Gender Justice and Women's Community Land and Forest rights

Key related visuals

Overview

Historically, most rural lands were customarily owned and governed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities. While states have recognized the value of these lands and resources and began to legally claim them, up to 2.5 billion people still live in community arrangements. They directly manage over 50 percent of global land, including many of the world’s remaining forests and biodiversity hotspots, which have remained intact under their sustainable stewardship. Women within these communities play an outsize role in both feeding their families and protecting the resources that all humanity depends on. Securing their rights is vital to achieving global sustainable development and climate goals.

But despite women’s crucial roles as forest and household managers, food providers, and leaders of rural enterprises, the land rights of indigenous and local community women remain constrained by unjust laws and practices. Even as these women are taking on greater leadership due to men’s out-migration from communities and mounting external threats to community lands, they are often locked out of decision-making processes at all levels that affect them.

While many women have made positive strides without secure legal land rights, strong tenure rights for community women are essential to their livelihood and self-determination, their communities’ well-being, and greater stability in the face of climate change and food shortages. This means that securing women’s rights to community lands offers a promising path toward peace, prosperity, and sustainability in the forested and rural lands of the world.

Key Messages and Data Points

Governments are not respecting indigenous and community women’s tenure rights and are failing to meet international obligations to do so.

• A 2017 global study, Power and Potential, analyzed 80 legal frameworks regulating community forest tenure in 30 low- and middle-income countries that cover more than three quarters of the developing world’s forests and found that no country provides adequate recognition of indigenous and community women’s land and forest rights. [Source: RRI 2017 (Power and Potential)]

  • • All the countries analyzed have ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and yet not one meets the minimum standards established in the treaty.

    • Community-level indicators: Of the 80 legal frameworks regulating community forests: only 3% adequately protect women’s community-level voting rights; only 5% adequately protect women's rights to lead communities; only 10% adequately protect women’s community-level inheritance rights; only 16% adequately protect women’s right to community-level dispute resolution; and only 29% adequately protect women’s right to community membership

    • Overarching indicators: Of the 30 low- and middle-income countries assessed, 93% of the countries examined prohibit gender-based discrimination or explicitly guarantee women equal protection under the constitution (only Indonesia and Thailand do not); 57% of the countries analyzed specifically affirm women’s property rights; only 8 of the 30 countries assessed mandate that daughters, windows, and unmarried women in consensual unions have equal rights to inherit alongside their male counterparts.

      • Only 8 of the 30 countries have intestate inheritance laws that provide equal protections.

      • More than a third of the countries assessed (India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mali, Myanmar, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia) have laws that legally discriminate against daughters, widows, and/or women in consensual unions, or defer to religious or customary law without safeguarding women’s inheritance rights.

There is a particularly pressing need for legal reforms regarding women’s governance (voting and leadership) and community-level inheritance rights. [Source: RRI 2017 (Power and Potential)]

• Governance: Women’s rights to participate in community-level governance through voting and leadership—arguably the legal entitlements most necessary for asserting their voice in decision-making processes that affect them—are the least protected community-level tenure rights.

  • Only 3% of community-specific legal regimes adequately protect women’s voting rights; and only 5% of community-specific legal regimes adequately protect women's leadership rights.

• Inheritance: Individuals’ right to inherit community lands and resources is the least acknowledged community-level right assessed. 58 of the 80 community-specific legal regimes (73 percent) analyzed fail to address community-level inheritance in any respect.

The legal advancement of women and their communities go hand in hand. [Source: RRI 2017 (Power and Potential)]

• Laws recognizing community forest ownership provide the most robust legal protections for indigenous and community women’s forest rights, suggesting that community-focused laws can serve as powerful tools for advancing the rights of women.

Conservation-oriented legal frameworks regulating community-held lands offer the fewest and weakest protections for women’s tenure rights. [Source: RRI 2017 (Power and Potential)]

• Conservation-oriented legal frameworks provide women even weaker statutory recognition than natural resource exploitation-oriented sets of laws. Legal frameworks that provide avenues for communities to own forests and those that are created with the express purpose of acknowledging community-based rights provide the greatest protections for women’s rights.

