Should Research Communications Be Shared?” Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledge, Climate Change, and Research Contracts in South Africa

Guest blog by Dr. Laura Foster

Dr. Laura Foster recently spoke at the Annual Meeting of Force 11: The Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship in Portland, Oregon from April 17- 19, 2016. Dr. Foster spoke about the joint research project on Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledge, Climate Change, and Intellectual Property between Natural Justice, IP Unit at University of Cape Town Faculty of Law, Indiana University - Bloomington, and the Griqua and Nama Nations of South Africa. The project is funded by the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet) through the International Development Research Centre (Canada) and iHub (Kenya).

 Foster shared insights from the joint research project on a panel about success stories in research and knowledge communication from outside Europe and North America and how those stories inform ways of improving research communication globally. Dominique Babini, Dora Ann Lange Canhos, and Juan Pablo Alperin also joined the panel and spoke on similar issues.

 In her remarks, Foster provoked the audience to consider how histories of colonial violence against indigenous peoples require us to think differently about notions of open and collaborative science. In particular, she highlighted how insights from the Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledge, Climate Change, and Intellectual Property project demonstrate the need for a more critical approach or what might loosely be called a “situated openness.” This concept draws upon Donna Haraway’s notion of “situated knowledge” and insights from feminist science studies and indigenous methodologies.

Foster argued that a situated openness requires a way of doing research that assumes knowledge production is situated within particular historical, political, and socio-cultural relations. It considers how open and shared knowledge practices can democratize knowledge, while also recognizing how such notions are embedded within colonial histories that explicitly deployed openness as a way to legitimate the taking of indigenous peoples’ knowledge. Furthermore, it aims to develop practices of knowledge production that are more responsive to contesting hierarchies of power and inequality, so collaborative research production might involve simultaneous modes of being open, closed, sharing, and restrictive.  

 In other words, the Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledge, Climate Change, and Intellectual Property project is working towards a more robust notion of situated openness in order to democratize science in more meaningful ways.

 Dr. Laura Foster (@DrLauraAFoster) is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University, where she is also Affiliate Faculty in the IU Maurer School of Law and African Studies Program. She is also a Senior Research Associate in the Intellectual Property Unit at University of Cape Town Faculty of Law. Her current book project examines how contestations over patent ownership rights, Indigenous San knowledge, and Hoodia plants in South Africa present emerging sites of struggle over who does and does not belong. 

Recognizing and Supporting International Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs) and Other Community Conservation Initiatives within the Convention of Biological Diversity

Street Art, Montreal, Canada

Natural Justice’s Cath Traynor recently joined Global Forest Coalition (GFC), the Indigenous Peoples’ and Community Conserved Area (ICCA) Consortium, and the Community Conservation Resilience Initiative (CCRI) at the Twentieth meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA), 25-30 April and the First meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI) 2-6 May, Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal, Canada.

Both SBSTTA and SBI considered a range of agenda items relevant to indigenous peoples’ and community conserved territories and areas and other forms of community conservation. Position papers were produced for both meetings and for each key agenda item the papers highlighted key issues and additional documents and identified how to strengthen the draft recommendations to more appropriately recognise and support ICCAs and other forms of community conservation. During both meetings GFC, ICCA Consortium and CCRI members actively followed key items, presented statements, and submissions to the Secretariat and hosted a Side Event. An important item under consideration was the mainstreaming of biodiversity and ahead of the meetings GFC released a Briefing Paper on ‘Mainstreaming Biodiversity and the Resilience of Community Conservation’ which outlines how mainstreaming requires reforming a diverse range of sectors and processes that are currently harming biodiversity and the peoples and communities who depend directly upon biodiversity for their survival, livelihoods and culture. The paper illustrates how ICCAs and other forms of community conservation can play a key role in the process and considers challenges, the importance of governance, mainstreaming in the agriculture, forestry and fisheries sectors and provides recommendations.

Both SBSTTA and SBI produced recommendations which will be considered at the Thirteenth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity will take place 4-17 December, 2016, Cancun, Mexico.

