CAWR Policy Briefs
The Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) works to ensure that its research and knowledge mobilisation have the greatest positive impact for equity, resilience and sustainability.
The centre’s Policy Briefs provide accessible, evidence-based, and timely analysis to audiences around the world, including policymakers, academics, practitioners, and social movements. The Policy Briefs enable CAWR and its partners to influence policy and institutional choices as well as stimulate change in practices at global, regional and local scales.
WOMEN ARE PEASANTS TOO: Gender equality and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants
Published
December 2021
Authors
Priscilla Claeys and Joanna Bourke Martignoni
Abstract
Food sovereignty cannot be achieved for all people unless structural inequalities in food systems are identified and redressed. Women within agrarian social movements have long campaigned for gender equality and women’s rights to be fully integrated into policies and legal instruments designed to guarantee the rights to food, land, work and social security. The 2018 UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) is an important achievement for rural people as it explicitly recognises the human rights to land, seeds and food sovereignty. However, it fails to directly include key gender equality provisions, such as women’s right to inherit land. This brief discusses the various pressures that led to agrarian women’s demands being excluded from the final version of the declaration. It recommends steps that governments, civil society and international organisations can take to ensure that UNDROP is implemented in a way that promotes gender equality and women’s rights effectively.
Saying NO to development-forced displacement and resettlement: myths and alternatives
Published
April 2023
Author
Jessica Milgroom, Asmita Kabra and Brooke Wilmsen
Abstract
For 50 years, mainstream development thinking has legitimised the displacement and resettlement of people for large-scale projects such as dams, infrastructure and wildlifeconservation. But half a century of evidence shows, indisputably, that displacement causes social, economic and environmental harm, and that it cannot be mitigated by resettlement. Despite this evidence, estimates suggest that the number of people displaced for development has risen drastically in the last few decades, from 10 million a year in the 1990s to 20 million in the 2010s (Cernea and Maldonado, 2018). Resettlement continues to be the preferred solution to overlapping claims on land. The three authors of this brief have each been working in and researching development-forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR) for 15-20 years in different parts of the world. We come together to express our shared conclusion: displacement causes irreparable harm, and well-intended resettlement policies and practices perpetuate and justify further displacement. Decades of experience and research demonstrate that it is impossible to get large-scale resettlement right. New policies must prioritise human-scale development that does not require displacement.
