Monitoring - Before you start
What does the monitoring tool consist of?
The tool consists of an indicator framework with 60 indicators, which can be used to assess the implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT) from a human rights perspective.
Two questionnaires can be used to collect data against the indicators:
- The national questionnaire can be used to assess the governance of tenure of land, fisheries and forests from a human rights perspective. The assessment focuses on laws, policies and procedures and aims to get an overview of key land and natural resource related conflicts and issues in a country.
- The local questionnaire can be used to assess the situation for rights-holders or groups of rights-holders. It can be used in a specific locality or for larger surveys and representative sampling depending on the scale of the data collection effort.
The questionnaires offer different insights into structures (laws and policies), processes (to assure implementation of policies) and outcomes (final results of these policies for rights-holders) and should be combined to get a fuller picture. When comparing the national submission and the local responses, it will be possible to see gaps—for example between policies and realities on the ground.
The process of gathering data is in itself a capacity development and awareness raising exercise, and the tool includes guidance on key human rights concepts relevant for the indicators.
Who is it for and for what purpose?
The indicator framework and questionnaires can be used by National Human Rights Institutions, civil society organizations, research institutions, or governments to monitor the land governance situation in a country or for specific groups from a human rights perspective. It can produce quantitative and qualitative information for use in advocacy, litigation, policy and programme development. The tool explains the linkages between land governance indicators and human rights, which enables National Human Rights Institutions, civil society and others to report on land governance deficits to established human rights monitoring and reporting mechanisms.
You can create an account here.
Before you begin
The national questionnaire can be filled in by one or more entities with expertise and insights into land, property and natural resource laws in a country.
We recommend that you familiarize yourself with the whole questionnaire before beginning to fill it out. Evaluate which questions you can respond to directly or through desk-research, where you can draw on other data collection efforts (as indicated in the questionnaire), and which questions may require up-to-date information from ministries, departments, human rights experts or civil society organizations working on land rights in the country.
The exercise of collecting data can help develop relationships with the relevant governmental focal points and other organizations which may lay the foundation for subsequent advocacy and capacity development activities.
Plan for the data collection exercise to stretch over a month. Consider how much time is adequate to acquaint yourself/your team with the questionnaire and the terms used. Plan how to obtain the information, and set up interviews with key informants. Critically analyse information and submit your own assessment.
The local questionnaire can be used for interviews with individual respondents or a group with collective land rights. The questionnaire is designed to be used with individual respondents to capture issues related to individual land rights and to allow for disaggregation on multiple characteristics (including but not limited to gender and age). We recommend doing group interviews only in a situation where a group or community has collective land rights (for example an indigenous community, or an agricultural cooperative). Hence, when the questions ask about “your” land or experience, this can refer to an individual or a group with collective land rights.
If a group of respondents is diverse in terms of gender, age, and other identifiers, it may be necessary to split it into several sub-groups based on shared identifiers as relevant (for example gender and age). The respondents could for example be a group of young indigenous women. Submitting responses per sub-group can help capture different experiences within the group of collective rights-holders.
Please carefully plan the data collection exercise. If the aim is to identify trends and issues for people in a particular area or a particular rights-holder group (for example women in patrilineal land systems) then representative sampling may be needed. If the aim is to collect just one or a handful of illustrative cases, then it is even more important to capture sufficient qualitative data (to be inserted as free text) as the “yes”, “no” responses will otherwise not give sufficient data to constitute a case.
The data collection should be based on self-identification and do no harm principles. Please let the interview person select their gender, age and other characteristics as relevant. Questions about personal identity characteristics should be voluntary and a non-response option should be provided especially where personal characteristics may be sensitive.
Data collectors should only include characteristics that relate to personal identity where it is necessary and appropriate to do so. Kindly consult the OHCHR publication “A Human Rights-Based Approach to Data” for further guidance on these principles.
Please inform the respondents about the purpose of the data collection effort and how you intend to use the information. Kindly ask if the respondents give consent to making the responses public in anonymized form if you plan to publish the data. No names of individual interviewees should be collected.
You may choose to focus only on those clusters that are most relevant for your purpose and skip questions that are not relevant or applicable. The first section called “data collection, respondent and method” should always be answered.
Key concepts used
Legitimate tenure rights
The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure coined the term “legitimate tenure rights” to underscore the need to consider legally recognized as well as customary or informal tenure rights as legitimate. These concepts are underpinned by and reflected in the content of international human rights and labour law standards whose implementation is overseen by supervisory bodies.
Legitimate tenure rights hence refer to a broad range of rights from full-fledged ownership or property rights to possession, use and access, from formal to non-formal rights, and legal ownership to customary land rights. This can include more limited rights of access and use, such as herders’ seasonal grazing rights, hunters’ access rights to shared local forests and their resources, and long-term tenants’ rights to land they have farmed for generations. It can also include the rights of those renting property or land.
Tenure rights can also refer to a range of different types of land and resources. Tenure rights can be over land, natural resources and in some cases water bodies.
Informal tenure
Informal tenure means that the tenure in question is not formally documented, or there is no legal title or contract relating to the tenure. This can leave those occupying, inhabiting or otherwise using the land, property or resources in question open to dispossession, displacement or evictions.
Customary tenure
Customary tenure is a set of rules and norms that govern community allocation, use, access, and transfer of land and other natural resources. The term “customary tenure” invokes the idea of “traditional” rights to land and other natural resources. Customary tenure may or may not be recognized in statutory law. Indigenous peoples or others can have statutory rights to customary land.
Collective rights
Collective rights are rights held by a group as such rather than individually by its members.
Peasants and other people living in rural areas have the right to land, individually and/or collectively, in accordance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas.
The collective rights of indigenous peoples to lands, territories and resources are embedded in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as well as in the International Labour Organization’s Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention No. 169 and its predecessor Convention No. 107.
Other international human rights instruments, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination have implicit references to indigenous peoples’ rights to lands, territories and resources.
Regional human rights mechanisms in Africa and the Americas have also affirmed indigenous peoples’ collective rights to lands, territories and resources as well as more generally recognizing the collective aspects of human rights in regional human rights instruments.
Similarly, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights include the responsibility of businesses to respect the rights of indigenous peoples and remedy for any abuse.
Using the data
The tool will generate a report with your responses that can be downloaded and serve to underpin further work at country level to promote implementation of responsible governance of tenure. The report will include visualization of the data entered to support communication with national stakeholders. The report can thus be used to communicate where gaps in national implementation have been identified and advocate for addressing these gaps in national policy development. It can also be used as input to SDG and human rights monitoring and reporting processes and a basis for litigation.
If you wish, you may opt to publish the report based on the national questionnaire on the global data repository (link to view data site). It will then support global advocacy for responsible governance of tenure and contribute to monitoring progress in implementation of the VGGT and the related human rights obligations of States in this regard.
The reports based on the local questionnaire submissions cannot currently be published for personal data/data security reasons, but they can be downloaded for your own purposes.
Should you have questions, please use the contact form below to reach out to us.