"Stepping up: Protecting collective land rights through corporate due diligence", 10 June 2021

New human rights due diligence legislation and practices should result in positive human rights outcomes for all rightsholders. To assist policymakers and businesses in understanding key elements of effective due diligence on collective land rights, FPP has published a new guide – Stepping Up: Protecting collective land rights through corporate due diligence.

The guide incorporates lessons learned from decades of experience working alongside indigenous communities affected by business activities throughout the tropical forest belt. It provides resources, recommendations, and practical tools that aim to ensure human rights due diligence is effective at addressing negative impacts on indigenous peoples.  

Read Report (English only: Spanish version upcoming)

This guide is intended to supplement other resources that provide broader overviews of human rights due diligence. Many of the recommendations in the guide will be particularly helpful for downstream businesses or investors as they navigate how to identify, address, and track the impacts of their value chains on indigenous peoples. The guide will also be useful for policymakers as they design due diligence legislation. A few examples of information provided by the guide are: 

• Discussion of how due diligence obligations and legal liabilities can change over time 
• Recommendations for how to identify violations of indigenous peoples’ rights, as well as specific sources of information that may be helpful 
• Red flags to look out for that may indicate failed or improper FPIC processes 
• Hypotheticals to walk through steps businesses should consider taking to address common violations of indigenous peoples’ rights 

While due diligence processes will invariably look different depending on the context, there are core principles and elements that must be present if due diligence is to be effective at changing human rights outcomes. FPP hopes that our new guide will be useful to policymakers and businesses in improving land rights outcomes.