Background and Objectives of the Workshop

This year’s Women’s Land Rights Initiative (WLRI), co-hosted by TMG Research, Robert Bosch Stiftung, UNCCD, UNCBD and UNFCCC, brought together 50 stakeholders to interrogate the role of women's land rights (WLR) within the Rio Conventions. The event was organized as part of the celebrations of the Desertification and Drought Day. The starting point was clear: land is the unifying thread across the Rio Conventions, with each dependent on land-based measures to achieve their targets. This spells direct consequences for grassroots women’s right to that land, and in tandem, their lives and livelihoods. Moreover, women’s actions are what ultimately contribute to realizing the objectives of the Conventions on the ground: restoring land, mitigating and adapting to climate change, combating desertification, and preserving biodiversity. As a result, utilizing the Rio Conventions as a mechanism for protecting and recognising women’s land rights must be a priority. And breaking down silos to achieve this took centre stage at the WLRI this year. Advancing women’s land rights across all three Conventions is an imperative – and opportunities exist.

The overarching question of the workshop was: How can we advance the recognition of women’s land rights by leveraging synergies across the Rio Conventions — UNCCD, UNCBD and UNFCCC — and by strengthening grassroots perspectives in Convention spaces? The aim of this document is to summarise the main outcomes of our 2-day workshop in relation to the above key question and taking into account the two objectives mentioned below.

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Rational Objectives </aside>

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Experiential objectives </aside>

Roadmap of the WLRI 2024

Workshop Summary

The workshop aimed to catalyse the promotion of women's land rights by fostering collaborative efforts and strategic entry points. Through dynamic discussions and interactive sessions, participants collectively explored ways to operationalize the debate on synergies for women's land rights. This joint exploration aimed to identify actionable strategies and activities that can be implemented at the local level to ensure a decentralised yet unified approach. The workshop also emphasised individual clarity and empowered participants to define their personal commitments and intentions towards the shared objectives.

A short external version of the summary of the WLR workshop was published on the TMG blog: **Unlocking Synergies for Women's Land Rights: Bridging Rio Conventions with Grassroots Organizations.**

Strengthening the agency of grassroots organizations in driving debates on synergies for land rights across the Rio Conventions

Social participation in political decision-making is a decisive factor in promoting democratic governance. Rooting global discourse on women’s land rights at the grassroots level is no longer debatable. Grassroots organisations have highly critical perspectives that should be given a platform to influence global decision-making processes.

The panel discussion delved into the critical need for deep-rooted involvement of grassroots organisations in the promotion of women's land rights. The panellists discussed examples such as Women Land Link Africa (WLLA) with its mission to empower women's voices at all levels — from the local to the global. WLLA has created a solid framework for capacity building, knowledge sharing and evidence-based advocacy and has 100 members in 45 countries. The organisation has been instrumental in advocating for women's land rights by linking grassroots efforts with global platforms and facilitating the exchange of ideas through annual meetings and partnerships. Another example was the grassroots organisation Shibuye Community Health Workers, which was founded in the late 1990s in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Community health care, access to food and community development are closely linked to securing women’s land rights. One of Shibuye Community Health Workers examples are the community land lease guidelines, to ensure women's access to land. Both examples show that we need to create spaces to articulate positions from the bottom up, but also to translate global discourses and negotiations to the local level so that local communities can benefit from and contribute to international policies. The various Conventions already offer civil society varying degrees of space to raise its voice. In this context, TMG presented the first results of a comparative analysis conducted jointly with FIAN International, analysing the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples' Mechanism (CSIPM) for relations with the UN Committee on World Food Security and the UNCCD Civil Society Panel. The main recommendations related to the UNCCD CSO Panel were:

Develop balanced rules to ensure continuity and rotation with the civil society spaces themselves. Continuity is key to ensure the institutional memory, rotation is key to ensure broad participation. The CSO Panel would benefit from a redesign to strengthen continuity.
Establish an autonomous mechanism for social participation that is self-organized by civil society. This autonomous mechanism should have an independent secretariat to facilitate the necessary processes of self-organisation and participation in negotiations and deliberations, be it as active participants or observers.
Defend and take care of the UN as a multilateral and democratic space. One specific recommendation is to open UNCCD COP contact groups to civil society observers.

The discussion then centred on the following key aspects: Rootedness vs. inclusiveness, challenges in identifying solutions and shared expectations of roles.

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Involving is not enough: grassroots actions need to be rooted </aside>

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What does rooting mean? </aside>

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Overcoming engagement barriers: Solutions still need to be found </aside>

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Not all roles have to be equal </aside>