Learning from the laws analyzed in Power and Potential has resulted in a new guidance on the key attributes of national constitutions, laws, and regulations that play a fundamental role in protecting indigenous and community women’s rights to community forests. [Source: RRI 2018 (Legislative Best Practices for Securing Women’s Rights to Community Lands)]

• Legislative reforms should be comprehensive and resonate with existing customary norms and laws

Learning from 18 organizations’ work in 10 low- and middle-income countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America distilled 10 contributing factors underlying successful initiatives that strengthened women’s governance rights regarding community lands. [Source: RRI 2019 (Strengthening Indigenous and Rural Women’s Rights to Govern Community Lands)]

• FACTORS 1–4: Maintaining a Community-Wide Focus

  • 1. Approach women’s empowerment through inclusive, collaborative processes that engage entire communities.

  • 2. Engage community leaders.

  • 3. Activities implemented by non-community members are culturally appropriate and developed alongside communities in order to prioritize their agency.

  • 4. Recognize that social change takes time.

• FACTORS 5-7: Using Information and Learning to Further Empower Women and Their Communities

  • 5. Render visible the valuable contributions that women already make to their communities.

  • 6. Demonstrate the community-wide advantages of securing women’s governance rights.

  • 7. Use information to empower women as community leaders and decision-makers.

• FACTORS 8-10: Establishing Strategic Networks and Alliances at All Levels

  • 8. Establish meeting spaces, activities, networks, or institutions that are exclusively for women.

  • 9. Create self-sustaining, multilevel networks of women leaders.

  • 10. Build and leverage strategic relationships with a wide variety of stakeholders outside of communities.

Country-Level Messaging and Data Points

[Source for all: RRI 2017 (Power and Potential)]

Brazil

• Brazil is one of 8 countries studied that recognizes inheritance rights for women in consensual unions at the national level.

• The 8 legal frameworks in Brazil largely fail to address community-level governance: only 1 addresses community-level leadership (though it fails to establish a quota or quorum for women’s participation).

Colombia

• Afro-Colombian Community Lands in Colombia is one of only two legal frameworks that requires a quorum of women with respect to voting, and one of only four do so with respect to leadership.

• Colombian law (overarching) specifically guarantees women’s rights in land titling and allocation processes, and gives preferential treatment to vulnerable women and women who head households.

• The gender-blind allocation of membership rights at a household level in the Afro-Colombian Community Lands and Indigenous Reserves legal frameworks (CBTRs) may be problematic, as they may be implemented in a discriminatory manner.

Peru

• Peru is one of only 8 countries studied that recognizes inheritance rights for women in consensual unions at the national level.

• In Peru, although widows, daughters, and women in consensual unions have the right to inherit under national laws pertaining to all women, this right is not protected in community-level laws and regulations.

• In Peru, while community governance and dispute resolution are addressed in the laws regulating 3 of 4 community-specific legal frameworks, women’s rights to vote, participate in leadership bodies, and access dispute resolution mechanisms are not guaranteed.

DRC

• National law affirms equal rights to property for men and women (Art. 9 of Law No. 15/013 of 2015).

Kenya

• Of the laws examined in this study, those establishing registered community lands in Kenya contain some of the most detailed protections for women’s membership rights, as they explicitly account for situations of divorce, widowhood, and remarriage.

India

• Although India’s Forest Rights Act does recognize the inheritability of Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers' Land, the specific rights of women to community-level inheritance and dispute resolution are not explicitly acknowledged.

• India does not have laws recognizing the inheritance rights of women in consensual unions; inheritance in India may be regulated by civil, religious or personal laws, some of which fail to explicitly guarantee equal inheritance rights for wives and daughters.

• Because of provisions in the Forest Rights Act (FRA), Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers’ Land in India are one of only 2 legal frameworks identified (out of 80) in the report in which women's community-level voting and leadership rights are guaranteed through a quorum requirement. (NOTE: The Act’s strong community-level governance provisions are tempered by the fact that that the Forest Rights Act has barely been implemented).

Indonesia

• Indonesia’s Constitution is 1 of 2 assessed that does not explicitly protect women from gender-based discrimination and/or expressly guarantee women equal protection under the law.

• The Civil Code of Indonesia does not recognize consensual unions of Indigenous Peoples and local communities as legally valid. Indonesia has also reportedly considered criminalizing consensual unions.

• 0 of 6 legal frameworks identified in Indonesia adequately protect women’s rights to community-level inheritance, membership, governance, or dispute resolution.

• 5 of 6 legal frameworks analyzed do not address community-level decision making processes in any respect.