Resource Material 2

Landesa’s Responsible Investments in Property and Land (RIPL) Resource Platform offers practical, step-by-step guidance for companies, governments and communities to achieve socially responsible investments in agricultural land. The Resource Platform builds on existing guidance with the objective of synthesizing best practices, contributing concrete examples to address existing gaps and leveling the playing field by developing guidance tailored to multiple investment stakeholders.

This is the go-to resource for most stakeholders and contains many of the other resources linked here.

Landscope is a system for measuring tenure risk, a term TMP created to describe the financial risk associated with local opposition to a real asset. This kind of opposition to investments is very common across Africa, Asia and Latin America, often causing significant financial losses and operational headaches.

The Interlaken Group is an informal network of individual leaders from influential companies, investors, CSOs, government and international organizations. Its members develop, adopt and disseminate new tools and advance new “pre-competitive” mechanisms to accelerate private sector learning on responsible land rights practices. The Interlaken Group has produced short guides on topics including VGGT implementation and for legacy land issues.

The Tenure Risk Tool is a discounted cashflow model developed by TMP Systems using research conducted with ODI. The tool helps investors account properly for the possible impacts of tenure disputes such as delays in project development or operations.

This document provides practical and action-oriented guidance on how to manage and address land rights grievances in the palm oil sector. The guidance provides information about how to verify and identify causes of grievances, develop action plans for remediation and resolution, and minimise chances of future non-compliances and conflict.

OpenLandContracts.org is a repository of publicly available investment contracts for land, agriculture, and forestry projects. It features plain language summaries of key provisions and provides tools for searching and comparing contracts.

This good practice guidance aims to provide support to agribusiness companies (as well as investors) who find themselves in situations where legacy land issues are evident. The guidance also aims to help local communities define their rights and identify community development and business opportunities. It does not constitute a new standard but is based on experiences of companies that have actively managed legacy land challenges and so represents practical guidance for companies, investors, communities and others.

This note is designed to help fund managers quickly familiarise themselves with key issues they may encounter when investing in companies intending to lease or acquire land. It includes guidance on land acquisition, involuntary resettlement and economic displacement as well as related issues such as human rights, food security, land tenure, governance and corruption aspects of land acquisition. It is not intended to be a detailed technical guidance document.

This tool is a series of checklists that allow companies to manage efforts to comply with international standards and best practices. This includes measuring progress made against each international standard and best practice, assigning risk according to progress, detailing work plans and timelines the company will follow to reach compliance, and designating responsibilities to both internal and external actors by task.

One way to help satisfy stakeholder concerns and promote transparency is to involve project-affected stakeholders in monitoring the implementation of mitigation measures or other environmental and social programs. Such participation, and the flow of information generated through this process, can also encourage local stakeholders to take a greater degree of responsibility for their environment and welfare in relation to the project, and to feel empowered that they can do something practical to address issues that affect their lives. Participatory monitoring also tends to strengthen relationships between the project and its stakeholders.

This publication draws on the work undertaken by members of the ‘Land Tenure and Development’ Technical Committee set up by AFD and MAE. It presents an Analytical Framework and a Guide that each institution can now appropriate and use to change their internal project evaluation procedures.

The Interlaken Group and RRI developed this Guide to support senior-level and operational teams at companies and provide them with an entry point to understanding and implementing the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forestry in the context of National Food Security (VGGTs).

The Analytical Framework for Land-Based Investments in African Agriculture is designed to help investors ensure that their land-based investments are inclusive, sustainable, transparent and respect human rights.

This guide discusses USAID’s recommendations for best practices related to the due diligence and structuring of land-based investments, with the goal of reducing risks and facilitating responsible projects that benefit both the private sector and local communities.

The Governance of Tenure technical guides are part of FAO’s initiative to help develop capacities in to improve tenure governance. Guides include:

• Responsible governance of tenure: a technical guide for investors
• Safeguarding land tenure rights in the context of agricultural investments
• Respecting free prior informed consent
• Governing land for women and men
• Valuing land tenure rights

This technical guide aims to assist implementation of the VGGTs’ principle of gender equality through the achievement of responsible gender-equitable governance of land tenure.

This trainer’s manual strengthens and builds capacity of community activists, community based organisations (CBOs), other non-government organisations (NGOs) and community educators to support communities’ understanding of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC).

This resource contains a catalogue of community development laws related to the mining sector which has been created featuring legislative arrangements from 54 countries. All legislation can be seen in an interactive map, while all laws and community development agreements are searchable and can be downloaded.