Beyond Protected Areas

A side event was held at the twentieth meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity's Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice on 'other effective area-based conservation measures. On Monday 25 April, the WCPA Task Force on Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs) and the Secretariat of the CBD (SCBD) hosted a side event on OECMs. The event was chaired by Kathy MacKinnon (Chair, WCPA/Co-Chair, Task Force on OECMs) and was opened by Braulio Dias (Executive Secretary, SCBD) who underscored the importance of developing guidance on OECMs as a means of contributing to the security of biologically diverse areas that lie beyond the current protected area estate. Trevor Sandwith (Director, Global Protected Areas Programme, IUCN) suggested that the development of guidance on OECMs provides an important opportunity to consider the factors that lead certain areas that are currently not considered to be protected areas to support the conservation of biodiversity and to explore means of enhancing those qualities. Harry Jonas (Natural Justice/Co-Chair, Task Force on OECMs) presented an overview of the Task Force, the roadmap developed in Cambridge (January 2016) and the Task Force’s progress to date. David MacKinnon (Canadian Council on Ecological Areas - CCEA) presented on the CCEA’s work on OECMs, including a screening tool. Questions were raised by, among others, Puri Canals (Mediterranean Protected Areas Network), Simone Lovera (Global Forest Coalition) and Sarah Pearson Perret (Switzerland). Further information about SBSTTA-20 is available here.  

MARGINALISATION AND INEQUALITIES COURSE (OSISA)

Reflections from Indigenous Fellows Ivan and Yvette

Natural Justice’s Cape Town office held its monthly Skills and Information Sharing Session on 25 April 2016. At this session the Cape Town office’s two indigenous fellows, Ivan Vaalbooi and Yvette le Fleur, shared their reflections with the team about their learning at the Open Society’s Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) Marginalisation and Inequalities Course, which they attended in Johannesburg from 2 to 15 April.

This course aimed at providing knowledge around marginalisation and inequalities in Southern Africa, as well as the skills to use the knowledge gained when working with marginalised communities and inequalities in society. The knowledge is also useful in influencing policies and laws. It is said that inequality in Southern Africa is amongst the highest in the world. This course identified domains in which these inequalities, marginalisation and social exclusion manifest itself in this region. These domains are ethnicity, race, class and nationality, gender, people with disabilities, youth and identity, as well as indigenous peoples. It also looked at how marginalisation and inequalities could be addressed through social policy for the development of Southern Africa that has respect for the human rights of marginalised peoples under the domains of exclusion and inequalities mentioned above. The course brought a wide array of indigenous peoples, activists, academics and experts alike together in this discussion.

The knowledge gained at this course is important for Natural Justice as its work is focused on such marginalised indigenous and local communities in Southern Africa impacted by their human, environmental and related resource rights.

OSISA supports both Yvette and Ivan’s fellowship with Natural Justice for a period of one year. Yvette is a youth from the Griqua Khoisan community, West Coast of the Western Cape. Ivan is from the Khomani San community in the Kalahari, Northern Cape. They appreciated understanding how policy can be influenced to address the concerns many of their communities continue to face within South Africa’s period of continued decolonisation in post colonial and apartheid South Africa. Natural Justice wishes to congratulate OSISA on running a very successful workshop and for their continued support of Southern Africa’s most marginalized communities, in particular their Indigenous Rights Programme .

Yvette and Ivan is looking forward to incorporate these learnings in their current work around land restitution, access and benefit sharing and related intellectual property rights work in both South Africa and Namibia. 

Intern Lorna Born reflects on Participatory Action Reserach with the Nama Community in the Richtersveld, South Africa

We left Cape Town early on Monday morning, driving northerly while the sun drifted over us, settling down in the west as we stopped for the night in Springbok. After an interview in the morning with municipality officials from the Richtersveld Municipality, we continued our driving to arrive in the afternoon in Kuboes where we met up with our community guide, Gerren. We soon discovered that time moves differently in the desert and we found ourselves adjusting to a new clock. This clock didn’t have numbers but rather activities. Sunlight dictated waking hours and insects directed when we could sleep. Our chalet was located right on the bank of the Orange River and the lush green that crowded the banks contrasted starkly with the expansive desert that surrounded us.

