In recent years, we have seen increased momentum around financing for Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local communities’ rights, climate, and conservation action. With the historic IPLC Pledge made at CoP26 by the Forest Tenure Funders Group expiring in 2025, CoP30 in Brazil will have a heightened focus on these communities and presents a strategic opportunity to promote a new pledge that’s more responsive to communities’ feedback and lessons from the prior 5 years, and clearly links with impacts on the ground.
To support this momentum, the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) is using upcoming global platforms on climate and conservation to inform and promote a new, more ambitious funding pledge that is just, equitable, and more inclusive of organizations led by Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples.
The Pledge We Want must put at the center of climate and conservation funding approaches the 1.8 billion Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples who are pivotal in the fight for a more resilient planet.
THE CHALLENGE
The resources reaching rightsholders’ own organizations directly is dismally low
Most current funding mechanisms are not “fit for purpose”
Direct funding for Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women is greatly inadequate
We believe that any new funding pledge must address the following current challenges:
- Despite increased donor commitments to prioritize direct funding to Indigenous and local community rightsholder organizations, little of this funding reaches these organizations directly.
- Most current funding mechanisms are not designed to be “fit for purpose,” i.e., they are not responsive enough to the needs of communities; are not gender-inclusive; lack flexibility, transparency, and mutual accountability for both donors and beneficiaries; lack a long-term vision for addressing diverse community needs; and are neither timely nor accessible to most rightsholder-led organizations.
- Direct funding for Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women’s organizations is still extremely inadequate and data on their funding sparse. According to a recent RRI study on this subject, climate investment in gender equality is declining, and women’s organizations receive less than 1% of official development funding to address climate change.
What do we need to make
this pledge happen?
Principles to guide efforts to scale up and improve the effectiveness of donor support over the next 5 years
Collaboration between public and private sector, civil society, and rightsholders through platforms like RRI’s Path to Scale
Direct support for initiatives led by Indigenous, local community, and Afro-descendant women
Greater support for Indigenous and local community-led funding mechanisms and solutions
Here is what our campaign is proposing for donors and financial intermediaries to achieve the pledge we want.
- We urgently need principles that can guide, scale up, and add effectiveness to donor support over the next five years. This guidance must be co-designed and led by rightsholders from the bottom up to respond to the most strategic opportunities.
- Donors must continue to collaborate via initiatives like Path to Scale and support the next generation of the Indigenous and local community-led global movement for rights by supporting their own funding mechanisms.
- Donors must prioritize fit for purpose funding for Indigenous, local community, and Afro-descendant women’s organizations that have historically been excluded from decision-making processes in the design and implementation of programs and financial instruments that affect them. See this Call to Action by local women’s groups across the world.
- There is also a need to revolutionize climate and conservation finance by supporting rightsholder-led funding mechanisms that can provide a trusted bridge to deploy funds from large and often complex donors to frontline communities, based on the communities’ own priorities. Indigenous and community-led funding mechanism such as the Community Land Rights and Conservation Finance Initiative (CLARIFI), Nasuntara, Podaali, and the Mesoamerican Territorial Fund, present examples of such funding tools.
Check out the study, Funding with Purpose, to learn more about these mechanisms and other ways to achieve fit-for-purpose funding.