Governing Natural Resources for Food Sovereignty

Funder

11th Hour Project

Value

65,000 USD

Collaborators

IRPAD Mali and Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa

Team

Priscilla Claeys and Stefanie Lemke.

Project objectives

The objective of this preliminary research is to elaborate a 3-year participatory action research (PAR) project on the governance of natural resources for food sovereignty. With this initial 18 months project, we focus on two regions, i.e. Western and Eastern Africa, each with its specific challenges, legal frameworks and civil society and research networks. In each region, we made contact with civil society and academic partners to identify research gaps and build joined future activities. Our long-term goal is to analyse the potential and limitations of current and newly emerging legal frameworks for the protection of natural resources that are managed collectively, such as land, seeds, forests, and pastures, and draw lessons from civil society struggles to defend, protect, reclaim or institutionalize collective rights over these resources, including commons.

Impact Statement

This is a participatory scoping project with the aim to establish relationships in the longer term, and to jointly frame the research questions and priorities. Through field visits and workshops in both Mali and Uganda we create connections between social movement networks representing small scale farmers, pastoralists, fisher folk, Indigenous Peoples, NGOs, progressive human rights lawyers, and academics.

This will lead to various collaborations at different levels, for example joint research projects, public interest litigation, advocacy activities, and engagement in policy processes.

We are in the process of co-creating a larger research project which will involve many of these actors and draw on the initiatives they are already engaged in.

For more information you can watch videos (in French and English) of our two workshops organised in Mali (2018) and Uganda (2019)