Rights-Based Livelihoods Analysis Consultant

About RRI

The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) is a global coalition of over 150 organizations dedicated to advancing the forest, land, and resource rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, Afro-descendant Peoples, and in particular the women within these groups. RRI’s members capitalize on each other’s strengths, expertise, and geographic reach to achieve solutions more effectively and efficiently. RRI leverages the power of its global coalition to amplify the voices of local peoples and proactively engage governments, multilateral institutions, and private sector actors to adopt institutional and market reforms that support the realization of rights.

Purpose

Consultant support is sought to develop a methodology and framework to assess and compare the enabling environment for Indigenous Peoples, Afro-Descendant Peoples, and local communities (IPs, LCs, and ADPs) to pursue their self-determined livelihoods aspirations along the tenure continuum. The framework should be rooted in the relevant literature on Common Pool Resource Management and Sustainable Livelihoods and should articulate a “Bundle of Livelihoods Rights” that is consistent with the methodology used by RRI’s Tenure Tracking Program.

Background

Recent years have witnessed important progress in recognizing the land tenure rights of IPs, LCs, and ADs. Between 2015 and 2020, communities gained rights to more than 100 million hectares of additional lands globally; many international mechanisms now foreground human rights in relation to investments and landscape-wide interventions on community land; and a strong consensus has emerged within the scientific community, recognizing that IPs, LCs, and ADs with secure land tenure rights are the most capable stewards of the biodiverse ecosystems they have customarily managed for generations. Over $1.7 billion was committed by public and private donors at the UNFCCC CoP26 in Glasgow to support the recognition of Indigenous and community tenure and to directly support rightsholders to manage and conserve tropical forests and biodiversity. Moreover, the Montreal-Kunming Global Biodiversity Framework, agreed at CBD CoP15, explicitly recognizes the importance of Indigenous and traditional territories, and contains targets to protect and encourage customary sustainable use by Indigenous peoples and local communities.

Despite such progress, evidence shows the legal recognition of communities’ land rights has not consistently yielded improved local economic or development outcomes, nor does it result in increased community self-determination. While many companies and investors have committed to respecting community land rights, their actions to date have not translated into positive changes for local peoples and women at scale, nor have they mitigated global supply chain impacts on the environment. IPs, LCs, and ADs remain among the poorest and most marginalized peoples in the world, and their poverty manifests in diverse ways, including insecure land and property rights, and vulnerability to climate change, food insecurity, socio-economic disparities in health, education, and numerous other forms of institutionalized discrimination.

RRI’s engagement at the intersection of land tenure rights and livelihoods has thus far implicitly rested on the assumption of a linear relationship:  that as communities receive title (or other forms of legal recognition of land rights), they will gain tenure security and thus be able to pursue their self-determined livelihoods activities. Recent research, as well as the experience of communities on the ground, has problematized this linear assumption: formal land title has not been a reliable indicator of land tenure security, and many communities with formal land title still struggle to establish their self-determined economic or development initiatives. On the positive side, recent evidence suggests that livelihood security can strengthen tenure security, even in contexts where communities’ land ownership rights have not yet been fully recognized.1  

The struggle for land rights is inter-generational, long term, and at times indeterminate while livelihood needs are a question of everyday basic survival. Livelihood security relates directly to local peoples’ abilities to meet immediate needs and to provide a viable future for generations to come, thus affecting their capacity to pursue other goals and priorities, including advocacy for, and defense of, their land rights. Conversely, land tenure security shapes communities' livelihood opportunities, and the possibility of just and equitable outcomes or agreements with third parties.  

Amidst increasing support for rights-based actions and investments, as well as growing demand for changes in the conditions that inhibit the realization of community rights and capabilities, RRI aims to develop strategies for engagement to advance the livelihoods aspirations of IPs, LCs, and ADs that build upon securing land tenure rights. This question has been increasingly raised by the Coalition in recent years and now is the time to give it dedicated attention given the momentum for community land rights recognition globally, and the drive for rights-based approaches in investment, conservation, and other landscape-wide endeavours. The emergence of global funding commitments and direct financing mechanisms to support IPs, LCs, and ADs to manage and govern forests and rural landscapes, for example through the Community Land Rights and Conservation Finance Initiative (CLARIFI), is an additional impetus.  

