Namati’s Manju Menon and Kanchi Kohli argue that the current system of ‘independent’ environmental regulation in India is failing because governing laws do not articulate clear intended environmental outcomes. They argue for “a practice of outcome-based governmental decision making located within the public sphere of influence” toward a goal of “substantive justice rather than procedural efficiency.”
Namati’s Ellie Feinglass makes a passionate case in the New York Times for the role of legal empowerment in healthcare. “Our strategy, if it is to be successful,” she writes, “must recognize that achieving universal access to care and treatment necessarily means addressing human rights barriers to health services. This will require confronting not only the challenges of physical distance and availability of diagnostics and drugs, but also of stigma, discrimination and quality of care.”
Read the full op-ed here.
In India, ‘a dangerous precedent’ is being set as companies running large development projects pay ‘compensation’ for ecological damage instead of following environmental regulation laws, argues Namati’s Manju Menon.
The Sierra Leone government’s efforts to promote the country “as an el dorado for international investments” have been a boon to the legal community in recent years, with lawyers involved in the lucrative work of incorporating companies, securing titles and drafting lease agreements. But lawyers must be more careful, writes Namati’s Sonkita Conteh. Unfair lease negotiations have resulted in wide equity gaps and are prompting increased public scrutiny. By shortchanging communities as some have, lawyers risk putting themselves in breach of the legal practitioner’s code.
This guide from the Land and Equity Movement in Uganda and Namati presents a step-by-step process for communities to secure stronger legal protections for common grazing lands and improve local land governance. The instructions are specifically tailored to the context of customary community grazing lands in northern Uganda, drawing upon LEMU’s experience leading community land protection efforts since 2009.
This video is a recording of a webinar outlining the five-part approach to protecting community land, as detailed in the Community Land Protection Facilitator’s Guide. The webinar was delivered by Rachael Knight, the director of Namati’s community land protection program and one of the guide’s main authors.
The Guide is a step-by-step, practical “how to” manual for grassroots advocates working to help communities protect their customary claims and rights to land and natural resources. The five-part process 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 video recording of the webinar serves as a helpful introduction to the Guide’s purpose, its content, and the possibilities for its application in communities around the world. It is 1 hour and 19 minutes in duration and can be watched below.
The Guide can be downloaded here.
An interview from April 18, 2016 with Harvard University’s A Measure of Justice program on how Namati uses data to connect casework to policy change in Myanmar. The Measure of Justice Program is a group of leading practitioners, academics, and government officials working on legal empowerment.
Defining the boundaries and membership of a community is the first step in community land protection and documentation. These decisions require careful negotiation among a wide range of stakeholders and consideration of many social, political, cultural, and practical factors. Community definition should not be left to bureaucrats or external ‘experts’ because this may impose an inappropriate definition and deprives communities of a powerful opportunity for collective action. Rather, skilled facilitators should help communities to navigate the self-identification process to define their territories and membership. This Lesson from the Field shares strategies for supporting community self-definition in rural Liberia from Namati partner the Sustainable Development Institute (SDI).
Community land protection efforts must often confront cases of encroachment, where individuals have claimed part of community land as their own private property. Namati and the Land and Equity Movement in Uganda (LEMU) have witnessed this in many communities in northern Uganda, where encroachment disputes often threaten to undermine or stall community land protection efforts. Over the past five years, LEMU has developed ways to assess these conflicts and respond appropriately. This Lessons from the Field elaborates on LEMU’s approach to encroachment conflicts and reflects on the effectiveness of this approach to date.
The stories in this publication are written by paralegals. It provides a platform for paralegals to reflect on the laws that they have learnt, their experiences working with their respective communities and strategies or experiences in pushing for non-discrimination in access to nationality documentation.
Namati has been working closely with community-based organizations in areas that face gross discrimination to recruit and train community-based paralegals. These paralegals have been our foot soldiers who have handled over 20,000 cases from 2013 to-date. From these cases there have been many lessons learnt for the project team and the paralegals themselves. The continuous learning and reflections have also led to tremendous growth of the paralegals. In turn, the paralegals have transferred what they’ve learnt to the communities they work with.