It proved pretty tough to track down some of the pastoralists as their lifestyles involve moving around the desert and grazing their stock. Stock posts showed where they’d settle own for the night but the day involved constant movement. We drove around bumpy, rocky roads just outside the Richtersveld Transfrontier Park searching for pastoralists, usually sticking near to the river as vegetation was densest here. We completed several interviews with Gerren, who organized the meet ups by gathering information on where the pastoralists might possibly be and by being our translator. For most of the interviews, we sat on chairs under the trees or scattered around a fire with a potjie in it. One interview took place in a house in Kuboes – a small town within the Richtersveld World Heritage Site. We were welcomed into homes and stock posts and the interviews were carried out without a hitch and before we knew it, our time in the Richtersveld was over.

We drove to Port Nolloth on Friday afternoon to stay the night after our interview in Kuboes. Mercifully, we arrived in Cape Town on Saturday afternoon and thus had time to readjust our internal clocks to cope with traffic, slog and being indoors. 

This blog is the personal views of Lorna Born. Lorna successfully completed a two-month voluntary internship with the Climate Change Program at Natural Justice, she has a Bachelors degree in Marine Biology and Environmental and Geographical Sciences from the University of Cape Town.

International Symposium Held on Project Analyzing Community Protocols in the Context of Extractive Industries

Are community protocols useful in assisting communities to respond to the challenges posed by extractive industries? For the last three years, four communities in Argentina, India, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, respectively, have been participating in a project that seeks to answer this question (click here for more information). On Thursday April 14, a Symposium at the Heinrich Böll Stiftung's  headquarters in Berlin brought community members and supporting organizations that are part of the project together with experts involved in relevant fields to present and discuss experiences as well as lessons-learned from the project so far.

The Symposium provided an opportunity for participants to learn more about the process going on in each country through parallel working groups. During the working groups, each project partner gave a presentation on the process thus far and participants were able to ask questions and share their own thoughts and experiences. The presentations showed that the various protocol processes had helped communities to decide on their priorities, articulate appropriate ways for obtaining free, prior and informed consent, and led to the formation of community groups to deal with specific issues caused by extractive activities. In the afternoon, a "World Café" session addressed several guiding questions relevant to developing community protocols, including how to identify the "community" to ensure meaningful stakeholder engagement, options for benefit sharing arrangements in the context of extractive industries, and how communities can ensure that impact assessments are conducted with their participation.

The Symposium also served as the launch of the Community Protocols Toolbox, a publication developed as part of the project. The Toolbox provides practical guidance for facilitators on what to consider before developing a protocol. It breaks the protocol process down into five main elements (facilitator’s perspective, community background, process, outcome, and legal landscape), with context provided for each element. It also provides tools for actually engaging in the process of developing protocols, including tools for holding meetings, ensuring an inclusive process, and for finding relevant national and international laws. It is currently available in hard copy in English, but we hope to make it available in other languages soon. Over the next few months, work will also continue on a research paper to provide an overview of the different processes and seek to identify good practices for protocol processes in the extractive industries context.

Natural Justice Co-Hosts Brainstorming Workshop on “The Future Development Finance and Accountability Landscape”

With the world on the brink of the biggest infrastructure boom in history, infrastructure project funding is increasingly slated for the Global South. Here the projects are often located in environmentally and socially sensitive areas, including on lands inhabited by indigenous peoples and other vulnerable groups. While these projects can have great benefits, they can equally constitute serious threats to already marginalized groups. At the same time, the models for financing new infrastructure are growing increasingly complex, with the creation of new institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Global Infrastructure Facility, and a call for growing private sector involvement. 

Against this backdrop, Natural Justice, Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Center of Concern, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and Inclusive Development International, with the support of the 11th Hour Project, co-organized a brainstorming workshop to bring together experts in finance, development finance, infrastructure development, and human rights. The workshop took place over two days (21-22 April 2016) at Columbia University. The purpose of the workshop was to build an understanding of the current system and projected future financial models and develop a plan for where to focus efforts in order to ensure that financers of infrastructure are accountable to international human rights standards.