RRI held a series of Coalition-wide dialogues in 2022 to generate a better sense of the how the RRI Coalition understood the concept of livelihoods as linked to tenure security. These dialogues yielded a Vision document that outlines the collective ambition, theory of change, and priorities of the RRI Coalition to mobilize and engage to support IPs, LCs, and ADPs to secure their rights and pursue their self-determined economic and development aspirations. Among the priorities outlined in the Vision document, Coalition members highlighted the need for new analytical tools, including a methodology and framework to establish national-level baselines of the enabling policy and capabilities needed to advance community-led economies. This framework is intended to support livelihoods-related advocacy at national and supra-national levels, as well as to guide and inform donor funding and impact investments. To this end, RRI seeks to develop a framework for conceptualizing the enabling conditions for collective rightsholders to pursue their self-determined livelihoods priorities.

Scope of Work

The consultant will contribute to the design of a practical framework that can be used for evidence-based advocacy. The consultant will:

• Develop an indicative framework for assessing and comparing the enabling conditions for the realization of sustainable community-based livelihoods at the national level, that is cognizant of political economy and land governance.
• Situate this framework within the sustainable livelihoods and common pool resource management discourses, including critiques thereof, and considering other relevant perspectives, such as gender equality and social inclusion.

Design Principles

The draft framework should identify enabling conditions – with associated indicators -- for the realization of collective rightsholders’ self-determined economic and development aspirations.

The methodology should align with research on Common-Pool Resources (CPR) management, common-property regimes, and the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach, but should integrate Indigenous, Afro-Descendant and local community epistemologies and locally-defined indicators of well-being.

These indicators should be assessed using a simple scoring system.

The framework should incorporate, among others, the following focal elements into the proposed enabling conditions and indicators, which were identified during dialogues with the RRI Coalition:

• Community governance institutions and dispute resolution mechanisms, and their interactions with state institutions.
• Traditional knowledge, land use practices, and food production systems.
• Women and youth involvement and access to livelihoods, tenure, and governance at the community level, including the effect of legal, cultural, social, and gender norms.
• Collective choice rights, economic self-determination and community self-governance.
• The multi-directional relationship between livelihoods and land tenure and governance.
• The framework should incorporate Gender and women’s specific livelihoods needs in a cross-cutting manner.

Consultant Deliverables

• A detailed workplan to deliver the project.
• A brief, based on a review of relevant literature, summarizing the findings of key research on collective livelihoods and elaborating up to three options for developing a framework, of between 10 to 15 pages.
• A first draft of the framework, corresponding to the design principles above and building on the results of the literature review and options, including test results in Colombia, DRC, and Indonesia.
• A second draft of the framework, incorporating feedback from RRG and relevant steering bodies and experts.
• A note, building on the brief, that outlines methodology, and situates the framework within broader literatures on community livelihoods and common pool resource management, gender equity and social inclusion, and reflects on results from case study countries.

Minimum Requirements

• Experience working with Indigenous Peoples, Afro-Descendant Peoples, and local communities, particularly in the context of land tenure and livelihoods.
• Proven experience in developing methodologies and frameworks for assessments related to community-based livelihoods, land governance, or common-pool resource management, with the ability to integrate gender equality and social inclusion perspectives into frameworks and methodologies.
• Excellent research and analytical skills, including the ability to synthesize complex information into clear and actionable frameworks.

Preferred Qualifications

• We welcome proposals from teams or partnerships between different individuals or organizations.
• We especially welcome proposals from the Global South and/or from representatives of Pastoralist communities

Key Contract Terms

This will be a fixed price contract. The consultant will be paid based on completion of deliverables.

Proposal Requirements

Please upload your proposal in a single file that includes:

1. Narrative proposal describing your understanding of the tasks and your approach to delivering the project (no longer than 2 pages);
2. Summary of qualifications describing how your background, or that of your team, positions you to deliver the project (no longer than 1.5 pages);
3. Workplan in Gantt format (no longer than 1 page);
4. Financial proposal with all costs and build-up to deliver the project;
5. Annexes, including CVs for relevant team members (each no longer than 2 pages), and any other relevant information.

Submission Deadline: Proposals will be received and evaluated on a rolling basis.

Evaluation Criteria

Proposals will be scored based on the following parameters:

• Proposed approach (35%)
• Understanding of the work and previous similar engagements (20%)
• Consultant work history and experience (20%)
• Financial Proposal (25%)