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Legal empowerment for secure resource access

Appropriate legal arrangements and adequate capacity to use them can help local groups in Africa have greater control over the natural resources on which they depend. This is the essence of the concept of legal empowerment – using the law to help disadvantaged groups have greater control over decisions and processes affecting their lives.

Yet, in much of rural Africa, the effectiveness of law as a tool for empowerment is constrained by inappropriate legislation that does not respond to local needs, or that fails to protect the interests of weaker groups; by lack of resources to implement and enforce legislation; by lack of legal awareness; by constraints on access to legal institutions such as courts; and by power asymmetries between actors standing to gain or to lose from law implementation.

Legal empowerment requires addressing these constraints through action at different levels, including for instance:

• Law reform to establish or improve legal arrangements that strengthen the protection of local resource rights, or that provide greater say in decision-making processes affecting these rights.
• Strategies, approaches and support materials to help local groups make the most of the opportunities offered by the law, including legal literacy training, legal assistance, individual and public interest litigation, and representation and advocacy.

On the concept of legal empowerment, read Making law work for the poor and Legal empowerment for local resource control: Securing local resource rights within foreign investment projects in Africa.

Together with partners, IIED works to promote legal empowerment through:

• Identifying innovative legal arrangements to secure local resource rights, developing ways to improve these arrangements, and supporting informed and participatory policy processes to change legal frameworks as needed.

• Developing, testing and implementing approaches to build local capacity to make use of the law (e.g. legal literacy training), targeting selected sites while developing innovative approaches that can be replicated elsewhere.

• Facilitating cross-country exchange of experience and wider dissemination to enable mutual learning and wider lesson sharing on innovative ways to use the law as a tool for empowerment.

Our work focuses on the following areas:

• Legal empowerment to secure local land rights
• Legal empowerment in investment projects
• Access to natural resources and human rights
• Addressing the “rights” challenges in water infrastructure programmes
  

For more information on this body of work, contact Lorenzo Cotula at lorenzo.cotula@iied.org

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