The workshop served as an opportunity for people from many different backgrounds – private finance, pension funds, the UN, civil society, academics, and others – to sit together and share information and experiences on financing infrastructure. It was clear from the workshop that while so called “downstream” accountability (e.g. remedies after harm has occurred) is critical, building more accountability at the “upstream” (e.g. project design, procurement) level is equally important. Unless human rights impacts are taken into account in project design and financing, communities will always be playing catch up during implementation.

International Fellow, Luchino Ferraris reflects on his internship with Natural Justice

My four-month internship period at Natural Justice (from January to the end of April 2016) was not just a high level professional training, but also an unforgettable life experience.

With an elegant office situated at the sixth floor of the prestigious “Mercantile Building” – one of the most traditional and well-preserved buildings in Cape Town, located at the heart of the Central Business District (CBD) – Natural Justice is a team of professional and committed people primarily fighting for indigenous peoples’ rights on a national and a global scale and drawing on a wide array of tools (legal, political, scientific) to reach this aim.

If anybody reading this post has in mind the cliché of the intern making photocopies twelve hours a day, please forget about it and keep on reading. On the contrary, the team immediately welcomes you and makes you feel involved in its projects, always giving you the possibility to have a say in the organization and encouraging you to adopt a personal and critical view at every stage of the work.

Thanks to my legal background - and particularly in international and environmental law, acquired during my undergraduate in “Law” at the University of Milan and in the master (LLM) “Global Environment and Climate Change Law” at the University of Edinburgh - I focused on numerous legal and political-related issues such as the research and drafting of a working paper on the outcomes of the 2015 Paris Agreement, the drafting of a policy brief on the Right to Food and Food Security in Southern Africa and at international level, the elaboration of strategies to defend indigenous peoples’ rights at judicial level and the development of plans to raise awareness on the protection of traditional knowledge and intellectual property rights.

The carrying out of such tasks is reflected in my dynamic daily life at the office which involved desktop research, team meetings, interviews with other researchers and politicians, as well as the participation in workshops, conferences and the frequent contact with the teaching staff of the University of Cape Town (UCT). On this point, the one-week field work we conducted in the Richtersveld desert (Northern Cape) with the Nama community definitely deserves a special mention.

On a personal note, I wish to stress the serious, transparent and respectful attitude of the whole team, with whom I undertook not only a professional, but also a human relationship. I therefore strongly recommend such an experience to everyone who wishes to undertake a highly professionalizing experience and to spend a magnificent period in the gorgeous Cape Town.

Post by Luchino Ferraris.

How to Help Communities Protect their Lands

Guest Blog by: Rachael Knight, Director, Community Land Protection Program, Namati

The scale of the global land grab is staggering. While international actors have made excellent progress establishing complaint boards, issuing principles for responsible investment, and securing commitments from multi-national corporations, these protections do not chart a clear course of action that communities can follow to protect their lands and natural resources before an investor arrives seeking land.

The problem is that once an investor arrives to “consult with” a community, it may be too late. After a deal has been made in capital city conference rooms or in clandestine meetings between chiefs and company representatives, communities are forced on the defensive. At this point, all they can do is try to mitigate the negative impacts of investors’ plans - rather than assertively proclaiming their legal rights, demanding that the investor abide by FPIC principles, and then choosing whether to reject the investment or accept it on terms that ensure that the community benefits and prospers.

Meanwhile, many of the “investors” grabbing land are national or local elites unaccountable to international institutions – the cousin of the President or the nephew of the Minister – who operate with complete impunity, protected by powerful connections to government, the judiciary and the police. Such individuals do not answer to shareholders or complaint boards, and are not the least bit concerned with principles of corporate social responsibility. If  a community’s land claims are unrecognized or undocumented – and if the community’s leadership is weak or corrupt – the easier it is for these elites to manipulate their power to claim what land they want.

To have a fighting chance against elites’ bad-faith actions, communities must proactively take steps to know and enforce their rights, prevent their leaders from transacting land without community approval, and seek legal recognition of their land claims. And they must do so before elites and investors arrive.

After years of working with partner organizations around the world to support communities to protect their land rights, the international legal empowerment organization Namati has developed a comprehensive approach designed to support communities to do just this: proactively document and map their land claims, seek formal government recognition of their land rights, and strengthen local governance.

