Interlaken Group Retreat Facilitator (Consultant)

Project Description

We are seeking a specialized consultant to lead the delivery of a 2.5-day international meeting of the Interlake Group the week of September 2, 2024. The purpose of the meeting will be for the Interlaken Group to define a collective agenda and action plan to materially scale implementation of private sector commitments supporting the tenure rights and livelihoods of Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendant Peoples (IP, LC, and ADP). The consultant will design and facilitate this convening, which will reorient the network’s strategy and workplan to scale contributions to 2030 climate, biodiversity, and development targets, and accelerate a “race to the top” to implement rights-based private sector commitments to support community land tenure.

The Interlaken Group

The Interlaken Group - catalyzed by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) - is a network of leaders from companies, investors, CSOs, and rightsholder groups committed to mobilizing private sector support for community land tenure. The network is hosted by RRI, a global coalition of the leading IP, LC, and ADP movements and their allies working across the tropical forested developing world to secure collective tenure rights to rural landscapes.

The Interlaken Group emerged in response to the global “land grab” between 2010 to 2013. At this time, a boom in commodity prices drove a material increase in controversial, corporate-backed land acquisitions in many developing and forested countries in the Global South.  These acquisitions displaced and/or disadvantaged many IPs, LCs, and ADPs, inciting land tenure-based conflicts and violence, and increasing deforestation. The impacts of these land acquisitions on communities informed high-profile advocacy and analysis that raised insecure land tenure as a business risk.

RRI Partners and Collaborators, civil society allies, and leaders from some leading sourcing companies and investors recognized that all stakeholder groups faced the shared challenge of insecure land tenure.  There was, however, no “safe” space to share information, identify opportunities to coordinate, and develop solutions. To this end, a small group of leaders from RRI, IFC, Nestlé, Rabobank, Rio Tinto, Global Witness, Rainforest Foundation Norway, Landesa, Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact, and several others met in early 2014 to elaborate a multi-stakeholder platform to mobilize private sector support for community land rights. The results of these discussions, building on collaboration agreed at a preceding international meeting in Interlaken, Switzerland in September 2013, became the Interlaken Group.

The Interlaken Group has contributed to the achievement – alongside the contributions of many other organizations – of its original mission to promote adoption of standards on community tenure among companies and investors. Participants have collaborated to: develop guidance to help companies and investors integrate international normative standards on land tenure and legacy issues – including the rights of local women – into their operations; instigated collaboration between supply chain and portfolio companies, governments, civil society, and rightsholders in key tropical forested countries like Kenya, Liberia, Indonesia, and Laos; and most recently, developed the first ever resource for companies and investors to integrate community monitoring into human rights and environmental due diligence (HREDD) processes. These are being implemented and scaled in Liberia, DRC, Indonesia, Colombia, and Ecuador. In parallel, rightsholders have