Rights must come first.
New UN Report Establishes 10 Core Human Rights Principles for Conservation Organizations
To mark Human Rights day (Dec 10, 2024), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released an important new call to action outlining ten core human rights principles for private conservation organizations and funders. This report sets out critical sidebars and expectations to ensure that conservation efforts around the world respect and uphold the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities.
The ten principles set out in the report are:
- Respect human rights
- Respect the rights of Indigenous peoples
- Respect the rights of all communities, groups, and individuals
- Undertake human rights due diligence
- Engage in good faith consultation
- Prevent human rights abuses
- Provide for effective remedies
- Protect against human rights violations and abuses in relationships
- Protect against human rights violations in law enforcement
- Report regularly on human rights
These ten principles cover the fundamental obligations and responsibilities that private conservation organizations and funders have regarding human rights. They build upon key UN declarations and standards like the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. If widely adopted and implemented, they have the potential to transform conservation practices to make them more equitable and just, and in so doing, they will also make our consevation efforts more effective and durable.
While not stated outright, an important take away from this report is the clear hierarchy it reinforces between rights and rightsholders (i.e., Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities) and stakes and stakeholders (i.e., conservation organizations like The Nature Conservancy, corporations, etc). These are not the same, though they have often been conflated and collapsed under the singular stakeholder framing. But very notion of stakeholding has colonial roots and implications, evoking ideas of manifest destiny and the land theft of settlers ‘staking a claim’ on lands they perceived to be empty and in need of their improvement. Bundling all rightsholders together with stakeholders in a single uniform category is, in other words, a covert act of oppression.
We must be proactive in elevating the participation and leadership of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in conservation initiatives. Attending to social safeguards, that is, ensuring that our work doesn’t create or exacerbate harms, is a start, but it is not sufficient to developing a professional ethic that ensures that the outcomes of work are just. To put it another way, reducing risks so that we do no harm matters, but we also must start proactively looking for ways to doing more good in people’s lieves. In the language of human rights this is called being a duty bearer, and while the state is usually though of as the primary or sole duty bearer, I think it is fantastic that this norm is being pushed to reflect the power and privilege we hold as outsiders working on conservation. Free, Prior and Informed Consent can no longer be treated as an optional extra, but must be the foundation for conservation moving forward. Only by centering the rights, knowledge, and priorities of local rightsholders can we hope to forge a new paradigm for protecting our planet.
TL;DR: rights will always outweigh stakes. A corporation may have a financial interest in extracting resources from a forest, but that pales in comparison to an Indigenous community’s inherent rights to their ancestral territories and way of life. Conservation organizations must internalize this and rethink their planning, from one focusing on risks to communities (and to our reputations), to how our actions can actively advance progress on human rights wherever we work.
Adopting a human rights-based approach to conservation as outlined in these principles is not only a moral imperative, but is pragmatically necessary to secure the buy-in and leadership of local peoples. Study after study has shown that lands and waters managed by Indigenous Peoples have higher levels of biodiversity and lower rates of deforestation. Empowering their stewardship is one of our best solutions to the entwined biodiversity and climate crises.
The release of this UNEP report marks a milepost achievement reached only because of the advocacy of rights- and justice-oriented conservation practitioners for the last couple of decades. And I am proud to work at an organization that leaned fully into this process. With the view of an insider, I can say I am confident that we are started on a good road to a future conservation practice very different from the Western, settler-colonial conservation practice that got us here.
