Can community-investor conflict be prevented? Piloting four proactive strategies in Cameroon and Uganda
A three-year project in Cameroon and Uganda piloted ways to support communities in preventatively addressing conflict related to land-based investments. Rachael Knight and Lorenzo Cotula discuss how proactive interventions can help identify and resolve potential, latent or emergent conflicts.
The project piloted four strategies to prevent community-investor conflict (Illustration: Nnaemeka Ekeocha/IIED)
In many parts of the world, government efforts to promote investments in sectors such as ‘critical minerals’, agriculture, renewables and carbon offsets are increasing pressures on land, with large-scale ventures impacting the land rights of Indigenous Peoples, rural communities and small-scale producers.
The projected increase in global demand for commodities necessary for the energy transition is set to further exacerbate these pressures. The need to ensure that all legitimate tenure rights are adequately recognised, protected and respected, in both law and practice, is more urgent than ever.
Prevailing approaches to protect land rights in the face of large-scale investments are often reactive. This means that, in many cases, legal and other support is provided and accessed after community-investor conflict has already escalated and communities have suffered adverse impacts.
By this stage, communities may have been displaced or evicted, lives may have been lost, property destroyed, waters and soils polluted, and the community’s social fabric upended. In the wake of such violations, even the most effective legal support has limited chance of repairing the damage.
The need for preventive legal support strategies
To address this problem, a three-year project has developed innovative approaches for preventive legal support to communities facing conflicts with land-based investments.
The initiative was implemented by the Centre for Environment and Development (CED) in Cameroon, which also led the overall project; by the Land and Equity Movement in Uganda (LEMU) in Uganda; and by IIED, which provided methodological support and facilitated lesson sharing between the two countries. Funding came from Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC).
The project piloted four strategies to proactively identify and resolve potential, latent or emergent conflicts related to land-based investments before significant harm is done. These strategies are:
- ‘Hotspot mapping’ to identify where future investment-driven land conflicts are more likely to occur, allowing advocates to take action to prevent conflicts before they begin
- Participatory monitoring of investor compliance with the terms of their contracts and national laws, allowing communities and advocates to proactively identify and address investor non-compliance before it results in serious violations of rights and/or environmental harm
- Rapid response mechanisms that enable communities to promptly access legal support before an emerging conflict escalates, and
- Local, government-led grievance redress mechanisms that enrol government officials as active partners in early-stage conflict resolution efforts.
Key lessons
A new research report, co-authored with CED’s Samuel Nguiffo and LEMU’s Theresa Auma and Doreen Kobusingye, shares key lessons from this work. We found that although investor-community conflicts often have multiple triggers, overlapping layers and complex dynamics, land and resource scarcity is often a key factor.
Importantly, we found the risk of conflict around a land concession is often particularly acute when the affected community deems the remaining land and resources insufficient to meet its needs and there is limited alternative land and water available.
The research also indicated that land-based investments tend to exacerbate divisions within and between communities: as land and resources become more scarce, people begin questioning others’ right to live and work within a community (a process CED refers to as the “spiral of scarcity”).
The research underscored the structural barriers that communities often face when challenging rights violations. Corruption, fear, limited legal knowledge and the lack of functioning justice mechanisms often left communities enduring violations or resorting to sabotage or violent protest.
The findings indicate that government corruption and the involvement of high-level government officials and their associates can both drive community-investor conflicts and make their resolution harder.
We also found that women and Indigenous Peoples – such as the Bagyeli in Cameroon – tend to bear disproportionate impacts of land concessions and related conflicts. Yet, sociocultural marginalisation undermines their participation in community-investor conflict resolution efforts.
Conflict resolution efforts must involve women and Indigenous Peoples so their perspectives, knowledge and wisdom are included, and their interests and needs are addressed. Enabling women and Indigenous Peoples to participate in conflict resolution can also facilitate their inclusion in wider land, water and resource governance over the longer term.
The power of preventative conflict resolution
The research highlighted that preventive legal support strategies and proactive interventions – such as dialogue, negotiation and early-stage safeguards – can help prevent rights violations and mitigate harm as well as strengthen communities’ ability to assert their rights and engage with government and investors from a position of greater strength.
For example, supporting communities to gather the evidence and articulate the links between the investors’ actions on the one hand, and violations of specific national laws or contract terms on the other, can pave the way to more effective accountability strategies, more informed dialogue processes, and more effective litigation (if necessary).
By grounding communities’ grievances in specific legal violations, evidence can help to transform communities’ experiences into specific, actionable claims.
The research also showed that, in some contexts, partnering with allies in government to enforce national laws can advance community-led efforts. Specifically, training government officials to support communities in the peaceful resolution of community-investor conflicts – and then working with them as key actors in resolution processes – proved effective.
Such training included supporting government officials to identify the roots of community-investor conflicts, properly characterise the drivers of conflict, and comprehensively address both underlying and immediate causes.
Proactively addressing community concerns and potential violations (such as by company workers or managers) is also likely to advance investors’ interests over the long term.
Investors can embrace a proactive approach by recognising the role of community-led compliance monitoring and prioritising meaningful community-investor dialogue throughout the lifetime of the investment, ensuring that a diverse range of community members participate.
By equipping communities with necessary legal support, accurate information and effective advocacy strategies, proactive interventions may foster more equitable engagement between investors and affected people, ultimately reducing the risks of prolonged conflict and promoting more just outcomes.
