant stakeholders’ knowledge shifting attitudes towards tackling the structural barriers for climate change mitigations, adaptations and land governance.

This event is for

ILC Asia members, representatives of NGOs in the region that are beyond ILC members, international organisations, representatives of local communities, and governmental organisations.