The Community Empowerment Project, initiated by the Open Society
Foundations in Jordan, builds on and complements existing refugee
response efforts through legal empowerment and community-based
justice services. The project supports both Syrian refugees and host
communities in Jordan to understand and use legal and administrative
systems to find concrete solutions to justice problems. In the pilot phase
of the project, three Jordanian organizations coordinated to incorporate a community facilitator approach into their existing legal aid programs.
Community facilitators (CFs) are frontline justice workers recruited from
within the communities where they work and supported by a team of
project staff and lawyers. Community facilitators use basic knowledge of
the law and administrative procedures and a range of skills to take on
many roles that help beneficiaries gain access to justice, including conducting
community outreach, providing information, accompanying beneficiaries
to certain government offices, referring cases to lawyers and
other service providers, and collecting information on beneficiaries and
their grievances to support evidence-based advocacy efforts. CFs can
address justice issues in various thematic areas.
In this project, each partner chose to focus on justice issues that were
urgent needs of the target communities and that fit within the mandate
of the organization. Partners recruited both Jordanians and
Syrians as community facilitators.
During the pilot, Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development
(ARDD), Justice Center for Legal Aid (JCLA), and Tamkeen developed
their community facilitator projects around some agreed commonalities,
such as the role of the CF and basic training modules,
while also leaving room for experimentation and adjustments based
on their thematic areas of focus and organizational structures.
Namati played a support role through sharing experiences and tools
from the legal empowerment field, informing the planning process,
and facilitating cross-partner learning.
The following sections offer reflections on the recruitment, training,
and data collection methods that these partner organizations used
during the pilot phase of the community facilitator project.
This resource is also available in English.
Community-level environment justice practitioners, or grassroots environment paralegals, use legal empowerment approaches to assist affected communities to seek legal remedies through administrative routes. This handbook is a guide to help practitioners in India use appropriate legal clauses and institutional routes in their work.
The handbook presents scenarios that include problem types, the likely complaints the practitioner could come across, and the legal clauses and institutions through which a remedy could be pursued for those complaints. The scenarios presented in the handbook are illustrative and draw from the several cases currently being piloted for remedies by the enviro-legal coordinators associated with the Centre for Policy Research-Namati Environmental Justice Program.
The handbook is in both English and Gujarati.
This resource is also available in Hindi and Odia.
Understanding the legal status of sand mining is important before pursuing any remedy or seeking a regulatory response from concerned authorities. This short document outlines how you can map the laws that regulate riverbed and coastal sand mining and specifies which government institutions can be approached.
A chapter from the Guide that provides specific recommendations for collecting and using data in community land protection efforts.
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This resource is one chapter from Namati’s Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide, which can be accessed here. To view all the individual chapters and supporting resources, refer to the interactive online version of the Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide here.
A chapter from the Guide that explains the process of conducting a baseline and endline in order to measure impacts from community land protection efforts.
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This resource is one chapter from Namati’s Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide, which can be accessed here. To view all the individual chapters and supporting resources, refer to the interactive online version of the Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide here.
A chapter from the Guide that introduces general good practices of monitoring and evaluation.
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This resource is one chapter from Namati’s Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide, which can be accessed here. To view all the individual chapters and supporting resources, refer to the interactive online version of the Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide here.
A chapter from the Guide that provides a brief introduction to concepts and techniques of ecosystem restoration for communities that want to rehabilitate or enhance their local ecosystems as part of their community action plans.
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This resource is one chapter from Namati’s Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide, which can be accessed here. To view all the individual chapters and supporting resources, refer to the interactive online version of the Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide here.
A chapter from the Guide with strategies for how the Community Land Protection process can support sustainable local livelihoods.
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This resource is one chapter from Namati’s Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide, which can be accessed here. To view all the individual chapters and supporting resources, refer to the interactive online version of the Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide here.
A chapter from the Guide that suggests how to return to the earlier Community Vision to motivate communities to create specific, feasible action plans to move towards their vision.
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This resource is one chapter from Namati’s Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide, which can be accessed here. To view all the individual chapters and supporting resources, refer to the interactive online version of the Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide here.
A chapter from the Guide that explains how to train communities to negotiate with potential investors seeking access to land or natural resources.
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This resource is one chapter from Namati’s Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide, which can be accessed here. To view all the individual chapters and supporting resources, refer to the interactive online version of the Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide here.