To share this approach with frontline advocates and activists across the world, Namati has published a Community Land Protection Facilitators’ Guide as a step-by-step, practical “how to” manual for grassroots advocates working to help communities protect their land rights.

The guide, available to download for free, details Namati’s five-part process for protecting community lands and examines questions such as: “Who is included or excluded when defining a ‘community’?”, “How to resolve longstanding boundary disputes?”, and “How can communities prepare for interactions with potential investors?” The guide goes beyond documentation to address issues of women’s land rights, inclusive governance, cultural revitalization, ecosystem regeneration, and more. Every chapter includes exercises, sample forms, and tips from veteran land protection advocates. All activities are easily adaptable to a range of cultures, contexts, and community goals. The guide is accompanied by short, animated videos that demonstrate the community land protection process visually.

The goal is not just to protect land, but to leverage community land protection efforts to build:

●   Inclusive, diverse communities that respect the rights of women and other marginalized groups;

●   Sustainable local economies fueled by diverse local livelihoods;

●   Environmental stewardship that results in flourishing ecosystems, food security, and the protection of future biodiversity; and

●   The revival, maintenance, and inter-generational transfer of dynamic local cultures, languages, ceremonies, and traditional knowledge.

By adapting and using the approach in the guide, advocates around the world will be better able to not only help communities resist elites and investors’ bad-faith efforts to grab their lands, but to also empower communities to drive the course of their own development, create more just, equitable societies, and preserve ecological and cultural diversity for future generations

Join Namati’s Global Legal Empowerment Network to learn more and exchange strategies and experiences with other community land protection and legal empowerment practitioners.

Namati is a proud member of the #LandRightsNow campaign - learn more and sign up today!

African Civil Society Engages the 6th Special Session of AMCEN

Natural Justice joined the ‘Pre-AMCEN African Post Paris/UNEP MGSF Consultative Workshop’ held in Cairo, 15^th April 2016. The workshop was organised and hosted by the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), and CSO representatives from across Africa met to deliberate on key issues on the agenda of the 6^th African Ministers Conference on the Environment (AMCEN). The aim of the workshop was to reflect on the COP21 outcomes, the Sustainable Development goals and plan for the 2^nd United Nations Environmental Assembly scheduled for 23-27^th May 2016, Nairobi, Kenya.

The UNFCCC Paris Climate Agreement was analysed and Natural Justice’s Dr. Cath Traynor joined a panel presentation on the agreement and discussed the implications of the mitigation decisions for Africa, other issues covered included adaptation, finance, gender, and technology transfer.

The following day a consultative workshop was held on ‘Energy Transformation and Access’, participants discussed the African Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI), which aims to enable the installation of large-scale renewable energy capacity on the African continent by 2020. Speakers shared post-Paris discussions on renewable energy, and what the initiative could mean in practical terms for Africa, breakout groups discussed how energy transformation and access could be accelerated in Africa.

Ms. Hindou Oumarou (PACJA Executive Committee), Representative for Hon. Dr. Khaled Fahmy (AMCEN Chair/Minister for Environment, Egypt), & Mr. Mithika Mwenda (PACJA Secretary General)

Representatives from both workshops drafted key messages for AMCEN, these included calling on their governments to play a leading role in the forthcoming April 22 UN Paris Agreement Signing in New York, to compel developed countries to sign and ratify the Agreement, to fulfill their commitments and indeed to raise their Nationally Determined Contributions ambition so that the collective goal of limiting temperature increases to 1.5^oC above pre-industrial levels can be achieved. They also called for their governments to translate the provisions of the Agreement and other AU resolutions into domestic laws, policies, structures and development strategies. Regards to AREI, they called for comprehensive safeguards, the involvement of local communities in the energy transition, and for decentralized energy. Mr. Mithika Mwenda, Secretary General of PACJA presented the collective message on the first day of AMCEN.

During AMCEN Ministers reaffirmed that adaptation to climate change is a priority for Africa, they highlighted the need for adequate support for implementation of adaptation measures, and that developed countries must adhere to their pre-2020 commitments in the Paris Agreement.

Natural Justice has produced a Working Paper ‘The Binding Nature of the 2015 Paris Agreement and Outcomes for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities’ – please email cath.at.naturaljustice.org.za for a copy.