This framework serves as a guideline for evaluating the fulfillment of the rights to food and livelihood within the business and human rights framework. The guidelines in this framework can be adopted individually by each party and jointly or collaboratively between parties.

This Guide is drawn from experience in the action research project “Bottom-up accountability initiatives and large-scale land acquisitions in Africa”. The project aimed to bring the international soft law instrument, the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of the Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests (the Tenure Guidelines or TGs), to rural communities and, together with them, to use the Guidelines to strengthen their tenure of land, fisheries and forests.

This guidance document is designed to help Intergovernmental Forum on Mining, Minerals, Metals and Sustainable Development (IGF) member states implement the IGF Mining Policy Framework (MPF). It focuses on the role that national governments can play in ensuring the effective and sustainable management of the environment and natural resources by the mining sector, using the legislative, regulatory, and policy tools and mechanisms at their disposal.

Often, approaches to investment-related land rights violations are reactive, rather than proactive and preventative: legal support is usually provided after communities have been negatively impacted, displaced or evicted — and after lives have been lost, property destroyed, local waters and soils polluted, and communities devastated. In such cases, legal support has a limited chance of reversing the damage caused.